Settle a bet

Okay…some time last year my Dad and I were talking randomly about a drive we both do on the interstate all the time. He mentioned one stop along the way and I said “yeah about 30mins down the road”. He said there is no way you could get there in 30mins. And after thinking about I realized he was right and that I was thinkin about some where else…BUT I had a great idea. So I bet him you could. He accepted the bet and so him and I got in the car late one night to go drive it. I had of course picked day light savings time to do this and once the clocks were set back it was now just about the same time we had left. So he has yet to pay up on this bet…do you think he should? Yes it did take longer than 30mins to get there but according to the clock I did it in just under 4 minutes!

You could similarly have won the bet by using a faulty clock that ran slowly. The fact that your measurement device indicated elapsed time incorrectly does not change the actual elapsed time.

I think your Dad won.

As you said, it did take longer then 30 minutes. What time the clock said doesn’t really matter since we are only counting actual minutes here.

I agree with micco and In Conceivable: your father won the bet. Your bet concerned elapsed time, which was unaffected by the switch from daylight savings to standard time. In fact, the amount of time between 12:01 a.m. Daylight Savings Time and 3:01 a.m. Standard Time is still four hours, since you can’t convert from one to the other just by adding or subtracting the time that shows on a clock’s face. Likewise, you don’t travel backwards or forwards in time when you cross into a new time zone or over the International Date line.

If the bet was whether it would take longer than 30 minutes, you lost. If the bet was that you would arrive by X:00, you won.

You lose, kiddo. You were crafty in your thinking, but the parameters of the bet weren’t laid out well enough for you to take advantage.

Pay Pop.

“Late one night” indeed. Daylight Savings switches back to standard time at 2:00 AM everywhere I’ve ever lived. So you said to Pops “Hey, it’s 1:00 in the morning, on a randomly selected Sunday. Let’s go do that drive.” And he figured 1:00 AM was a fine time to do it? Did you at least have to make a compelling plea about light traffic late at night?

I think my father might have been a tad suspicious, but then again, I can’t remember the last time my dad was awake past midnight.

What if your clock was broken and registered NO time passing? Would that mean that no time actually passed and therefore it took zero minutes to get to your destination? No, it still took whatever time it took. The indicator on the clock has no relevance.

This is precisely the correct answer, since the OP said

You should have said, “It’s 1:45 am; I bet I can get there by 2:15 am.” If it happened to be the Sunday in October when the clocks get set back, and your dad was really clueless, you would have won.

But you didn’t.

You know, if you were to bet double or nothing and get a faster car…

Or here’s a hypothetical for you:say you were going so fast that relativity came into play, so it took 5 seconds by your clock and 31 minutes by his…then what?