Sunday, March 8, 2015

Daylight saving time's unintended consequences

Joseph Stromberg writes at Vox:

In the days following [daylight saving time], researchers have found, rates of heart attacks, traffic accidents, and workplace injuries tend to increase slightly — likely the effect of millions of people's bodies being forced to adjust to the missing hour of sleep. Workplace productivity, meanwhile, tends to decrease.

These problems have led some people, sick of changing their clocks twice a year, to call for the end of daylight saving. They point out that the practice doesn't even appear to save any energy — one of its original purposes. . . .

Daylight saving time was first formally proposed way back in 1895 by a New Zealand entomologist named George Vernon Hudson, who realized that shifting clocks forward an hour would give him more time to collect insects in the evenings. . . .

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