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The clock evolved out of the sundial. 12 hours on the clock makes more sense if you think of it that way.
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.
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
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.
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:
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.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.
That reminds me how after not sleeping for 3 days (I studied for an exam) I fell asleep randomly on my bed (more like passed out) and woke up to a low sun, the analog clock showing like 7:00, and I could not tell whether the sun was rising or setting.
(As a side note: I didn’t have a clue whether my window went out to the west, east, north, etc, and I was way too groggy to even think like that. It was more the color of the light in the room that was ambivalent. Obviously I checked my phone rather quickly and didn’t need to figure out the position of the sun to understand whether it was morning or evening)
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.
I see what you mean and where you’re coming from, and I also realize there are historical reasons for 12 hours, there’s a reason it’s called "p"m and "a"m and so on. Still, it does not feel intuitive to jump from 11:59 am to 12:00 pm, go on to 12:15 pm, and end up at 1:00 pm again. It feels like an either or thing. Either you go to 12:00 am after 11:59 am, or you go to 0:00 pm. I understand why it is pm and why it is 12, I am just saying, it feels off to me (and, as mentioned above, the whole class of German students). I absolutely understand that it feels much more natural and less counterintuitive if you have grown up with this system.
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.
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.
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
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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.
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.
Edit: Found it!
The powder was also applied to solve the longitude problem in the suggestion of an anonymous pamphlet of 1687 entitled Curious Enquiries. The pamphlet theorised that a wounded dog could be put aboard a ship, with the knife used to injure the dog left in the trust of a timekeeper on shore, who would then dip said knife into the powder at a predetermined time and cause the creature to yelp, thus giving the captain of the ship an accurate knowledge of the time.
Oh God… Weren’t this people happy water clock and other sandglass-like engine?
Thank you. I add it on the list (^_^)
Is this from Timecube?
No it is from good sense and observations of technology inherited of extremly ancient civilisations.
They don’t know how to switch bases
🤣😂🤣
Aand that’s Numberwang!
This joke has lived in my head quietly for at least a decade.
That’s wangernumb
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 zero, not 12. 12 is “Noon” ie halfway through the day. The clock starts at 12 because it’s more practical than inscribing 24 divisions in a circle. And the 6 doesn’t “mean 30”, it’s simply the hour marking at the bottom of the circle. Finally, the 12 hour clock was invented after the 24 hour day, not the other way around.
And inb4 “I bet you’re fun at parties”. I’m all for “this logic is ridiculous” jabs, but this is just misrepresenting everything to make it sound stupid. Everything sounds stupid when you purposefully get it wrong.
Personally, I enjoy this kind of discussion at parties.
You sound fun at parties
Also, noon is when you set your clocks based on the sun.
I mean the day does start at “the 12” on the face of the clock. And 30 minutes is at the 6 on the clock. I get what you’re saying but come on they both make sense.
You must be fun at parties 😉 jk I’d party with you! I’m not very fun at parties tho.
Well to add some more pedantry to this conversation, only one of the explanations makes sense, the other is obtuse for comic effect.
Let’s all have an awful party together 🥳
The clock is two dials at the same time superimposed on another. There’s one 12 hour dial and one 60 minute dial. To save space and material they are combined into one.
To akshually your akshually, the day DOES start at 12 in places that use a 12 hour clock, since midnight is 12am and there is no 0am.
Also this meme is not a serious criticism of clocks meant to be taken literally, so taking it as such so you can debunk it just makes it look like you’re trying too hard to appear smart.
to akshually your actually post, the 12 IS zero. noon, as in midday isn’t zero, which is a sort of arbitrary decision. That’s the differentiating feature between the two systems.
Technically i guess you could count the noon point as 0 also, but that provides ambiguity, so i think it;s better to treat noon as 12, and midnight as 00:00 (but listed as noon) because then it perfectly maps to 24hr time.
In the US the day starts at 12 AM; there is no zero.
Let me introduce you to something known as military time (which, yes, even exists in the US)…
The most unlogical thing. If it starts at 12 AM, the next hour is 1 PM, right?
I prefer midnight and noon, or a 24h clock.the 12 is a zero point, it’s just listed as 12.
The most unlogical thing. If it starts at 12 AM, the next hour is 1 PM, right?
