Tomorrow evening, we North Americans (well, most of us) are supposed to turn our clocks back an hour in the vain quest of pursuit of saving energy.

Why “vain pursuit”? Well, 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 few 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:

[pastacode lang=”markdown” manual=”%5Bgordon%40seedling%20gordon%5D%24%20zdump%20-v%20%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%7Cgrep%202017%0A%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%20%20Sun%20Mar%2012%2006%3A59%3A59%202017%20UTC%20%3D%20Sun%20Mar%2012%2001%3A59%3A59%202017%20EST%20isdst%3D0%20gmtoff%3D-18000%0A%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%20%20Sun%20Mar%2012%2007%3A00%3A00%202017%20UTC%20%3D%20Sun%20Mar%2012%2003%3A00%3A00%202017%20EDT%20isdst%3D1%20gmtoff%3D-14400%0A%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%20%20Sun%20Nov%20%205%2005%3A59%3A59%202017%20UTC%20%3D%20Sun%20Nov%20%205%2001%3A59%3A59%202017%20EDT%20isdst%3D1%20gmtoff%3D-14400%0A%2Fetc%2Flocaltime%20%20Sun%20Nov%20%205%2006%3A00%3A00%202017%20UTC%20%3D%20Sun%20Nov%20%205%2001%3A00%3A00%202017%20EST%20isdst%3D0%20gmtoff%3D-18000%0A” message=”” highlight=”” provider=”manual”/]