About time for the biennial panic about time

From the Associated Press:

How springing forward to daylight saving time could affect your health -- and how to prepare

“Not unlike when one travels across many time zones, how long it can take is very different for different people,” said Dr. Eduardo Sanchez of the American Heart Association. “Understand that your body is transitioning.”

Yikes.

Time may be real but clocks are imaginary (or arbitrary, at least), simply a way of marking the passage of it (time). We use hours, minutes, and seconds to do the marking but that's not etched in stone (although occasionally approximated by sand).

The Swiss watch company, Swatch, for example, in the 1990s proposed a time-marking unit called a "beat" and eliminating time zones altogether. 

Instead of hours and minutes, the mean solar day is divided into 1,000 parts called .beats. Each .beat lasts 1 minute and 26.4 seconds. One .beat is equal to one decimal minute in French decimal time. 

 Wait a minute (err, beat). French decimal time?

Yep.

In 1788, Claude Boniface Collignon proposed dividing the day into 10 hours or 1,000 minutes, each new hour into 100 minutes, each new minute into 1,000 seconds, and each new second into 1,000 tierces (older French for "third").

 And let's not even start with the Romans.

Just chill.

And, before you go to bed Sunday, spring up.