No, ante meridiem and post meridiem say whether it’s before or after noon, thus, after 12:59 AM comes 1:00 AM.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight
I mean when looking at numbers:
. . . . . . 1100pm 1159pm 1200am 1259am 0100am … 1100am 1159am 1200pm 1259pm 0100pm … 230024h 235924h 000024h 005924h 010024h … 110024h 115924h 120024h 125924h 130024h … Too much confusion.
Even NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology in the US) suggests:
To avoid ambiguity, specification of an event as occurring on a particular day at 11:59 p.m. or 12:01 a.m. is a good idea, especially legal documents such as contracts and insurance policies. Another option would be to use 24-hour clock, using the designation of 0000 to refer to midnight at the beginning of a given day (or date) and 2400 to designate the end of a given day (or date).
I didn’t want to imply that the use of the 12 hour system should be prefered in any way. Just that the division into AM and PM follows some logic. Its just the numbering 12, 1, 2,… that’s weird.
I like your reply. I think it’s a source of all problems.
“midnight” and “noon” for sure.
… And now I’m thinking about all those super heros and villains named “midnight” and their logical counter-characters “noon”
You don’t know what a.m. and p.m. mean.
12 is the zero point, it’s just indexed one off, because there isn’t a 00:00 timeslot in 12 hr time, so it needs to be 12.
It has to do with 24hr time being zero indexed, and 12hr time being 1 indexed, so it’s slightly offset at the point of day changeover.
The clock starts at 12 and not 0 because humanity didn’t have the concept of 0 when we invented the 12 hour clock
You sound stupid when I purposefully get it wrong
Edit: dear Lord, y’all’s funny bones are broken tonight
😶
You fools need to submit to the 4 simultaneous separate 24 hour days within a 4-corner (as in a 4-corner classroom) rotation of Earth.
“There is no teacher on Earth qualified to teach Nature’s Harmonic Simultaneous 4- Day Rotating Time Cube Creation Principle, and therefore, there is no teacher on Earth worthy of being called a certified teacher.”
-Gene Ray, Visionary
The time cube is simultaneously really funny and possibly the most bigoted thing I’ve ever read. Like holy hell this guy is more antisemitic than some neonazis and his hate for queer people is intense. Shockingly not misogynistic though, credit where credit is due.
I thought above was just some sort of surrealist joke. Then you informed me that this is an actual thing. I have never been milkshake ducked this abruptly.
TimeCube is legit internet lore at this point. One of the earliest viral meme sites I can remember… as in a site that was meant to be taken seriously, but so absurd it became a meme.
Oh it’s absolutely not a joke. It reads like severe mental illness. It’s very much an uneducated white southern man lost his fucking marbles. He’s so antisemitic he hates Christianity.
Like you read it and at parts you’re laughing and screenshotting and at other parts you’re agahst. Like this is a perfect line
But he’s also saying things about black people that make my assessment of mentally ill southerner make sense. I went in for cheap yuks at something I was shown as a teenager because it was funny and left too uncomfortable to recommend it to anyone.
lost his fucking marbles.
Funny thing about that. He was an avid promoter of the game of marbles and wrote a book called “Marbles for Everyone” under the name “Mr. Marbles.”
But yes, also a raving lunatic until he died in 2015.
Based on his other writing I highly doubt that he meant everyone lol. And yeah I had to double check that you weren’t lying lol
But yeah looking back at it, it really is a mentally unwell man attempting to comprehend the reality that everything is sinusoids as he hates circles
That was the south when I was young, but it was fairly sparse.
Social.media is like typhoid Mary.
1 day greenwich time is bastardly queer and dooms future youth and nature to a hell.
Classic Gene Ray
I have not though about the time cube in years, looks like the site is gone now.
He passed almost ten years ago I think, the domain lapsed. Pretty sure it’s archived on the way back machine.
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.
It might have been an extra reason.
ever think about how 5 is 1/12th of 60? that means putting 5 min and 1h on top of each other is genius imo. because there are 12 times more minutes in an hour then there are hours in a day
there are 12 times more minutes in an hour then there are hours in a day
24 x 12 is 60? You are a weird mathematician.
yeahur right i meant to to say there are 5 yimes more minutes in an hour then there are hours in half a day xD
Gilgamesh joins the chat. The Sumerians and the duodecimal system for time keeping.
Base 60 is actually a lot more practical than base 10.
How do you count on your hands in base 60?
It sucks, it requires way too many digits.
Then why computers use the binary system and not base 60?
