 Jumping in and out of daylight saving time is a load of garbage, and I think it's time we stopped doing it. Daylight saving time is the practice of shifting clocks up by one hour during summer months so that evening daylight lasts an hour longer. This messes with sunrise times and almost guarantees you'll be late for something at least once in March and November. Back in 1784, Benjamin Franklin woke up, probably out of a drunken stupor because he was that kind of guy, around 6am and found the sun was already up. He wrote a letter to the journal of Paris proposing, among other things, cannon fire to awaken oversleepers and candle taxes to ensure everyone was using the glorious free morning sunlight he discovered. Other people, including a German bug collector, have had similar ideas. And some of their arguments were compelling. Franklin wrote about saving candle wax and energy that eventually led to the US enacting daylight saving time in 1918. With World War I taking up a lot of resources, the US temporarily enacted the time shift using this logic. Since people tend to be more active in the evenings, they'll use less energy and resources if you change all the clocks to supply extra daylight. Note, changing clocks doesn't actually make the sun shine longer, but it does shift everyone's work day so it feels like the sun is out later. After the war, farmers lobbied either the law repealed, which is weird because I distinctly remember being told that all this nonsense was for the farmers' benefit. Turns out it's easier to do farm work when the rest of the world is on the sun schedule and you're not just jumping all over the clock. But in the US, daylight savings time came back in 1942 for World War II, and then again infuriatingly permanently in 1966. It's a federal law, but whether or not it's observed is up to the states. Arizona and Hawaii don't even observe daylight saving time because they're logical and want people to be happy. Also, if you want something especially confusing to wrap your head around, here are all the different time zone and daylight saving time rules across the globe. But saving energy isn't bad. Right, it's not. It's great. It's a shame daylight saving time doesn't technically save energy anymore. Yeah, in the 1970s a study found a 1% benefit to energy use, but a few things have changed in the last 40-some years. We have LED bulbs, more efficient appliances, and a smarter electric grid. More recent research shows no to little difference in energy uses between places observing daylight savings time and those that don't. And some research even says changing our clocks results in more energy use. A 2008 paper that looks at southern Indiana found that daylight saving time actually increased the energy demand by $9 million a year in Indiana alone. And we aren't just paying for this with our wallets. We support that switching into daylight saving time is actually detrimental to our health. The Journal of Applied Psychology found that workplace injuries spike the Monday after we spring ahead. A paper presented at the American Economic Association showed that traffic accidents rise by about 6% nationally for the next six days after we move our clocks forward. Sleep deprivation is already a huge issue, and while one hour less sleep a night might not seem like a lot, it makes a big difference. So the concept of daylight saving time was introduced as a joke, doesn't really save energy, isn't great for our health, and not everyone even does it. What the heck are we doing losing sleep and confusing ourselves with our unchanged microwave clocks? Personally, I'd rather we just have daylight saving time all year. In the US it already lasts 8 months, why not just swing in the last 4? Plus there are definite benefits of the day starting later and having more sunlight in the evenings, especially as you move further from the equator. But whether we stick with daylight saving time or standard time, I don't care. Just pick one. No more of this switching back and forth. What are other fun things to say? You know more about the science of that than me. I mean, time, time, daylight saving time, time, it's all made up notions anyway, unless you get into like astrophysics. That's the most merrily I've ever heard.