In the USA we just went though a time change. The majority of the world does not do daylight savings time, however some of us are still stuck on legacy systems.

The most common answer to why daylight savings time was used is that it was good for the farmers, however this answer is largly mythological in nature. Farmers will get up and work regardless of what time the clock on the wall says it is. Another answer is to save electricity. Factories used to use daylight to augment or replace lighting during the day, so if the factory works during daylight hours, it is then saving money.

These reasons are not valid reasons anymore, if they ever were.

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Since Halloween just went by I thought I would talk about vampires. You know, things that turn into bats and suck your blood! No, I’m just kidding. Well, I am talking about Vampires, but of a different sort.

Vampires, Wall Warts, Power Brick, these are all descriptive names for those transformers that plug into your wall socket and sap power out of the wall night and day regardless of whether or not anything is connected to them. Standby power is a minimal problem, but I did a little experiment recently to find out just how minimal.

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When I went to college I was shocked that people called Soda something other than Soda. When I said I wanted a soda they didn’t understand me. When I got married I found out that some people actually use the term “Coke” to mean soda including sodas other than Coke. Someone has finally taken this to the next level and produced a map overlaid with popular opinion on what Soda/Pop/Coke is called. Additional information is here. A similar project can be found here. Trivial, but fun. What’s most interesting to me about this is how, in this information society where we are so connected, we can still be diverse about simple things like this.