• saltesc@lemmy.world
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    21 hours ago

    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.

    • givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      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.

      • TheRealKuni@piefed.social
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        19 hours ago

        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.)

    • mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca
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      17 hours ago

      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.