Daylight saving time is the practice of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Typically clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.

During his time as an American envoy to France, Benjamin Franklin, author of the proverb, “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”, anonymously published a letter suggesting that Parisians economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. This 1784 satire proposed taxing shutters and waking the public by ringing church bells and firing cannons at sunrise.

William Willett independently conceived daylight saving time in 1905 during a pre-breakfast ride, when he observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through a large part of a summer day. An avid golfer, he also disliked cutting short his round at dusk. His solution was to advance the clock during the summer months, a proposal he published two years later. He independently proposed daylight saving time in 1907 and advocated it tirelessly.

The practice is controversial. Adding daylight to afternoons benefits retailing, sports, and other activities that exploit sunlight after working hours, but causes problems for farming, evening entertainment and other occupations tied to the sun. Although an early goal of daylight saving time was to reduce evening usage of incandescent lighting, modern heating and cooling usage patterns differ greatly and research about how daylight saving time currently affects energy use is limited and often contradictory.

Daylight saving time’s occasional clock shifts present other challenges. They complicate timekeeping and can disrupt meetings, travel, billing, recordkeeping, medical devices, heavy equipment, and sleep patterns. Changing clocks and daylight saving time has a direct economic cost, entailing extra work to support remote meetings, computer applications and corrections to errors.

It has been argued that clock shifts correlate with decreased economic efficiency, and that in 2000 the daylight-saving effect implied an estimated one-day loss of $31 billion on U.S. stock exchanges, althought the results have been disputed. The 2007 North American daylight saving time cost an estimated $500 million to $1 billion.

In the Indian Hindu calendar, Tithi is the lunar date. A tithi is the time taken for the longitudinal angle between the moon and the sun to increase by twelve degrees. Tithis begin at varying times of day and vary in duration. As the moon rotates around the earth, the angular distance between the sun and the moon as seen from the earth increases from 0 degrees to 360 degrees. A lunar month consists of 30 tithis, whose start time and duration vary. 

The lunar date, however, varies approximately between 22 to 26 hours based on the angular rotation of moon around the earth in its elliptical orbit. It takes one lunar month or about 29.5 solar days for the angular distance between the sun and the moon to change from 0 to 360 degrees. When the angular distance reaches zero, the next lunar month begins. Thus, at the new moon a lunar month begins; at full moon, the angular distance between the sun and the moon as seen from the earth becomes exactly 180 degrees. 

Since the angular distance between the moon and the sun is always relative to the entire earth, a lunar day or tithi starts the same time everywhere in the world, but not necessarily on the same day. Thus, when a certain tithi starts at 10:30pm in India, it also begins in New York at the same time, which is 12:00pm on the same day. Since the length of a tithi can vary between 20 to 28 hours, its correspondence to a weekday becomes a little confusing. 

Tithi is one of the most important aspects of the Indian Almanac, or Panchang, and therefore many Hindu festivals and ceremonies are based on the Tithi Calendar. Most Indians celebrate Kartik Shudha Prathama (the first day of the Indian lunar month Kartik) as their New Year’s day. Indians living in India, Europe, and the eastern part of the United States thus celebrate their New Year on that Monday, while regions west of Chicago do so on the preceding day, Sunday.

Cryptomnesia, or inadvertent plagiarism, is a memory bias whereby a person falsely recalls generating a thought, an idea, a song, or a joke, when the thought was actually generated by someone else. In these cases, the person is not deliberately engaging in plagiarism, but is rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.

Self-plagiarism is not as costly as plagiarizing the work of others. In a famous case, George Harrison was sued over royalties for his first solo song “My Sweet Lord”, a song that sounded too similar to the Chiffons’ “He’s So Fine”. Harrison lost the case when a judge said he “subconsciously plagiarized”, and was ordered to pay $587,000 to Bright Tunes Music, who owned the copyright. Plagiarism of this sort is a kind of sleeper effect whereby old ideas come to feel new.

As explained by Carl Jung in Man and His Symbols, “An author may be writing steadily to a preconceived plan, working out an argument or developing the line of a story, when he suddenly runs off at a tangent. Perhaps a fresh idea has occurred to him, or a different image, or a whole new sub-plot. If you ask him what prompted the digression, he will not be able to tell you. He may not even have noticed the change, though he has now produced material that is entirely fresh and apparently unknown to him before. Yet it can sometimes be shown convincingly that what he has written bears a striking similarity to the work of another author, a work that he believes he has never seen.”

Helen Keller seriously compromised her and her teacher’s credibility with an incident of cryptomnesia which was misapprehended as plagiarism. The Frost King, which Keller wrote out of buried memories of a fairytale read to her four years previously, left Keller a nervous wreck, and unable to write fiction for the rest of her life.

Cryptomnesia may be the result of some memories becoming forcibly unconscious, due to lack of reinforcement through use. There may be enough of the memory left to recall it but not its origin. Therefore it does not always take the shape of plagiarism, as it would in writing, as well as musical compositions, but can also be the basis of philosophy.

Eternity often means existence for a limitless amount of time, and may be used to refer to a timeless existence altogether outside of time. There are a number of arguments for eternity, by which proponents of the concept, principally Aristotle, purported to prove that matter, motion, and time must have existed eternally.

The metaphysics of eternity might be summarized by asking if anything can be said to exist outside of or independent of time, and if so how and why? Some consequential metaphysical questions of some importance relate to whether information can be said to exist independently of the human mind, and if so, what would be the content and purpose of such information?

It is an understatement to say that humans cannot fully understand eternity, since it is either an infinite amount of time as we know it or something other than the time and space we know. For the infinite definition, there are parallels that give some notion of a potential infinity, or a series that begins and has not ended. A series of moments that has begun and not ended is, however, not potentially eternal by that definition. A series of moments that has begun and not ended cannot be eternal, because even if it were to continue for the rest of infinite time, there would still be time prior to the initial moment in the series.

