History of Election Day: Why we vote on a Tuesday in November
HISTORY OF ELECTION DAY Why do we vote on a Tuesday in November in the US? Historically, the United States was an agrarian society where much of the calendar revolved around farming. In 1840, Congress set voting day on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. This time provided a convenient month for farmers, who needed to travel perhaps overnight to the county seat’s polling places, following the Autumn harvest season. The weather would not yet have turned bad enough to make rural roads impassable. Rural Americans would begin

Information Reformation
I wrote the following article over a dozen years ago when I was a technology evangelist at Sun. Back in the mid-’90s, we were experienced the early part of the first wave of “The Web.” Today, with the advent of Web 2.0 technologies we’re seeing an explosion in different dimensions. Wikis, social networking, mass collaboration, blogging, and Instant Messaging have expanded what was largely a “reader oriented” phenomenon into a dynamic read-write participatory platform. While the mantle of managing information has passed to a new generation of companies, the basic principles about information production and exponential growth remain the same.

History of October 31
HISTORY OF OCTOBER 31 On October 31, 1517, an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther nailed to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany 95 propositions or theses and marked the beginning of the Reformation. Of course, the Reformation began long before that, but this date proves to be a conven

History of Halloween
HISTORY OF HALLOWEEN Halloween (Allhallows Even) is the evening of October 31. In its strictly religious aspect this occasion is known as the vigil of Hallowmas or All Saints’ Day, November 1, observed by the Roman Catholic and Anglican churches. In the fourth decade of the 8th century, Pope Gregory III moved this holiday to this date

History of Daylight Saving Time – Ending
HISTORY OF DAYLIGHT SAVING TIME – ENDING Daylight Saving Time, or DST, is a brilliant campaign to convince people that we’re getting more daylight each day, when in reality we’ve simply changed our clocks and then forgotten about it within two weeks. DST begins each year at 2:00 a.m. on the second Sunday in March in most of the United States and it