Unca Cece has already addressed daylight savings time very well (find the link yo damnself). My question is about the timing of DST. Why are the changes in April and October? Wouldn’t March and September (the months of the equinox) make more sense? An additional question is why does DST last slightly more than six months, rather than the six between the equinoxes?
Sua
My WAG is that it’s meant to encourage pleasant outdoor summertime actitivities, and in the northern tier of states, at least, March doesn’t count as “summertime”. Or as “pleasant”. 
And that answers the second question, too–October is still pretty nice weather around here, “Indian summer”, etc. November is when the big winter lockdown starts, so why encourage people to stay outside and play softball, when it’s blowing hard from the northwest and the sky is steel-gray with clouds scudding across it?
You wouldn’t want the time changes to occur exactly on the equinoxes because their dates (and times) vary slightly from year to year and they also move around the days of the week. You’d have to remind everyone to change their clocks on Thursday, March 21 at 9:48 p.m. one year and on Monday, March 22 at 2:03 a.m. another year.
So I’m assuming you’re proposing something more like “2:00 a.m. the third Sunday in March and the third Sunday in September”. From the standpoint of remembering when to change your clocks that would be as simple as it is now. In which case DDG is on the right track, IMHO. The temperature changes associated with the seasons lags the increased daylight, so that March is still (relatively) cool and October is (relatively) mild.
I believe also that by the time you get to the end of October (and the beginning of March), the mornings when people are going to work and school are more likely to be in the dark. At least they are in the southern part of the U.S.
I, for one, hate getting up when it’s dark.
That would make sense if we consider exclusively daylight hours; not necessarely the equinoxes but same number of days before and after the solstice.
OTOH, temperature lags behind daylight hours so that March 21 is colder than September 21, so this may be a factor in choosing the dates lagging by about a month after the center point of the solstice.
As to the OP’s second question, I’ve wondered something similar: it turns out we spend less time on “Standard Time” than we do on the departure from it. That seems pretty strange, i.e. for the standard to be the minority position, so to speak. And I wonder where else the standard is actually not the main portion, or the primary setting, or something. (This is not to negate the obvious fact that the average of a set of data may only be reported a minuscule number of times, even though it’s the mean). Do I make ANY sense with this observation/question?
Then again, that’s what we get anyway. When the TV tells us to change our clocks (c’mon, admit it. Do you know off the top of your head when we’re supposed to change our clocks as it is?), it’s invariably at 2:00 a.m. on a Sunday. The dates don’t enter into it, it has to be done on Sunday mornings so we have a day to try resetting our circadian rhythm.
Which segues nicely into my WAG: One of the reasons we don’t change our clock on the equinoces is that they can fall any time during the week, and would be a real pain.
Although, I’m in favour of moving them to…perhaps the Sunday closest to the equinox. FWIW, I think it’s a great idea. It follows (somewhat) the earth’s natural amounts of daylight, and it’s easy to remember.
I, for one, am going to write my Congressman about it.
I say stay on DST all year round. Heck, maybe even go double DST in the winter. I don’t care if it’s pitch black when I go to work, but boy do I like SOME sunlight after I get home!
Also, living in a warmer state, I don’t quite understand these whole “snow” and “cold” concepts you speak of!
I understand what you mean, and I’ve thought about it myself. As far as I can tell, the reason why winter time is standard time is because it is the timekeeping system that accords with the observable universe. That is to say, during standard time, the sun reaches its zenith at or around noon (depending on where you are in the time zone, of course). During daylight time, of course, this happens at one o’clock.
There is also a sizeable chunk of the world that doesn’t use DST, so Standard Time applies for a lot of people who just happen to live much closer to the Equator than those of us in the USA.
Well, I don’t think we’d want it all year 'round because in the northern states, a lot of folks would be going to school and work in darkness. Of course, the Soviets apparently got used to this - IIRC, there was a time (during WWII?) when the Soviets put the clock ahead and never bothered to set it back, so they remained on DST for, oh, forty or fifty years. Effectively, China does this as well by having only one time zone, keyed to the convenience of its coastal cities.
Now, I remember when the start of DST was pushed back to the first Sunday in April rather than the fourth - there was an argument that the end should be pushed past Hallowe’en for trick-or-treating safety. There have also been semi-serious proposals to extend DST in the western time zones for federal elections.