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It’s a lot of different things it’s design is based on the sundial, we already had base 12 time
Wikipedia page for base 12, the origin is a fun read and while I can’t say it’s all accurate, the parts I know are
The U.S. 12h clock is stupid: 12PM + 1h = 1PM
If you don’t use a 24h clock at least do it like the Japanese, who also use the 12h clock and have: 0:00 PM + 1h = 1:00 PM
turns out Americans really love the modulo operation, no wonder programmers are paid so well there
that just moves the weird math, because 11:00 + 1h = 00:00… The fact that clocks are a circle means there is some weird math like this happening somewhere no matter the system.
Not really 11:00 AM +1h becomes 00:00 PM, and vice versa. PM and AM are different prefixes/systems/units. Much simpler to understand IMO. 12:00 AM and 12:00 PM would no longer exist, you just convert them from PM to AM or back when you reach them and set the numbers to 00 again.
This is basically the same system as the regular 12:00 clock except noon and midnight are 00:00 instead of 12:00.
Seems functionality the same to me.
24 hour is the only way. If only I could convince people to stay saying “15 O’Clock”. That would be neato. People know what it is, just not used to it
They don’t know how to switch bases
🤣😂🤣
The sound of Babylonian growling intensifies… (Babylonian / Sumerian cultures used the base 12/60 system)
And it remains a sensible system that we rejected because of the ‘superiority’ of the Decimal system.
The Mesopotamian System can reasonably be divided by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, and 60. All without fractions!
Even the much-vaunted Greeks of antiquity lifted wholesale from the peoples of the fertile crescent- it’s why we still use 360 degrees to measure circles.
why has all this worked just fine for a century and suddenly gen Z can’t make sense of it? do you guys not ever stop to wonder if maybe the devices are making you stupid?
Pretty short-sighted take. Sure, they worked for centuries, and still work today. Lots of things worked for centuries, still worked, and were still replaced by a better thing. Henry Ford famously said that, if he asked the consumers what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses. Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s the best way, or the way that makes the most sense. Change can be scary, but it’s not inherently bad.
ok genius. tell us what we should replace our clocks with.
Nah, not my job. I don’t claim to have any better solutions, I just know that for almost every problem we’ve ever solved, we probably haven’t found the MOST efficient solution. People should be questioning everything, even the most basic, because that’s how stuff gets better.
I’m actually a millennial and when I first read this post, it occurred to me I didn’t really “get” why clocks were 12 hours. I think years ago, I had seen a video on it, but for the most part, I didn’t have a working knowledge.
The fact is, we take a lot of things for granted, everything from mundane things “Why do clocks have 12 hours?” through to complex ideas. “What do LEDs light up?”
This post (the OP) reflects the opposite of what you’re suggesting, that the devices are making people stupid. This post is the start to curiosity. I suspect the author likely took time to look up exactly why clocks have twelve hours, and by extension likely caused many people who viewed it to do the same (myself included actually).
Device exposure has it’s problems, certainly, but I don’t see this specific post as an example.
if you don’t understand how clock relate to the reality of our world, i don’t know how to you. we live in two different worlds.
I guess I truly don’t understand this comment, like I accept that hours divide our day into 24 segments, of which 12 are represented on the face of a clock.
I also accept that these hours are divided into 60 segments of which 5 are expressed between each of the 12 hours - which of course logically follows through basic division.
I even know the origin of O’Clock “On the clock” and contrary to the post why 6 means 30 (again this part is just math).
What I am referring to are the finer points of why 12 and not 24, or even why divide the day as 24 and hours into 60 minutes. I guess perhaps I do live in a different world, I can of course easily obtain the answers to both these questions through a simple search. My comment was more in regard to how such knowledge is something I didn’t have on a holster, given that my day-to-day isn’t predicated on knowing it.
I will also say, all knowledge is acquired. You by default, don’t know anything, and have to learn it through experience and education. I make a point of being excited when people don’t know something, especially if it’s something I’m passionate about. This is actually a concept expressed well in this comic.
Well said.
