Stuff You Should Know - SYSK Selects: How Daylight Saving Time Works

Episode Date: November 18, 2017

In this week's SYSK Select episode, Benjamin Franklin first came up with daylight saving time in 1748, and people still practice it today. But how does it work? What are the pros and cons? Join Josh and Chuck as they turn back the clock to explore the origins of daylight saving time. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Hi everybody, Chuck here with How Daylight Savings Time works, my selects pick of the week from December 6th, 2011. And in real time, we have just sort of recently done the opposite where we fall back with our clocks annually, which is kind of a depressing

time of the year to be honest, it means on your clock it's dark really early. Then on the other hand, it's light a little bit earlier in the day. And Daylight Savings Time and the whole concept of it has always just been a little weird to me. And there are many false rumors out there about why we do it, how it started,

and this episode we'll clear it all up. So please to enjoy How Daylight Savings Time works. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant. He's on his iPhone, Chuck. No, I'm not. That makes this Stuff You Should Know.

The fully attentive podcast. You were saying? Yeah, I can't really say anything. You always say stuff and I repeat it like 30 seconds later. And I get a look of death from Chuck. We like to cover our bases twice sometimes. It's important stuff, like the digestion. That's right.

That thing, which comes out next, right? All right, intro man. Oh, I'm sorry, am I stalling? Yeah, OK. Frankly, Chuck, have you ever heard of a Methuselah trust? No, but do it be an old? Well, you're not old. Instead, say a bequeathment, a grant,

that you've put in an account earning compound interest for 500 or 1,000 or 100 years, should conceivably, were it still legal, grow into a staggering amount of money. Right. Like very quickly. For example, there was a guy who you might have heard of, named Ben Franklin. Benny.

Ben Franklin, in his will, left 1,000 pounds each to the city of Boston and the city of Philadelphia, both of which he considered his hometowns. OK. And these monies were meant to stay in a private trust that earned compound interest. And by Franklin's reckoning, so after 100 years, in 1890, it was supposed to be cracked open,

a bit was supposed to be taken out, and then the rest was supposed to be left in until 1990s, 200 years after his death. Right. So by his reckoning, each city would get about the equivalent of $6 million a piece. OK. By 1990, which is when it was supposed to end and finally

mature. It didn't quite work out. Franklin's calculations didn't take into account lawsuits to stop this, to stop the idea of a Methuselah trust in general, trustees fees, lawyers fees, all this stuff. So what it came down to was about $3.5 million each. So it was off the mark a little bit. But he made his point, which was if you put a grand in

and you have enough foresight, you can give some money to the city of Boston. Did that really happen? Yeah, really. They got their $3.5 million? Yeah, each town did. What this demonstrates probably more than anything, though, is that Franklin was above all else an idea man.

Right? Yeah. He was pretty good. I mean, he invented spectacles. He had some really good inventions under his belt. The electric kite. But more than anything else, he was all about ideas. And he was more aware than anybody

that his ideas weren't always, he didn't see them through to fruition all the time. Right. Not all ideas were meant to be. But another good example of that is his idea for daylight savings time. He was the guy that came up with this. Saving?

Daylight saving time. I think most people say savings. Yeah. But it is, in fact, saving. But we're going to mess up and say savings. So just prepare for that, S, people. Franklin was an ambassador to France, 1784. Which is a pretty good job back then.

Oh, I'm sure. The Enlightenment, come on. It's a good job now. Sure. Woke up one morning, all his fellow Parisians were sleeping. And he said, hey, we should change the time and get these people up earlier. Did he talk like he was from Jersey?

He basically proposed it in an article. But it's generally dismissed as satire. It wasn't a real idea. Right. His whole idea was to basically everybody was sleeping in light while it was still daylight. And then staying up late, long after sunset, it was a waste of daylight.

A great way to fix this is to say, let's get everybody up at the crack of dawn, and we'll do that by shooting off cannons that wake everybody up. It was sort of a jab at the French, a friendly jab. Well, he was a friend of the French. But like I said, generally dismissed as satire, not really like the seed of the idea for daylight saving. No, but other people about 100 or so years later

came up with similar things, and they meant it. And I don't know if we can say that Franklin didn't mean it, but he didn't think it was a very important idea necessarily. But it's so ingrained in our society here in the United States here in North America. And most likely, if you're listening to this in Europe or Australia, you know what we're talking about. All over the world, really.

