Retire Daylight Savings

via The CNN 10: Ideas

This gets my vote!

Yes, we can turn back time. There's a way to end seasonal clock confusion and eliminate jet lag. All it would take is doing away with daylight saving and splitting the continental United States in two time zones: East and West, an hour apart.

Retire Daylight Savings & Create 2 Time Zones -- West & East

The original article CNN references gets even juicier...

The US needs to retire daylight savings and just have two time zones—one hour apart

It would seem to be more efficient to do away with the practice altogether. The actual energy savings are minimal, if they exist at all. Frequent and uncoordinated time changes cause confusion, undermining economic efficiency. There’s evidence that regularly changing sleep cycles, associated with daylight saving, lowers productivity and increases heart attacks. Being out of sync with European time changes was projected to cost the airline industry $147 million a year in travel disruptions.

Daylight Parenthetical

Loved the parenthetical in this LA Times story about the eclipse.  Basically says "Yes, I know we're in Daylight Time now, but we won't be then..."

Those of us on the West Coast will have to get up early if we want to see the total eclipse as it happens. The Slooh broadcast begins at 3:45 a.m. PST Sunday. (We will have just set our clocks back as we moved from Daylight Saving Time to Standard Time). 

Semi-related:  I was flying back to LA from the World Series celebration in Boston on Saturday and my plane was delayed multiple times due to the incident.  At one point I was supposed to land at 1am.  Then I got delayed again and was scheduled to land at 1:55am -- which basically meant I was still landing at 1am...

Time travel is awesome...DST is not.

Taste of the Census

Making Census Data Taste Like New York City

The connections between neighborhoods, ethnicities and food are quite strong. So I wondered, what if we could relate data about geography and ethnicity through taste? 

I then created recipes for each borough, assigning ingredients to each group of people, keeping proportions, flavor profiles and reasonable correlations in mind. The population figures of each group determined the volume of each ingredient and when combined, produced five different spice rubs, one for each borough of New York City. 

Not everyone loved the rubs, of course. A few people were angry and offended as soon as they understood that the barbecue rubs represented census data and people groups. "You know," they would say, "some people would find this very offensive." "Are you saying that this group is this ingredient?" "Isn't this racist?" "How do you know this is the right ingredient?"

Moonshots

Cool article.  I especially liked this bit:

Google’s Larry Page on Why Moon Shots Matter

Teller imagines wheeling a Dr. Who time machine into Page’s office. He plugs it in and—it works! But instead of being bowled over, Page asks why it needs a plug. Wouldn’t it be better if it didn’t use power at all? “It’s not because he’s not excited about time machines or he’s ungrateful that we built it,” Teller says. “It’s just core to who he is. There’s always more to do, and his focus is on where the next 10X will come from.”

Coachella Standard Time

Coachella, you're killing me!

Update:

Guess they saw this post!  Might be the fastest ever correction in my years of calling people out for misuse of PST.