24 hours cause Egyptians split their sun dials and star decans into 12 parts each (probably cause 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6) which the greeks later turned into equal length hours (before the length would change over the year)
60 minutes due to Babylonian base-60 math
12 hour format is just tradition at this point, but derived from the sun dials which only worked at day, so half the time, and the star decans which only worked at night, so the other half.
pretty much every country except the US uses the 24h format on digitial clocks now
also the dude in the meme was kinda right: the day will be divided into 12 segments. and the night will too. at least originally
It’s called a “highly composite number!” I read up on a lot of this stuff while learning about numerology and other esoteric spiritual traditions!
24 hour analogue clocks exist. I have a 24 hour watch which only revolves once per 24 hours. It’s a disadvantage though.
The reason why clocks and watches display 12 hours at a time is so that they have space to show finer resolution of time. If you try to cram 24 hours onto a clock, it’s not easy to tell if it’s 12:20 or 12:30 at a quick glance.
Most people are not too stupid to be aware of if they are in the first 12 hours or second 12 hours of a day, so they benefit from a watch with 12 hour timescale and finer resolution so that they can more easily see exactly what time it is.
And for all the dummies posting about 12h vs 24h clocks. In the sense of saying that it’s 1pm vs 13:00. That’s not what this meme is even describing. This is about the physical layout of a clock or watch face.
I can’t believe this is the first I’m hearing of 24-hour analogue clocks! That’s so cool. But yeah, I see your point about it now allowing for very much precision at a glance.
If 12 is better than 24 we should build 6 hour analog clocks already!
Alright, I’m calling a 4.1666666666666666666666666666 metric hour meeting to discuss this!
The meeting might run to a full 5 metric hours.
there’s 86400 seconds in a day. If we use a new unit that is slightly shorter than a second as a metric second, we can do 100000 metric seconds a day, with 100 metric seconds per metric minutes, and 100 metric minutes per metric hour, and each day having 10 metric hours.
Your 1 hour activity now takes 0.5 metric hours (it might be 20% longer, but that’s arbitrary anyways, we rounded them to the closest hour anyways)
We are only used to the current system because we have been using it.
Keep it simple and just measure in terms of seconds since the Big Bang. The current time is 435,884,579,968,052,736 seconds, easy peasy
This would go great with my idea of everyone having a GUID instead of a name.
Most of that time is irrelevant to me. Let’s just start it in 1970. And I need more precision, so can we do milliseconds instead of seconds?
Nah just use Unix time
technically that is 64 bit unix time.
The big bang was definitely not in 1970
They had to pick a period where 32 bits would last long enough. If they had started with 64 bits, they could have used a start of time much further back.
It is wild how people refuse to use the 24 hour clock. It is so logical and easy. kind of like the metric system……
We should all also use GMT and forget about time zones.
First thing I change on every electronic device I buy.
And really annoying when something only has 12hr mode
I don’t want to believe that time goes on for that long.
I’d rather a 6 hour clock.
I’d prefer base 10 time than base 12. Until then I’ll just keep with am pm
I’d prefer base 12 for everything
It only solves a small part of the issue at the cost of less convenience and consistency. Propose a “metric” time that solves more of this issue problem and I’m all for it
less convenience and consistency
What? … seriously, which convenience and consistency are you talking about.
24h only has one “inconsistency”, going from 23:59 to 0:00. How is that less consistent than 12am being after 11:59pm and 12pm being after 11:59am. Solves all parts of the issue except for one. Which is a lot better than the 12h system.
This has messed with me for the longest time. 24h just wraps around at 24, simple modulo 24 arithmetic.
12h? The hour and am / pm wrap around independently, and hence I am always confused whether 12pm is supposed to be midnight or noon. Zero based would have made more sense (with x pm being x hours after noon…)
Why are the 60 minutes in an hour but 24 hours in a day? What functional difference is there between tne 12 and 24 hour clock? Are you showing up to your friend’s dinner party at 6am because you weren’t sure what time they wanted to start dinner? Are you unsure if your picnic is supposed to be right after midday or the middle of the night? Maybe your friend wanted to meet up for coffee and a bagel when you normally go to bed instead of right before you head off for lunch
I asked why the am/pm system is apparently more convenient and consistent than the 24h system. I didn’t ask about 24h in a day and 60min in an hour.
What functional difference is there between tne 12 and 24 hour clock?