How does the clock relate to the reality of our world?
i don’t know how to help you. we live in two different worlds. would you like for me to explain how to use a tooth pick as well?
I guess we live in a world where things got invented by humans at some point in time, while you live in a world where some higher power just backed 12h clocks into the fabric of reality for humans to just discover. Yeah, I am not sure how we can easily find common ground.
We are asking questions about the world and its rules to learn, study and question them, you demand acceptance and unthinking submission to it.
go ahead and waste your time reinventing the wheel then. that’s obviously super important in our current state of affairs.
The clock evolved out of the sundial. 12 hours on the clock makes more sense if you think of it that way.
Aand that’s Numberwang!
This joke has lived in my head quietly for at least a decade.
Well, it’s still a far plan than the time the French tried to force time into base 10…
Which might have been the first documented demonstration of the saying “The French follow no one. And no one follows the French.”
They also tried to implement a metric calendar, ya know I think I know why they started using the guillotine on the revolutionary leaders.
For an analog clock the reason for 12 hour time is that twelve divides evenly into 60 and 24 does not. Get rid of the whole 60 min/hour and 60 sec/min that make dividing a clock dial into 60 segments extremely useful and then we can talk about why there are twelve hours on it.
Reminds me of the collective confusion in english class when they taught us that 12:15 am is in the night and 12:15 pm is at lunchtime.
Imo anyone using 12:XX am for midnight for the sake of “symmetry” with 12:XX pm or whatever is adding pointless complications on top of the already pointless am/pm system. Midnight has no reason to not be 00:XX am in that system
It ain’t about symmetry or pointless complications. It’s about how many numbers can you get on a watch face and have it be easily legible. Yes, I know there are digital watches these days. But some people don’t like them and some of us need those analog faces. As an old medic, digital watches absolutely suck at timing things like BP or respiration’s. Neither me or my patient had time for that digital watch to zero so I could get a BP in 15 seconds. Ten’s of thousands of EMS people and nurses in general are wearing 12 our analog watches around the world right now.
Now my run reports were all done n 24 hour time because the little boxes on those paper run reports were tiny and often filled out in a hurry. So 24 hour time was more legible and clear to anyone reading the report.
Besides, can you not look out a window to see if the sun is up or not? That will tell you all you need to know to understand how to use 12 hour time.
Idk, I get your arguments but I’ve seen quite a lot of beautiful watch faces with small 24 hours numbers under the 12 hours one. Of course it works best with the big ones, but that seems to be in fashion these days.
I have no inherent issues with using or understanding 12 hours time, I just think it is actually adding complexity to something that is already pretty much perfect, for reasons that are mostly cultural nowadays (you’ve gotta admit that your point about hospital workers, while very valid, is still kinda isolated. Plus when I was wearing my watch with a 12 hours face daily I just did the x2 multiplication in my head).
Also there’s a reason basically all militaries use 24 hours, and I don’t think it’s because they think highly of their average soldier’s intellect.Its not about understanding it. Its about using it. I cannot tell you the number of times I had set an alarm 12 hours off before switching to 24 hour time. After I switched it never happened again.
Besides 24 is divisible by 12 so you can just double up the numbers on an analog clock. I have an analog watch with 24 hour face that looks similar to this:
Just remember that m is midday, when the sun it high in the sky. Anything with an a is before that moment, everything with a p is after that. It’s not that hard. Now, making heads or tails of thumbs, feet and miles. That’s a head scratcher.
I’m not saying it’s hard, and we got the explanation too. It’s about what feels or seems off. It’s technically correct, I know, but the first reaction of the class was confusion and a lack of intuitive understanding. Mostly it is using 12 instead of 0.
It seems off if you look at it from a purely numerical point of view. If you tackle it from a geometric POV and the face of a clock, it makes sense. That time representation was meant to be cyclical, not lineal. Time is a circle, not a vector.
Gilgamesh joins the chat. The Sumerians and the duodecimal system for time keeping.
Base 60 is actually a lot more practical than base 10.
It sucks, it requires way too many digits.
Then why computers use the binary system and not base 60?
