It’s that time of the year again

And now, in honor of the early start to daylight saving time, allow me to present "28 Things About DST You’ll Find Wildly Interesting, and If You Don’t, May Your Daughter Grow Up to Emulate Antonella Barba When It Comes to the Subject of Personal Photography."

1) First off, it’s "daylight saving time," not "daylight savings time."

2) The idea of switching the clocks around can be traced to Englishman William Willett. He published a pamphlet in 1907 entitled "A Waste of Daylight."

3) No one listened to him

4) Germany, in 1916, was the first nation to institute DST, with England following soon thereafter.

5) Willett didn’t live to see DST come into use; he died in 1915.

6) Get this -- Willett’s great-great-grandson is Chris Martin of the band Coldplay. One of his band’s big hits is a song entitled -- wait for it -- "Clocks."

7) Benjamin Franklin, while never actually coming up with the DST idea, did realize a lot of good sunlight was being wasted early in the morning, and wrote an essay entitled "An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light."

8) He believed we were wasting money on candles.

9) All things being equal, I bet Ben Franklin was quite the major dude.

10) Death, destruction, and economic horrors will occur Monday.

11) This is because we’re losing an hour of sleep.

12) "This results in sleepiness and impaired performance for days or weeks until we make up the lost sleep and our body adjusts to the earlier bedtime," says Dr. Donna Arand of the Sleep Disorders Center at Kettering Hospital in Dayton, Ohio.

13) "But it’s just an hour," you say.

14) Well, stuff it, because according to a study done in the American Economic Review, the effects of DST caused a one-day loss of $31 billion is America’s stock markets in 2000.

15) And according to Sleep Magazine, there is a "significant increase" in deadly traffic accidents the Monday after we switch the clocks around.

16) This year, a new wrinkle: Because of the early time shift, don’t expect your computer to switch over to the right time.

17) Experts are calling this a "mini-Y2K. problem."

18) Microsoft is telling all it’s users that it’s Outlook calendar programs will probably be off by an hour.

19) Basically, any software you have that was created after 2005 will probably not recognize the new time shift.

20) If all this makes you want to stay home Monday, we don’t blame you.

21) As such, here’s a tip: MTV is running an "Engaged and Underaged" marathon in the morning. Great television there.

22) In case you’re wondering, DST is starting three weeks earlier than normal this year (and finishing one week later) because of the federal Energy Policy Act of 2005.

23) The feds think the extra hour of sunlight will mean less energy consumption.

24) They’re probably wrong, as many critics point out. After all, you may not need your lights turned on at 7 p.m., but you will need them turned on at 7 a.m.

25) But really, isn’t it all just too much? After all, according to Albert Einstein, time isn’t absolute. It all depends on where you are and how fast you’re moving.

26) Take that, Federal Energy Policy Act.

27) Taking Einstein’s ideas one step further, Peter Lynds, a New Zealand physicist, claims what we perceive as time is just an illusion. Or, as an article in Wired magazine put it, "The human perception of time as a sequence of moments is just a neurological artifact, an outgrowth of the chunk-by-chunk way our brains perceive reality."

28) Well, whatever. I just like the idea of the sun shining later in the day. Makes me feel more alive.

http://www.trentonian.com/site/news.cfm?newsid=18048302&BRD=1697&PAG=461&dept_id=44551&rfi=6