That you're kind of like, yeah, daylight savings. I mean, it's peculiar, but of course we're going to do it. Right. Of course it makes sense. This is from people who really can't even tell you whether it's spring forward or fall back. So let's set that straight right now. Because I think if we just stop there and said,

it is spring forward, where you set the clock forward an hour, and it's fall back, where you set the clock back an hour, we've just done a tremendous public service. Did people really not remember that? Yeah. I'm among them. Really? Yeah.

I will always remember it now, because I've studied this article, but no, I always had trouble with it. Well, that's why they say spring forward, fall back. You can also fall forward and spring back. You can't spring back. Let me see it. I did. Hold on.

Josh just sprung back. Sprung back. All right. Well, here's the other public service announcement. Here in the US, second Sunday in March, you're going to spring forward. The first Sunday in November, you're going to fall back. I didn't know that, because every year I'm on the internet,

it's going, well, when do we do this? When do we do it? I thought it fluctuated. Second Sunday in March, first Sunday in November. Boom. Yeah, I thought it fluctuated as well too. At 2 AM. It's standard now, thanks to a lot of legislation

that's taken place over the years here in the United States. Most recently, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 set the rules, as you just described them, right? Yes. We should also say, Chuck, to our friends in South America, you have the opposite. We're not exactly sure when it starts for you, but we can tell you that you do spring forward and fall back.

No, fall forward and spring back, because the seasons are the opposite. So they go on to daylight savings time in the fall, and then change it. They go off of it in the spring. And also, one more thing, daylight saving time is not, I find it confusing in that the mind wants to say it's like daylight time saving.

It's like daylight saving time, right? Yeah. Like you're time saving. Yeah. But really, it's daylight saving time. So it's like a period of the year. Yeah. So I've always had trouble wrapping my mind around how they're just

saving daylight not time. Everything about this is so confounding. I know, because I'm one of those people that's like, what the clock says is arbitrary in a way, unless you have a shift job. You would have made a great farmer. Yeah, that's kind of bunk, too, from what I hear. OK, so let's talk about this, man.

You just gave the deets on when to do it. Yes. In the United States, it's the Energy Policy Act of 2005 that establishes that. But if you are Arizona or Hawaii or Guam, and you say, I don't want this to apply to me, I already feel cut off enough from this country, from the rest of the world, I'm going to apply for an exemption,

you're probably going to get it. Yeah, Indiana's had a mixed history with daylight saving. They've kind of fluctuated back and forth over the years. And at times, only some counties had it and some didn't. And they finally went all in. In 2006. 2006. Yeah.

Pretty recently. Yeah, if you're in Indiana, you know what I'm talking about. And it's not just the United States. Apparently, as of 2008, 76 countries observed daylight savings time. Yeah, I saw 70, but I don't know which source is newer. So we'll go with 70 to 76. But just after reading this, I could see six countries following.

Yeah. I mean, it's a surprisingly contentious thing, setting the clock back an hour. Basically, I saw one source that calls it the arrogance of humanity. Oh, to set time, period. Yeah. Well, no, to adjust the clock. Yeah, it's like it is now two and not one.

Right, exactly. And it is a little bit loony if you think about it. I think Japan, India, and China are the only major industrialized nations who do not observe. And it's getting more and more difficult, too, to be a country like that in this globalized world to not observe daylight savings time. I mean, it's kind of problematic.

Sure. I imagine that's why most countries do it now. Well, not most, but a lot. So Europe has long observed what's called summertime. But it wasn't until 1996 that the EU said, hey, let's all just stop this patchwork thing. Here's the standards now. Right.

And the European Union says it runs from daylight saving time, the time of daylight saving. Summertime. Yeah, it's the last Sunday in March to the last Sunday in October. That's the EU? Yeah. Well, good for them.

Stuff you should know. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s, called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper, because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy,

blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough,

or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place, because I'm here to help. This, I promise you.

Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS, because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so will my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that, Michael.

