Let's Meet Up on March 11th at 2:30am

From Tuesday's post.

Have you ever reflected back upon something you just completed only to discover some horrific mistake you made but had previously overlooked?  Say, for example, you are a heart surgeon.  As you are stitching the patient up after a lengthy procedure, you replay the operation in your head.  Just as you are knotting the last suture, you realize that you left a sponge in the patient's chest cavity.

Yesterday afternoon there was another spam attack on President Obama's Google+ page.  I thought back to the previous blog entry I wrote on the subject ... and it hit me.  I had written about just such an event and claimed it occurred at 4:00pm EST on Monday.  This cyber attack did not happen at four o'clock Eastern Standard Time; it happened at four o'clock Eastern Daylight Time!  4:00pm EST did not exist on Monday.  It existed the previous Monday, but not this past Monday.  How could I forget Daylight Saving Time?  How could such a surgical sponge be left to fester in my blog post?  (Too hyperbolic?)

Daylight Saving Time is a creepy concept to me.  Tonight, stay up to 1:59am, be a rebel.  I promise you that a minute later will be 2:00am, and the minute following that will be 2:01am.  Check for yourself, if you don't believe me.  This past Sunday, however, that did not happen.  Time went from 1:59am to 3:01am in a span of just two, short minutes.  What happened in between?  Was it 2:00am and 3:00am simultaneously?  Yes!  It's the Schrodinger's Cat of chronology.  Where did the time from 2:00am to 2:59am go?  Was there a rift in the space-time continuum?  Does the arbitrary shift from Standard Time to Daylight Saving Time contradict everything we learned in physics?

I understand the concept behind Daylight Saving Time.  Josh Clark and Chuck Bryant from Stuff You Should Know did an excellent podcast explaining the history and rationale behind saving daylight.  Long story short, it seemed wasteful for people to be asleep while the sun was up only to have the sun set early in the evening.  The remedy, push the clocks ahead so that our daily schedules better match the solar schedule.  I don't understand, though, why we fall back?  Why not just save daylight all of the time?  Wouldn't it be nice to get off work and still have a little sunlight left on a December evening?  Are decreased productivity at work and the increased number of deaths caused by sleep confused drivers necessary every time we switch our clocks?

If you are a resident of American Samoa, Guam, Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands, I apologize for wasting your time.  You have no idea what Daylight Saving Time is, and you have little need.  If you are a resident of Arizona, you do not observe Daylight Saving Time either.  I can only assume that your legislators are too concerned with upholding the rights of all of your fellow citizens to be bothered with such trivial issues.  Instead, you keep your clocks the same and switch what timezone your state belongs to twice a year.  That's much less confusing for the rest of us.  How will our boarder protecting militia members know when to meet up with your boarder protecting militia members?

My favorite part about Daylight Saving in Arizona ... the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona does observe Daylight Saving Time.