Although the 12 hours aren’t divided in day/night are they?
And depending on where/when you’re at, it can easily be light out at seven and seven, even in the same day.
What the 12 hour clock does well is to track when the sun goes up or down relative to the only convenient time marker: midday. It also does so in a pleasingly symmetrical way: it gets light and dark at about 8, rather than 4 hours before and 8 hours after midday.
I’d argue if you want to track time, rather than record the ends of daylight, a linear scale for the whole day makes more sense. If it should be reset daily or not, be divisible by 24, 86400, 100, 1000000, a second or whatever is mostly a choice of convention. If you have constant access to a clock, Internet time seems convenient, for humans without clocks we use daylight and units like hours and 5-minute increments.
For that the 24 hour clock seems simple and convenient, although it would be nice to be able to calibrate without a watch (is it two or three hours before midday? How many more hours until wake-up time?). 24 hour time isn’t perfect, but it’s much better adapted to modern life than the 12 hour clock.
AM/PM time is another thing that needs to sink with the USA, just like the Imperial system and Fahrenheit.
EU fella here. I’m strongly pro-Metric and yet don’t see a problem with 12-hour time. 24-hour is kind of clumsy to use in informal speech or chat/text, but I would use it in all other instances.
I use 24h all the time when speaking, never got strange gazes for doing so. And I never remember which one is midday and which is midnight on the 12-hour time.
Well… it depends on the language too - although I’m not a native English speaker, I would use 12-hour in spoken English too - often without even appending “AM” or “PM” because it would be obvious from the context.
What’s wrong with AM/PM lol. How many countries use 24h? Honesty, because I actua lly never thought about it before.
In Poland we use both interchangeably. U can use whatever suits you and everyone knows just fine.
What is the logic for distinguishing 12AM vs 12PM? Also, you have double of every element and need 2 more sillables each to distinguish.
It’s confusing and inefficient.
Get rid of Daylight Savings Time first, then we’ll talk about 24 hour time.
Everything after midday is PM. 12:00:00.00000001 is after midday. Therefore it can only be PM.
That’s the logic I use :)
It’s extremely common in Europe. I regularly get messages with “15h”, “22h”, etc, but spoken is a bit of a mixed bag, you can usually use 12 hour time and know if it’s AM/PM from context, but sometimes you need to be specific.
Though the weirdest thing I’ve had to learn in Germany about time is, near where I live it’s common to say “one/three quarters [hour]”, instead of “quarter past/to [hour]”, so 10:15 is “one quarter 11”, and 10:45 is “three quarters 11”. It makes a little more sense when you know that “half 11” mean “half to 11”, not “half past” like is typical in English.
24-hour format when written
12-hour format when spoken
You are trolling, right? Like, majority are using 24h.
Disclaimer: generalizations from personal experience.
Some nations use 12h with “at the morning” or “in the evening” in casual verbal conversations. In formal conversations it’s always 24h clock. Just yesterday I was booking an appointment at reception and they proposed me 14:45, so 24h clock, even though it is obvious that place is closed at 2:45 AM. But AFAIK some don’t use 12h even in casual speech, like Germans. Maybe Germans can confirm here.
I think it’s language thing, I never heard of “AM/PM” in language other than English. If you want to tell time in 12h clock it’s usually period of the day, like “2, at night”, “6 in the morning”, “10 in the evening”, which is much more cumbersome than just 2, 6, 22. And imagine it in writing.
Yeah man I’m trolling. I was raised using 12h and was told 24h was “military time” so obviously I assumed everyone else in the world uses 24h
I would be interested in knowing whether this was said with sarcasm or without. Because both are plausible!
I’d say Germany is about 50:50 verbally, but also depending on use. If using the 12h clock, one wouldn’t say “2:17”, rather round to “quarter past 2”. The other half of people would use “14:17”. But also if talking about timetables or other occurrences where the rounding would be detrimental, 24h will be u.sed.
Writing, I would say is about 90% 24h clock, because it’s just faster. Here, the divide would be between digital time (“14:17”) and military time (“1417”).
Wow, am I the only person on lemmy to grow up before any digital clocks, where all the clocks were 12 hours ? Yes, yes I am
There are 24 hour analog clocks dude.
Of course, they exist. But, they are extremely uncommon. Maybe you see them in military context? In sixty years, I’ve never seen one except in a picture, and maybe a movie. Not like a digital clock, where on nearly every one you just change a setting.
Dude.
I see them all the time in different business I go into.
I took a nap one time on a spring afternoon and woke up at 6:00. Only I wasn’t sure if it was afternoon or I slept all night until morning. Weird feeling.
I did this recently. I woke up at “sunrise”, had a cup of coffee, and it started getting darker outside. I was very confused for a few minutes.
Clocks were sundials.
If you can see the time, it’s not night.
I think their point was they picked 12 and not 24 or some other number to divide a circle by
That’s a Babylonian thing. They were obsessed with highly divisible numbers like, 12, 24 and 60. Basically the opposite of prime numbers, which are super annoying to divide. Babylonians wanted their numbers to as nice as possible when dividing. For example, 60 is particularly nice since it’s not absurdly large, but when dividing it, you have lots of options.
All of this was long before the decimal point and calculators were invented, so divisibility was a big thing back then. Nowadays though, having weird fractions like that is more inconvenient and annoying than nice. Thanks to the Babylonians, we have super messy time units now.
Thanks to the Romans, we also have super messy units for length, weight, volume and money. Yes, even money had convoluted fractions. That’s not a huge deal though, since basically nobody uses those any more.