And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general, can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody, about my new podcast, and make sure to listen,

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. We, you mentioned earlier that another couple of guys that proposed this. Yeah. One of them was a New Zealander named George Vernon Hudson. And he was actually the first dude to genuinely propose this.

And he gets overlooked a lot of times by the other guy that we'll talk about. But Hudson in 1895 was an entomologist and astronomer. And he had a shift job that allowed him, I guess he worked at night because allowed him extra daylight hours that his friends weren't getting. He'd go out and hunt for bugs. And he was like, this is great.

He's like, we ought to really try and do this. Yeah. But William Willett of England is the guy that a lot of people credit with it. And I think it's because it was kind of his passion in life. Yeah. Like he really, really tried to get this pushed through. Yeah.

He was an avid golfer. And his whole premise for it was that it would extend time for leisure after work, after everybody got done working for the day. Yeah. There's still daylight hours. Just the links. And he wrote a pamphlet that's online.

It's called The Waste of Daylight. It's online in its entirety, if you search that. And he lobbied the House of Commons to institute this. And in 1908, they officially said, nah. But he kept lobbying him until his death in, I think, the 20s. I died in 1915, actually. So he did not get to see it because a year later.

Oh, yeah. Insultingly enough, a year later it was brought on in England thanks to a little something called World War I. Yeah, and actually it was Germany that was the first country to ever institute daylight savings time. Yeah, they called it wartime, though. Yeah. So did FDR later on.

Oh, did he? Yeah. But the Germans started it. The English quickly saw the value in it, and they started it. And it was all the preserved coal supplies during the war. Because if you were up earlier, you'd be tired earlier, and you wouldn't stay up as late, earning precious coal needed to pound the Kaiser into oblivion.

That's right. And a lot of nations got on board because of World War I, 31 in total, including the US. And then World War II, well, after the war, I think most of these countries got rid of it. It was just for war. Yeah. And then World War II came around.

Same thing happened. But in more abundance, 52 nations this time. Right. And the US actually kept daylight savings year round for three full years uninterrupted from, what is it, February 1942 to September 1945. And apparently FDR, he called it wartime, too. He had no problem with it.

He was just going to leave it like that indefinitely. And he finally acquiesced to farmers, which if you know much about farmers at that era, they were really effective at striking, overturning scab trucks and dealing with communists and being pro-communist. And they were a force to be reckoned with. They called it God's time. Did they really?

Yeah, we'll talk more about the farmers in a minute. Go on. Well, we had it for three years solid, like you said. And then after the war, they said, you don't have to do it, but it's up to your state if you want to keep doing this or not. Some did. Some didn't.

Yeah. So that's the history. Well, actually. No, it keeps going in 1966. History does keep going, doesn't it? Yeah. And that stops. So the states are at all patchwork, and everybody's just

kind of doing whatever they want. But we have this thing called the interstate system that comes about, which links states more and more, and there's more trade. And really, people need to know what time it is in another state that they're sending stuff to. Sure. So the Uniform Time Act of 1966 finally said, you guys

can decide whether you want to do it. But if you're going to do it, you have to do it along these guidelines. Yeah. And it stayed that way uninterrupted until 1986, except for the Arab oil embargo, where the US said, we're going to extend the daylight savings to through winter as well.

Yeah, it went from six months to eight months in 1973, because they found that doing so saved the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil a day. It's a lot. And 600,000 in those two years. So that's what they said. It is. Is it true?

Who knows? Are there conspiracies about that? Definitely not for debate. Whether it saved 10,000 barrels of oil a day? Yeah. I'm sure it's not for debate. The weird thing about daylight savings is it's largely been intuitive for decades.

It was practiced for decades before anybody finally put it to the test. Well, the whole point behind it is this, Chuck. There are more people asleep at sunrise, and more businesses are closed at sunrise than at sunset. So if you look at electrical demand as a whole, over the course of a single day, you're going to see in the afternoon and the evening,

it starts to peak. If you take an hour, if you take the whole day and shift it backward by an hour, people are going to get up earlier, and it's going to spread that electrical demand over the day. They're also going to go to bed earlier, so they're going to use lamps less. They're going to stay up less late to watch TV.

