There's now only a six hour difference between Egypt and America!

The East coast, that is. Daylight Saving Time doesn't take effect here until the last Thursday in April (the 24th). As for Western Europe, they're still an hour ahead of us until the last Sunday in March (the 30th), at which point we'll be in the same time zone until our change.

So yeah... just thought you all should know. Here are ten other quick fun facts about Daylight Saving Time.

1. While Benjamin Franklin didn't invent it, he was the first to propose anything similar, albeit sarcastically. In 1784 he anonymously published a pamphlet in France which suggested that shutters be taxed, candles be rationed, and cannons be fired at sunrise in Paris to encourage people to get up earlier and take advantage of the daylight hours.
2. William Willett was the first to develop the idea. He came up with it in 1905 on one of his daily pre-breakfast horseback rides. It made him sad to see how many of his fellow Londoners slept through the best part of an English summer's day. Additionally, he was a little miffed to have his golf game cut short at dusk each evening. He never saw his plan come to fruition during his lifetime, but one year after he died in 1914, the Central Powers became the first nations to implement DST. By 1918, it had taken much of the world by storm, and Willett is aptly remembered by a memorial sundial which is permanently set to DST.
3. Contrary to popular belief, DST actually increases energy use! While it is true that there is a decrease in energy costs used for lights, there is a much greater increase due to the greater amount of cooling required when awake during those hotter parts of the day.
4. DST hurts primetime broadcast ratings.
5. One of the biggest negative impacts of DST involves its effects on the body's circadian rhythms, which can be quite severe and last for weeks. Kazakhstan cited such complications as a primary reason for abolishing DST in 2005.
6. The esteemed Canadian writer Robertson Davies said of DST, "[I detect] the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, to get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves."
7. To combat some of these difficulties, some parts of the world skew their timezones westward, effectively establishing permanent DST. That is, their clocks always read ahead of mean solar time.
8. Most countries near the equator don't observe DST, for the obvious reason that the sun's cycle doesn't vary all that noticeably. Countries like Brazil, however, where the Equator runs through part of the country but a sizeable portion is far enough from it that the sun's cycle changes significantly, the farther parts observe it while the nearer parts do not.
9. I don't like Daylight Saving Time.
10. Perhaps most interestingly, and here I must quote the Wikipedia article to which I am fully indebted for this entire post, since it is described almost too well there, "In the normative form, daylight saving time uses the present participle saving as an adjective, as in labor saving device; the first two words are sometimes hyphenated. Daylight savings time and daylight time are common variants, the former by analogy to savings account. Willett's original proposal used the term daylight saving, but by 1911 the term summer time replaced daylight saving time in British English." Wow.

So yeah... academics are a little more lax here... but I'm keeping busy.