Daylight Savings

If you missed it last night, don't forget to turn your clocks forward before Monday morning.  I always enjoy falling back exponentially more than springing forward, but at least physics will be over one hour sooner.

And now...some facts about daylight saving time.  Brought to you by Wikipedia.

Clearly, not all of the countries in the world 'celebrate' this tradition, but those that do have all gotten the idea from a guy named George Vernon Hudson, who, among other things, collected insects, made stained glass, and invented the concept of saving afternoon hours. 

The initial rationale for subtracting an hour in spring and adding one during autumn (...have I got that right?) was - apparently - to do with conservation of incandescent lights.  Not sure about that; Mr Hudson seems to primarily have been lobbying for more bug-collecting hours.  More recently, DST has been correlated with increases in spending, and decreases in traffic accidents and crime.

Wikipedia has an interesting bit about history of time-keeping in their article, but I'm going to call it a digression, and instead get to the boring details of what the USA does to keep the economy high and the homicide rate low (???).

Unless you live in Arizona, Hawaii, or one of a number of territories, listen up.  Up until 2006, the US had DST occur between the first Sunday of April and the last of October at 2:00am.  Well, no longer!  That is, the 2:00 part is the same, but it's now the second Sunday of March and the first of November.  That's a whole additional month of DST - oh yipee.

So now you know it all...never again can daylight savings be used as an excuse for missing church.

One more little detail though, before I go: keep in mind that not all countries change at the same time - this is relevant for me because of calling the UK to talk to friends.  For the next several weeks, the'll be just four hours ahead.