So the overall demand should decrease too. And this is the whole reason that daylight savings time has always been championed by most people. That's the whole reason that they want you to think. Well, that's a part of it. The other is to get people outside more. Yeah, I read up on this. And what I found out was that it really comes down to money.

They want you spending money more. Yeah. And that is going to happen more if you're out and about shopping or playing golf. Exactly, like the golf lobby in 86, the last time before 2005 that anybody tinker with it, Reagan said in public law in 99, he started at the first Sunday in April, which was where before in 1966,

it was from the last Sunday in April. So a full month he added to daylight savings time. But the golf lobby said that an extra month or an extra hour, I think an extra month was like $400 million to just that industry alone. I don't know. See there? Yeah.

Money talks. It does. And the reason I say that that's the main reason is because they've done studies. And in fact, in 1973, when they did the oil embargo, they didn't just study oil barrels. They studied utilities. And they found that it's a pretty negligible difference,

about 1% energy savings. But that's for the whole country. That's a lot. That is a substantial amount of, that's a lot. See, I read it's negligible. So say it is 1%, say it is negligible, but say that it's 0% if you don't do anything. You automatically have said, well,

there's a savings in energy, especially in this eco-conscious society that we're growing into. That's it, right there. OK, daylight savings time, do it. We'll save 1% of all the energy expended. Fine, do it. It's better than not. What else could possibly go wrong?

And I was very surprised from this article to find that there's actually counterarguments to daylight savings time. Well, yeah, because they basically, I think people have challenged these studies, is what I've seen. In 2001, they did another study, the California did, where they actually doubled it to a two-hour shift.

And in the end, they found that electricity savings of about 0.03 for the year. Right, which is substantially less. But you can also say it's still better than nothing. Why not just do it? That's true. There's also other arguments, too. Things like there's fewer traffic accidents in the evenings,

because it's lighter out on the evening commute. Crime is decreased because criminals prefer darkness. And if you're out taking a walk after work and it's light out still, you're probably not going to get mugged. And then, of course, the golf industry said, everybody needs to get off their rears and get outside and play more golf.

Golf fever, catch it. And they are big on that as well. Well, I got most of my info you should know from that Skeptor guy. Let's hear it. Dunning. Well, no, that's what he said. He said, basically, it's all about money.

He said, don't be fooled into thinking this is some energy plan. And he said that the numbers are suspect, and that it really comes down to spending money as a consumer. I'm sure it does. But the other aspect of it, you know who's the biggest against it now? Who?

These days, they used to be farmers. Well, he said that's bunk, too. He bunks everything, though. So here's the thing. Farmers, from what I understand, it used to be farmers. And I've seen this elsewhere, that farmers had a problem with it because daylight savings added a day

and an hour onto their day. They had to get up at the crack of dawn no matter what time it was. So if they had an extra hour, they had to extend their business hours because they had to deal with the public who was running on an hour later time. So farmers hated daylight savings,

and they railed against it. That's my understanding. With modern technology, where a lot of the farm processes are automated, they don't have to worry about the sun time or God's time as much. They're not as opposed to it. The problem is with airlines now. When they're flying to places that don't have daylight savings,

they apparently have a lot more trouble getting a slot at an airport when the time doesn't quite match up because the airport's like, we're not going into the trouble of figuring this out. Go lobby your government to stop screwing with time. So apparently, that's the big industry that's opposed to daylight savings right now. Interesting.

Yeah. Like I said, though, that's his job. He's the skeptoid. Debunking. He said the farmer thing is he thinks is somewhat of a myth because he can't find any. He said all the sources are the exact same, and he can't find any origin source that he thinks is valid.

It's pretty good evidence that something is a myth, but he's trying to prove a negative. He should be opposed to that. Maybe he is. Huh. Hey, dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster?

Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts

flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it, and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast,

Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing could be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough, or you're at the end of the road. OK, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation?

If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This, I promise you. Oh, god. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael.

Um, hey, that's me. Yeah, we know that, Michael. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now.

If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Bah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. There was a new study though recently by a guy named Matthew Kuchin.

