In just over an hour we North Americans are supposed to turn our clocks back an hour in the vain quest of pursuit of saving energy.

I say “vain pursuit” because although daylight saving time is promoted as leading to an overall reduction in energy consumption, there hasn’t been any proof that this has ever been accomplished. Check out David Prerau’s book Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time (hardcover: 1560256559; softcover: 1560257962) if you want to learn more about the history of daylight saving time. It’s actually more interesting than it sounds.

If you’re a *NIX system administrator you probably updated your systems a couple of years ago, but in case you haven’t you probably should take a look at this. The zdump command should give you something like this:

[gordon@seedling gordon]$ /usr/sbin/zdump -v /etc/localtime |grep 2011

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 13 06:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Mar 13 01:59:59 2011 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000

/etc/localtime  Sun Mar 13 07:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Mar 13 03:00:00 2011 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  6 05:59:59 2011 UTC = Sun Nov  6 01:59:59 2011 EDT isdst=1 gmtoff=-14400

/etc/localtime  Sun Nov  6 06:00:00 2011 UTC = Sun Nov  6 01:00:00 2011 EST isdst=0 gmtoff=-18000