I wouldn’t blame the Babylonians for us breaking the good standard and going 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 instead of the 58, 59, 100, 101, 102 that works just fine. They were first, we are the ones who added a new system aside the old one instead of replacing it.
If that was the case, we would now be talking about 48 h clocks vs. 24 h clocks.
18:40 pm on the 24h clock would equal 36:40 on the 48 h clock. You would still not know whether it’s night or day just looking at the time.
100% This.
Also, being an evolution of sundials is the reason all analog clocks move their hands in the same direction.
I was answering about the Northern/Southern hemisphere logic of this… and realised that it depends if the sundial is vertical in a wall (facing South in the Northern hemisphere) or horizontal (facing the zenith/sky)… today you can easily find those wall sundials in many monumental buildings (at least these seem to me more common than the others) and the shadow is casted counterclockwise in the Northern hemisphere, so not sure if the clockwise sense was locked by sundials… also in the Southern hemisphere logic flips completely.
in the Southern hemisphere logic flips completely.
In the southern hemisphere they think Australia is suitable for human life.
*Being evolution of sundials located on the northern hemisphere.
deleted by creator
So you’re saying clockwise can also be called sundialwise?
At least some North American indigenous peoples say something akin to “with the sun”. And I think in yoga terminology they have a similar phrasing, or am I mistaken?
deleted by creator
Or just sunwise
Not all, but most
I present to you, illuminated clocks!
crowd gasps MY UNIVERSE IS COLLAPSING the crowd starts screaming and lighting things on fire
…and then they noticed: “Damn, we could have lit everything on fire and seen our clocks in the night time millenia ago!”
Galaxy brain time
Your sundial still isn’t showing time.
Depends on what you mean with “showing time”. They won’t be showing the correct time, that’s true. But.
It’s showing a time
Clocks, not sundials
The lights go out, and I can’t be saved
Tides that I tried to swim against
How are the illuminated clocks able to comprehend your presentation?
Magic ✨
12 clock is easier to read at a distance.
Digital clocks handle 24 pretty well
I still don’t know why everyone doesn’t just use the 24-hour clock. It’s so much easier.
It’s like someone had doubts people could count much past 12, so just had them do that twice. Or maybe Big Clock didn’t want to manufacture 24 hour faces and sold the lie.
deleted by creator
As for the clock face, a 12 hour face is much easier to read at a glance or from a distance.
It’s like someone had doubts people could count much past 12
More like the people who invented a lot of shit used base 12.
Things restarting at 12, is because the thing is so old, it predates base 10.
Like, pick a language, count to thirteen:
Ein, zwei, drei, fire, funf, sechs, seben, acht, neun, zein, elf, zwolf, dreizein…
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen…
Notice how 11 and 12 aren’t one-teen and two-teen?
On each hand is 4 sets of 3 knuckles, touch your thumb to each knuckle and your finger counting on one hand higher than we can with two. Pretty sure there’s some pretty neat math tricks with their method too, almost like built in abacus.
But all this is off memory.
Ein, zwei, drei, fire, funf, sechs, seben, acht, neun, zein, elf, zwolf, dreizein…
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen…
Yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi, kuusi, seitsemän, kahdeksan, yhdeksän, kymmenen, yksitoista, kaksitoista, kolmetoista…
(though, notice that our words for “eight” and “nine” are derived from those for “two” and “one”. We used base 8 before migrating to Europe and applying the local standard. Then it was "two left until the new ten and “one left until the new ten”
With base 8 you can use your fingers to count up to 24 because you can use your thumbs for marking the “tens”. Or to 32, but that already takes a little bit of an effort because from my perspective your left thumb is on the right.)But yeah, base 10 is the worst. 12 can be divided by 3 without problems. And base 8 allows counting far higher with just fingers.
Still better than Danish…
/s
But yeah thanks! When I saw it was Finns I checked the Danes because they’re always doing their own thing, they go by 20s, so tens alternate “half 20s”.
More like the people who invented a lot of shit used base 12.
I thought we got it from the Babylonians, turns out we actually got it from the Ancient Egyptians.
Nope, it’s just down to how many “decans” you could see at any one point during the night.
The cool math trick I know of is using your other hand to count groups of 12, 5 fingers times 12 knuckles is 60.
It’s not called Big Clock, it’s called Big Ben /j
Um akshually, Big Ben is the bell. The clock is just “The Great Clock of Westminster.” And the tower itself is called “Elizabeth Tower.”
(But everyone just calls the whole thing Big Ben.)
one thing that I’m proud of my team at work for is just defaulting to using 24hr time when adding timestamps to filenames. I require datestamps, but there are no rules on timestamps if there are multiple files for that day. and a few of them just started appending the time in 24 hour format. I was so proud.
I dont like the look of the numbers
In general?
Big Clock
looks at London and it’s big clock you, have been, REVEALED
I’ve never seen one of these in person. Only in pictures.
Hmmm 4 20
beautiful
Honestly my mind has been tweaking lately ever since I started working. I’m under artificial lights all day long and sometimes I have no clue when I see “9:00” if it’s night or morning for at least 5secs. I really hate how my phone doesn’t show AM PM either.
Also using 24hrs clock really puts the time spent in the day into perspective. 9pm doesn’t look as daunting as “you’re 21hrs” into the day.
Well, I hope you are sleeping. So technically your day starts at <put whatever time you’re getting up>.
0th hour should start at 6 AM or something. But I better stop thinking about how dumb clocks and calendars are
12h clocks are 24h clocks if you just keep counting.