Yeah. He's an economist at Cal, Go Bears. And, you know, I said Indiana's kind of been back and forth over the years with, like, half the state doing it. When they finally went all in in 06, he said, hey, there's a great opportunity to check this out and study it. And he found that it led to a 1% rise. He figured that lamp usage went down overall across the daylight savings, but that there

was a peak in energy demand that was an increase over when you don't observe daylight savings. In the fall, when it was cold in Indiana, in the form of heating, people had their heat went up because they weren't under the blankets as early as when they just observed standard time year-round, and that actually cost $9 million for the state. Well, I think that's part of Dunning-Sing, too, as these studies that were done in the 70s, they didn't have computers and iPods and Blu-ray players, and we have way more things besides lamps these days to take into account and air conditioners and things like that.

So he's saying it's kind of an outdated... There were no lamps in the 70s. An outdated model. And daylight savings, Chuck, also kind of strikes me as a really good example of for every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction. So there's fewer fender benders during the evening commute, but apparently parents groups are also opposed to daylight savings. In part because kids, accidents involving kids waiting for the bus in the darker mornings

increase. Oh, really? And then crime goes down during the summer, but then it increases in the fall. Now, there's no figures to support that necessarily, but there's also the only study ever conducted about how daylight savings creates a decrease in crime was a single study of the District of Columbia in the 70s that found it a 10% reduction, but no one's ever backed it up in the future. That's the only one?

Yeah. Well, and think about it too. Car wrecks are good for industries like tow trucks and mechanics. The tow truck lobby. The auto industry that wants to sell you a new bumper, I don't know, but it does everything. You're right. Everything has an opposite reaction. And also, apparently, chronobiologically, it can be very problematic for us.

It also says, was he German? Yeah. I didn't see his name. He's just referred to as a German chronobiologist. There's only one. I couldn't find him. Or her. Yeah, that's true.

He or she says that your body never even adjusts period to the circadian rhythm, and so you're just out of whack for eight months out of the year. Or I guess it depends on which one he thinks is right. So yeah, and the big problem is going back and back, like going back and forth. Like if we all just said, okay, the whole world's going to set their clocks back one hour forever, and that will be referred to from here on out as the hour, the moment, and then we're just going to forget about daylight savings time, it would considerably have the same effect, right?

But it would not have that jet lag problem that the German chronobiologist describes. And even worse, there's other people that propose extended daylight savings throughout the year, or throughout winter as well. Oh, okay. Right. If we did that once, it would conceivably be fine. Our bodies could adjust. It's going back and forth.

Other people are proposing double daylight savings where you go back two hours, which would probably wreak havoc if the chronobiologist is correct. Right. And there's actually data that supports this idea that our bodies are disrupted by the Swedish heart attack study. Yeah, I'm sure they are. I never thought of it as losing an hour though, because it happened at 2 a.m. on Sunday, and I would just wake up and whatever the clock said is what it said.

Yeah. I never felt like, you know, I guess I don't get up Sunday morning at 7 for a shift job. No, that's a big part of it. I saw on the Consumerist some guy wanted to know about getting paid because he worked the late night on November, this past November, for Sunday and November, when he had an extra hour, because there's actually 25 hours in that day. Right. 1 a.m. is counted twice.

Interesting. Isn't that? Yeah. There's a 25-hour day that we just went through. That's got to mess us up somehow. It's got to. And it does. The Swedish study I was referring to found that since 1987, the number of heart attacks

rose about 5% during the first week of daylight savings time every year. And then Australia, some Australians looked at some data between 1971 and 2001 and found that male suicides increase in the weeks following daylight savings time. And they're controlling for everything else and it appears to just be daylight savings really affects people with bipolar disorder. And they are more men are more prone. Australian men with bipolar disorder are more prone to commit suicide in the weeks immediately preceding the change over to daylight saving.

Wow. Yeah. That's sad. It is sad. And some kind of interesting things that happened over the years because of DST and 99 at the West Bank was on daylight savings. Israel had just switched back to standard time. So a group of West Bank terrorists were preparing some time bombs, smuggled them to their counterparts

in Israel. And as they were planning the bombs, they blew up. No. Yes. No. That's what it says. Is that from Skeptoid? No.

No. They'll take snopes too. I think that's real. Wow. I think that happened. That is crazy. Minneapolis and St. Paul were on different times in 1965, which kind of whacked things out.

