Good morning, John.

This island is the reason there are 26 hours in a day. It and its neighbor- officially they are the property of the US government, managed by the Fish and Wildlife Service. People have been to these islands at various times, but on any given day, they are uninhabited. 

And I certainly would not know that they exist, except that in terms of time, they are two of the weirdest places on Earth. 

See, the time of day is both a physical reality, it's like where the sun is in the sky or not, where you are. But it's also a constructed cultural reality. It is the time that our phones tell us it is. And like the sun being at its highest point in the sky and my phone telling me it's noon very rarely actually overlap perfectly. Except for some places, including Kathmandu for a long time- we'll get to it. But this is fine, like an hour on either side of when noon actually astronomically is- that's going to be fine, the day is still going to be the daytime, the night's still going to be the nighttime. 

But of course it can't be noon for everyone on Earth at the same time, because the physical reality and the cultural reality do need to have some connection. And thus, time zones. We sliced the Earth up into an absolute mess of time zones. But some of those slices are messier than others. So let's hit some of the dumbest ones. 

So I'm going to start with like the least dumb. But still dumb. It's Arizona. So, in the US we have this thing called Daylight Savings Time where we shift forward and backward by an hour once a year. Daylight Savings Time is dumb and we should stop doing it, but in Arizona they were like, "This is dumb, and just we are going to stop doing it. We're going to be the pioneers. We're going to show you it's possible."

And that reminds me that an important part of courage is stupidity. I applaud the bravery of Arizona in showing us that it this possible, but oh my God. It is dumb to have no one know what time it is in one of the fifty states. Like I have friends in Arizona- and I never know. I have to Google it every time.

But Arizona, don't worry, I've got way dumber. China, for example, has a very specific way of solving the time zone problem, which is to simply only have one of them with no Daylight Savings Time at all. So, everybody knows what time it is in China all the time. I applaud the simplicity, but this is complex because China is very geographically big. Also, they didn't like pick a spot in the middle, they picked Beijing time, and the people on the far western side of China have to operate on that time even though it's quite distant from them. When you cross the boarder from China into Afghanistan, the time changes by 3 and a half hours.

And you may be thinking to yourself, "Hank, did you just say 'and a half'?" Yes. Honorary mention goes to all the many countries that went halfsies instead of being a whole hour off of UTC. The most populous country on Earth, India, is UTC plus 5 hours and 30 minutes. As you might imagine, this is 100% England's fault. The Royal Society suggested, "you should have two whole-hour time zones in India," but the colonial government was like, "that's too complicated, we don't need to do that. Just go halfway between both of those. That'll simplify things." 

But if you're looking for an even stupider villainous time zone situation, look no further than Spain, which should absolutely be in the same time zone as England. But instead, people there are having lunch at 2 and dinner at 10 because the sun sets really late.

And can you guess what you can blame for this? That's right, fascism! General Francisco Franco decided to kiss up to Hitler by putting Spain on the same time zone as Germany. They were like, "we'll be with you, Germany!"

But I gotta go back to the half hour increments here. So I would be remiss not to tell you that in Nepal and part of New Zealand, they have a 45-minute offset. Nepal actually originally had standardized to the local solar time in Kathmandu, so it was UTC plus 5 hours and 41 minutes, because that is when the average time of noon was. They were like, "Look, that's what time it is." And honestly I can respect this. Eventually those extra 4 minutes were annoying enough that they compromised and went to UTC plus 5 hours and 45 minutes.

So I started off thinking that was really dumb, but it's actually kinda cool. Like remote county, using their weird time zone to reinforce their independence, they're like, "we're the only one with this time zone because that's what time it is in our capital."

So now that we're talking about cool ones, I'll give you another cool one. It's the North Pole and Antarctica, where time zones just kinda stop mattering. Like what the sun is doing is so weird at the poles that the physical reality doesn't matter, so the cultural reality just takes over, and the standard actually is "it's whatever time you want it to be." 

Individual bases in Antarctica just pick the most useful time to them, which is usually the time in whatever place of the world is supplying them. This also results in a very good Wikipedia sentence: "In most areas south of 80 degrees latitude, Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) is assumed despite the limited presence of clocks." Very good. Love that. 

But back to the weirdest one, the one that we began with. These uninhabited islands are the only place on Earth that goes by UTC minus 12. Which is extremely silly, because no one lives there. Now, some countries used to use it, but for weird reasons they stopped using it. And now, we've got these two islands that are in this tiny slice of the Earth that is defined to have a time zone that no one has. And because of that, there are more than 24 hours in a day on Earth. 

Because if you travel from Baker Island across a time zone border to the Phoenix Islands, your clock will move 25 hours. You would think that we would have maxed out at UTC plus 12 and UTC minus 12, because that adds up to 24. Which is the number of hours there are. But as we have established here, the time of day is both real and made up. And so, we have made up not just a UTC plus 13 time zone, but a UTC plus 14 time zone, which was created in 1992 because the island chain of Kiribati spanned the international date line, and they were tired of having half their country always be in a different day.

However, as much as I've tried to figure this out, I'm still a little unclear on why they didn't just pick UTC plus 12. Like why did they pick UTC plus 13 and plus 14- I'm sure there was a reason. And whoever can explain that well in the comments will 100% get pinned. So go down there, and I hope they can help you understand this. 

John, humans are extremely weird and stupid, and I love us. I'll see you on Tuesday.