How do you count on your hands in base 60?
Actually that is not funny to make fun of thing you don’t understand.
A clock is a marvel using a plan to represent both numerically and in volume the time passing in an infinitly précise manner as it is continuous. Human reading precision can be chose at the level of the hour, the minute of the second. The 12-base allow a reading of the twelveths of the time period, the thirds, the halves and the quarters. The use of a circle make it possible to use it as a chronometer at any given start and follow the passing of time as your society see it.
That is just the data representation part!
The clock is also a marvel of ingeneering in the backend with very complex mecanism giving it a excellent precision and the abillity to run on many many different type of power.
the most impressive thing to me is that people managed to standardize and zero in a precise “second” especially back when seconds were kept by mechanical means. I wonder how they went about ensuring it.
A 1m pendulum has a 1 second half-period.
is it not dependent on mass at all? It’s possible given that this is the metric system that this is actually just a convenient retroactive truth about meters. I suppose it wouldn’t necessarily be, but then you’re accounting for gravity as well, which means you’re going to need a pretty effective approximation there. As well as a way to account for any mechanical losses as well.
I’m not sure the metric system even existed when we developed the first mechanical time keeping devices.
At least that’s an useful approximation, but too inprecise for accurate measurements over an entire day.
It’s only 0.3% off. You probably have more uncertainty on the length of the pendulum.
0.3 % would correspond to 3 mm difference in length of the pendulum.
After an hour, the difference between real and measured time would already be 10.9 s, and over an entire day, it would accumulate to 261.3 s, way too much for useful long term measurements.
Yet, it is an useful approximation for qualitative measurements, e.g. when Galileo Galilei did his fall experiments, he might have used a prendulum instead of his pulse for measuring.I’m not hauling this as the ultimate time keeping method. Friction in the system will mean you need to readjust it anyways. It’s just a neat fact that pi^2 ~= g
Atomic measurments, it’s why atomic clocks are the most accurate.
that’s a recent invention though, the first mechanical time keeping devices are what’s interesting to me.
The atoms are the powerhouse of the clock.
Is this from Timecube?
No it is from good sense and observations of technology inherited of extremly ancient civilisations.
Should watch an old BBC miniseries, Longitude.
So much fun watching how crazy clocks are engjneered, and Jeremy irons.
I was fascinated by some of the crazy things people tried to get working that were discussed on that show. Things like keeping a pair of dogs, wounded by the same knife, as a way to synchronize time. As if they were some kind of quantum entangled particles.
Oh God… Weren’t this people happy water clock and other sandglass-like engine?
Thank you. I add it on the list (^_^)
How many centiseconds in a day?
36*24=864?
I think, I’m pretty high right now, and all the numbers seem to be dancing around a bit.
The twelve comes from the babylonians, which counted the segments of four fingers with their thumb. So each hand could count to 12, which is far more useful than 10 as a base, since it can be divided by {1,2,3,4,6}.
“The day starts at night” sounds silly because it seems to be a contradiction. But really, how else could it be?
Either, day starts at day … but then it was already day. Or, day starts at night … unless we come up with additional entities like dusk or dawn.
And since we haven’t introduced them yet, day has to start at night, as a necessity.
Of course the actual silly thing is that it’s still night right after day has started.
The silly thing about this joke in the OP is that day means both “when the sun is up/the opposite of night” and “a period of 24 hours”. English has a lot more words than my native language of Norwegian, but in this case we actually have separate words for the two aforementioned things.
What are the words?
Døgn vs dag
starts at midnight?
I have come to conclude that probably, a terrible amount of these inconsistencies is to make it artificially hard, to “keep out the lower classes” from thinking, or sth. Similar to how the white population in the US made living in suburbs artificially difficult (car dependency, HOAs, …) to keep the “poor” (a.k.a. black) people out. it’s thinly veiled racism.
id argue its also thinly veiled racism to imply black people are too stupid to understand clocks
It’s dangerous making conclusions from big assumptions.
Is the kind of reasoning that leads to bias.
Or maybe it’s just a way to overlay multiple levels of information over the same circle.