Amtrak, a train cannot leave the station before it's scheduled to obviously can't leave early because everyone's going to get on. So when you fall back in October, if you're running on time, you stop and sit there for an hour. November. October. What did I say? October.

I think it used to be in October when this was written. So you sit there for an extra hour if you're on Amtrak on that day. That's right. That's crazy. And then in the spring, apparently they don't do anything but try and catch up. Like everything's a little late for a little while and they just try to like drive faster. Can you imagine being a logistician? I want to hear from logisticians.

I have a deep respect for your profession. Yeah. Agreed. Time. Who knew? Yeah. You know? Is it arbitrary?

What the clock says? It's just a number. I tend to go with just the rise and fall of the sun and moon. You know? Are you kidding me? Like you could throw away every clock in the world and nothing would really change in you know, in uncivilized parts of the world. In the civilized world, everything runs on the clock but it's just time the number was

invented by man. I know what you mean, man. You know what I'm saying? Mm-hmm. A little abstract. Thanks for that, Chuck. I think that was an excellent way to kind of put everybody to sleep. No, just put them on a little cloud and went, yeah man.

If you want to learn more about clouds, about daylight savings time, about Chuck, Brian, you can type in those words in the search bar at howstuffworks.com and it'll bring up some very cool stuff, I assure you. I mean I said search bar at howstuffworks.com. That means it's time, Chuck, for listener, con, honest, honest. That's right. Not listener, male. We have a contest that...

We have nothing to do with. Yeah, this was sprung on us but we like it. We're in favor of it. Yes. If you are interested in coming to Atlanta, all expenses paid. Yeah, that's the kicker. Actually, I'm not going to say all expenses paid. Yeah, I don't know if we should legally say that.

Certain expenses are paid. Well, you can come here, tour the studio, hang out in the office, we'll even go to lunch with you, with Jerry. Yeah, Jerry will be there and you'll get to see your face. We won't make her wear like a paper bag. You can enter in this contest. It runs now. If you're in America.

Yeah, yeah. We get grief. The United States. As I always tell everyone from Canada and elsewhere that's mad about this, I can't win your contest either. I don't think that makes anybody feel better. If you're American. If you're in the United States.

It runs through December 31st. Winners will be announced the week of January 1st, 2012. Grand prize trip to Atlanta includes one night hotel, airfare up to 500 bucks and an American Express gift card for incidentals. Like taking me and Chuck out to lunch. I think we'll pick that up. And if you refer somebody, like you go to Facebook, thehousestuffworks.com, not the stuff you should know.

Go to thehousestuffworks.com Facebook page to enter and you have to like it and then you enter. That's the only way to enter as far as I know. Yeah, I think so. But if you refer someone and they win, I'm sorry, after person A enters the contest, he or she can share the contest link with friends via Facebook and Twitter. And if a friend of theirs wins, then you win a Kindle Fire. That's not too shabby.

So does that make sense? Yeah. And I would give you the link, but it's like 3,000 characters long. So just go to Facebook, housestuffworks.com, housestuffworks.com, housestuffworks official Facebook page. Yeah. And you will find the information there. Yeah.

And lunch it up with us. Yeah. Let's lunch. Let's do lunch. Before we go, I want to correct myself, big time correct myself about patent trolls in the Gene Patents episode, I mentioned patent trolls and I don't even remember what I said they were, but I was way off. Yeah.

Patent trolls are people who go around buying patents with no intent of manufacturing these things or what the patent is for. I figured that's what it was, like buying up website domains. Sure. And they sue, the whole point is to own the patent so that they can sue anybody who infringes on it. So basically they're keeping any kind of innovation from coming about along the same lines of what they own the patent to by suing people who try to do it.

And they're basically just whatever this great idea that's patented is just never going to see the light of day because they have no interest in doing that. They just want the money from suing people. Gotcha. That's a patent troll. I apologize for. To all the patent trolls out there. Yes, it's all the people who corrected me.

Thank you for that. Yes. If you want to correct us, we are always up for that. You can send us a tweet at SYSK podcast. You can join us on Facebook. We have our own page too. It's stuff you should know. And you can also send us a good old fashioned email stuffpodcastathowstuffworks.com.

For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help and a different hot sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever

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