losings

DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME???

Willy-nilly change the clocks...

What the hell's the point?

I don't understand why Indiana switched to having daylight savings time.  It has to be a hassle for businesses, right?  Paying people for an hour they don't work in the spring, paying people overtime for an hour they work twice in the fall?  Plus it's just weird, and I don't see why anyone cares what clock hour the sun comes up at.

On that note, what's up with timezones?  I can understand that it's nice to have a semi-standard time that the sun comes up, but the way that they're currently laid out, that isn't really the case.  Indiana, again, for example, when it locked onto the Eastern time zone stretched it out to some kind of impossible proportion.  It's probably more than an hour between the time Augusta sees first light and the time that we here in Bloomington do.  Some places have solved this problem (?) by introducing time zones that aren't an hour long.  In India (noticing a pattern with place names here, haha) there are 30- and 45-minute time zones.  The way I see it, this is even more inconvenient.  Changing a digital watch by 45 minutes is a hassle.

I guess it makes sense that Indiana be slave to the same system as the rest of the states with respect to daylight savings, but why do we observe this any more in the States, anyway?  AFAIK, it's some kind of leftover from Ben Franklin's efforts to spark demand for candles or some such.  I've never heard of a modern-day purpose that it serves, and all I ever hear about it is people complaining.  Maybe that's because I'm in Indiana and we've been spoiled until recently, but does it make sense to you?

All I can say is I'm not buying any candles.

underground

Buried in the earth,

Endless water carvings lie,

Waiting to be found.

Southern Indiana may not have world-class dining, clubs, or musical venues.  It may be that hardly anyone here has ever heard an opera, spoken to a politician, or been outside the Midwest (as I meet more and more people who haven't, I'm continually astonished), but there is something to be said about caving here.  It's world-class.  A lot of people you wouldn't expect have experienced it.  I learned today that some 300,000 people have been through Buckner's.  That's probably why it's in such terrible shape today, but oh well.

Anyway, today I went on a caving trip through a system I've never been through before.  It was a rush!  We (the IU Caving Club) went through Donaldson and Bronson caves in Spring Mill Park, which isn't far from here.  I've never been through such a wet cave before; there were a couple parts that required out-and-out swimming, which is really hard in cave gear.  Sean lent me one of his wetsuits for the trip, which I was REALLY grateful for.  He and I actually explored a little side passage that involved crawling through an 18" high passageway that was half-full of water for about 50 yards.  Frigid water.  The other end, though, was a pretty neat, big, open room.  He said that we were among about 20 people to have been in there; it had only been discovered recently.  w00t!  Exploration!

He also led me up to a little rock ledge that didn't really go anywhere, but it had a couple of neat formations at the top.  The climb up there, as well as climbs in other parts of the cave, tested my parkour skillz.  ;)  I skipped their practice to go caving today, so that was good, haha.

I learned a few things on the caving trip:

don't forget a wetsuit if you're going to get wet

wearing crappy jeans is good, but wearing jeans without knees can get you beat up

test rocks before you try to use them to hold your weight

all water has to go somewhere and come from somewhere

What else recently.. umm.. oh, for my current B490 project my partner and I are writing Number Munchers.  Super awesome, haha!  Homework hasn't kept me as busy as I figured it would, but... there's still a lot of it.  I have some Modern Algebra to finish up, actually, so I'm going to have to shove off.  Oh, but I should mention that this week was the career fair, and I got an offer to interview with Microsoft.  Whee!  And tomorrow should bring some further adventures!