You need 2 numbers and 2 letters to accurately specify time in the 12h clock instead of just 2 numbers. Seems convenient to me.
You don’t need the am or pm 90% of the time because obviously a lunch date is happening sometime around noon, not midnight. A lunar eclipse or meteor shower isn’t visible while the sun is up, or a midnight snack isn’t happening in the middle of the day. Obviously if you are talking trains and flights, you need AM and PM. But people who are used to 12 hour time don’t want to figure out when 16:00 is, so they don’t.
If you know basic addition and you know how a 12 hour clock functions, then you know how a 24 hour clock functions. If you can’t figure it out, that doesn’t make it inconvenient, it just makes you incredibly stupid.
Placeholder
1 metric second would be a little less than half our current second.
Global electricity output would instantly more than double!!!
Dammit, that wasn’t supposed to post yet. I’m still in the process of revising! Lol.
Not to worry, we will use the Babylonian watt for
megaimperial-tonne-fortnights to come.
I get the joke, but the sundials of ancient civilisations precluded clocks.
“Precluded” means “prevented” or to “make impossible” ❤️
Sundials also didn’t work very well at midnight for some reason, what’s ya point?
You’re just not holding the flashlight properly.
If you hold the flashlight right they work 100% of the time.
That’s when we bring out the moondial.
The firedial works every night.
Instructions unclear, I think my fleshlight is broken…
Dial it back a bit son
Back in, or back out? Please be clear or I’ll have to keep trying both ways. Over. And. Over. And. Over. Aaaannn…fffff.
<connection reset by peer>
That’s why for a long time, and even longer in the Royal Navy, the new day started at noon and not midnight.
Sundials also didn’t work very well at midnight for some reason, what’s ya point?
Noon is the center of the dial. Midnight is just the opposite of noon.
I cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not. This is peak Poe’s Law.
Well… This post sent me down a rabbit hole -> Unequal Hours if anyone else is curious.
It’s all the Babylonians fault
Those fuckers could count to 60 on their fingers. Witchcraft!
Using binary, we could count to 1023 with 10 fingers but only 511 with 9 fingers
Boys could count to 2047.
Yup, that’s why we still don’t have any clocks to this day.
Babylonians: I see this as a complete win.
The clock makes so much more sense when you rewrite the 12 as a 0
I never confirmed this, but I noticed that in parts of West Africa, people wouldn’t say “afternoon” until after 1:00pm. Since greetings were important, I started noticing it more and more when peoe would say “good morning” during lunch at 12:30pm. As if the 12 noon hour is still part of the time segment.
maybe this is because i grew up in a house that had a clock with hands but no numbers, but wth do you mean “the 6 means 30”.
analogue clocks consists of two progress bars. the numbers are just for convenience.
When the minutes hand is over the 6, 30 minutes have passed
whoosh!
There is no six. Clock faces have big and little ticks and a 12 maybe.
Example: Eco-Drive One -Official Site [CITIZEN] https://share.google/2d1QSW6LfqjUUHMeX
If you want to avoid Google’s tracking: https://www.citizenwatch-global.com/one/index.html
3π/2
Poor lad never learned the code
My pet theory is (circa 10000 BCE) that ‘houses’ and ‘hours’ are related words, the 12 hour clock matched the zodiac, each hour/house was 1 Assyrian ‘watch’ and they had no trouble day or night (constellations at night, sundial during the day), they were easy to build, easy to communicate, easy to understand and efficient.
Then the Egyptians stole the technology (Circa 6000BCE) said ‘12 hours in a day? I got you bro’, fucked it up and it all went downhill from there.
Feel free to quote me in your prize winning scientific paper.
How important is it to your theory that “hour” is related to “house” in… ancient Assyrian language? Because they’re completely unrelated in English, “house” coming from Germanic hus and “hour” coming from French ore. If we look at ancient Greek, the two are hoora for “hour” and oikos for “house”. I think English post-vowel shift has to be the first language where those two even sound similar.
Not central, just suspicious, but… this is ‘house’ as in astrological house as in the first part of the word ‘horoscope’, not house like a house you live in.
My background in linguistics consists of a couple chompsky soft-science books and a love of tolkien, but if you actually know something and wanna chat I’d honestly love to dig in on this seriously. DM me.
Another classic meme. Love to see it getting a proper repost after all these long weeks.
Isn’t this a standup routine?