Augustine of Hippo wrote that time exists only within the created universe, so that God exists outside of time. For God there is no past or future, but only an eternal present. One need not believe in God in order to hold this concept of eternity. For example, an atheist mathematician can maintain the philosophical tenet that numbers and the relationships among them exist outside of time, and so are in that sense eternal.

Watermelon snow, also called snow algae, is snow that is reddish or pink in color, with the slight scent of a fresh watermelon. Compressing the snow by stepping on it or making snowballs leaves it looking red. Walking on watermelon snow often results in bright red soles and pinkish pant cuffs.

This type of snow is common during the summer in alpine and coastal polar regions worldwide, such as the Sierra Nevada of California. The snow is caused by the presence of Chlamydomonas nivalis, a species of green algae containing a secondary red carotenoid pigment. Unlike most species of fresh-water algae, it is cold-loving and thrives in freezing water. At altitudes of 10,000 to 12,000 feet, the temperature is cold throughout the year, and the snow has lingered from winter storms.

Chlamydomonas nivalis owes its red color to a bright red pigment which protects the chloroplasts from intense visible and ultraviolet radiation. They also absorb heat, which provides the algae with liquid water as the snow melts around it. Algal blooms may extend to a depth of 10 inches. It has been calculated that a teaspoon of melted snow contains a million or more of these cells.

The algae sometimes accumulate in “sun cups”, which are shallow depressions in the snow. The carotenoid pigment absorbs heat and as a result it deepens the sun cups and accelerates the melting rate of snowbanks. During the winter months when snow covers them, the algae become dormant. In spring, increased levels of light and melting water stimulate germination.

The first accounts of watermelon snow are in the writings of Aristotle. Watermelon snow has puzzled mountain climbers, explorers, and naturalists for thousands of years, some speculating that it was caused by mineral deposits or oxidation products that were leached from rocks.

The Madrone is one of the Pacific north coast’s most beautiful trees. Although the Madrone is an evergreen tree it reflects the four seasons with true character, and it easily melds the seasons together in its smooth transition from one phase to another.

It forms large bunches of blossoms in the spring, like bunches of white grapes. Each blossom looks like a tiny white Chinese lantern. Later the new leaves start to bud and form, then the new bark grows a green layer under last years cinnamon-orange colored bark.

In summer, the older leaves turn a creamy yellow. Through the dry summer, they flutter to the ground during the infrequent warm gusts, leaving the tree with the bright evergreen color of new leaves. The bark curls that are shed in the summer are sometimes collected and used as tea.

In the fall of the year the Madrone berries ripen and become a favorite food of the Western Robin, Cedar Waxwing, Band-tailed Pigeon and Quail. Mule Deer also eat the young shoots when the trees are regenerating after fire.

The wood is sought for its heating capabilities during the winter, since it burns long and hot in fireplaces. It has become popular in the Pacific Northwest as a flooring material due to the durability of the wood and the warm color after finishing, and is also used in the construction of furniture.

Booker T. Jones is an instrumentalist, songwriter and arranger, best known for fronting the band Booker T. and the MGs. He has also worked in the studios with some of the most highly regarded artists of our time, earning him a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement.

Jones was a child prodigy, playing the oboe, saxophone, trombone, and piano at school and serving as organist at his church. He attended Booker T. Washington High School with future stars like Isaac Hayes’s writing partner David Porter, and Earth, Wind, and Fire’s Maurice White.

Booker T. & the MGs are an instrumental R&B band that was influential in shaping the sound of Southern Soul and Memphis Soul. For many years, the official story was that the bandname The MGs was meant to stand for Memphis Group, not the sports car of the same name. However, this proved not to be the case, as musician and record producer Chips Moman, active in Stax Records when the band was formed, claims they were named after his car.

In June of 1967, they appeared at the Monterey Pop Festival, alongside performers like Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, The Who, and Jefferson Airplane. They were also later invited to play Woodstock, but drummer Al Jackson, Jr. was worried about the helicopter needed to deliver them to the site, and so they decided not to play.

An hippalectryon is a type of fantastic hybrid creature of Ancient Greek folklore, half-horse and half-rooster, with yellow feathers. The rooster half sports wings, the tail and the hind legs. The oldest representation currently known dates back from the 9th century BC, and the motive grows most common in the 6th century, notably on vase painting and sometimes as statues, often shown with a rider. It is also featured on some pieces of currency. 

Roosters are a symbol of solar power that routs demons with its singing at sunrise. Horses, especially winged horses, are a funerary symbol as they guide the soul of the dead. The grotesque and ugly hybrid supposedly induced laughter, thereby driving evil away. 

Aristophanes describes the hippalectryon as a yellow-feathered, awkward-looking creature. The appearance of the creature is consistent amongst the known artistic representations. A text attributed to Hesychius of Alexandria, mentions three different types of hippalectryons: a giant rooster; a giant vulture; and a creature close to griffins as painted on fabrics from Persia.

Hippalectryons are displayed almost exclusively on black-figure vases from Attica, and could constitute an alternative representation for Pegasus. Fantastic hybrids are a popular and common theme on archaic Greek sculpture and vases. Most hybrids appear to have reached Greece from the East, although no early representation of a hippalectryon in Egyptian or Middle Eastern art has yet been found. They have also been found on engraved stones from the Late Period of ancient Egypt.

An analysis of Aristophanes’ works suggests that it could originate from the Middle East, and the costumes worn by the people featured on potteries with hippalectryons seem to be Asian, though this particular point is a matter of debate.