As an American who uses the 24-hour time, so many people use 12-hour I basically still use 12-hour.
12-hour would only be somewhat decent if there wasn’t noon/midnight confusion.
If you see a working clock say 12:00 and it’s sunny outside and you’re not above a certain latitude: it’s noon
What if someone tells you something is gonna happen at 12?
For example: you can turn in your assignments until 12 tomorrow.
That confusion could lead to you failing your assignment if they meant noon and you thought midnight.
Time is not only for the present, it’s for the past and future too. You can’t look at the sky in the past/future.
What if somebody says to meet at 12:30 AM? I would think that’s an half hour past noon. Yet it often goes 11am -> 12pm -> 12:30pm -> 1pm. Absolute madness.
Well since it goes like this 11:59am, noon 12:01pm and 11:59pm, midnight, 12:01am you have your am and pm figuring wrong.
Exactly. 12:01pm is stoopid.
Not really, pm basically just saying that it’s the afternoon to evening to night period of time. Am it’s just the late night, early morning and late morning period of time.
I think you just don’t know how to tell time?
I agree with you up to the :30 part. 12:00am vs pm is nonsensical and seems like it could go either way.
But AM/PM means before noon/after noon, so 12:30 AM is unambiguously before the current day’s noon, and 12:30 PM is definitely after the day’s noon.
For determining 12:00AM VS PM I use the law of lease surprise. Basically it would be weirder for 12:01AM to be proceeded by 12:00PM since it would make sense for AM/PM to flip with the hour. Is this scientifically rigorous? Should we need this much philosophy to determine the current time: no, Hence the only real solution is to 24 hour time
Don’t forget the klick. Most of them are not buying that either.
The people in all the countries that have no problem counting off another dozen past twelve don’t always do that though. If you meet your friend at 15:00 most people will revert to “at 3” in their language. And they might “go to bed at 11.” Economy of language and context clues. So colloquially the am/pm crowd and the 24h folks aren’t far apart at all.
And any person claiming that it’s too difficult to add or subtract twelve from at maximum a low two-digit integer ought to have their passport revoked.
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You’ve never seen an analog clock?
That’s where it comes from, and that’s where it makes perfect sense. (An 8 hour reset wouldn’t) No need to carry that over to digital clocks however.
Someone made the call to choose a division of 12 though. They could have also chosen 24.
And have the numbers spaced 2.5 minutes apart?! MADNESS!
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Well, time measurement and the division of the day into 12/24 hours is of course entirely a human concept and thus a bit arbitrary and made up, so yes, you could divise a system with 8 hour splits, sure.
But the 12-hour system makes sense as soon as you buy into the 1 hour = 60 minutes convention and split that up into 5-minute blocks. There are 12*5minutes in an hour, so after 12 hours your hour and minute hand reach the same position again, thus the reset.
That doesn’t work so well with 8 hours, because you’d have to divide the hour into 60/8=7.5 minute blocks, which is pretty awkward.
Or you’d have to define the hour as having 64 minutes and divide it into 8*8 minutes blocks. And theres a dualist religion in my favorite fantasy RPG world, that would award you sainthood if you did that, but that’s not the world we live in.
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You have it backwards. Analogue clocks are the way they are because of the 12-hour convention.
In ancient times, people did not have the concept of a “civil day”; they viewed day and night as separate things which alternated.
The Assyrians divided the day into six equal parts, and the night into six equal parts, called ush. But because sunrise and sunset move around over the course of the year, the lengths of day and night vary, and thus one ush during the day would not be the same length as an ush at night except around the equinoxes.
The Babylonians divided ushes in two to make hours, because it was easier to do astronomy in 12s than 6es. This resulted in 12 hours in a day and 12 hours at night, but daytime hours were still different lengths to nighttime hours, and the lengths of hours still varied over the course of the year.
The Greeks partially adopted the Babylonian system; they divided the day into 12 hours but the night was divided into four watches. The Romans copied the Greek system, but later went full Babylonian with 12 hours at night as well. (I feel like this coïncided with the rise of Christianity, but I have no evidence). The Romans introduced the concept of the civil day beginning at midnight (which the Chinese independently came up with), and over time, this led to the idea of 12 hours from midnight to noon, and 12 hours from noon to midnight. That idea postdates Rome, however; Roman hours were reckoned from sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise.
Assyrian astronomical knowledge seems to have reached China via India, as traditional Chinese timekeeping divides the civil day into 12 shi. Ancient shi were like Assyrian ushes; they were either 1/6 of a day or 1/6 of a night. Originally, midnight and noon fell in the middle of a shi, but this was changed to shi starting at midnight to make administration and astronomy easier. This system of variable-length shi continued to be used in Japan until about the Meiji Restoration.
Fixed-length hours are the result of analogue clocks, which are impractical to design to change the lengths of hours with the seasons (but not impossible; the wskusei clock is an ingenious Japanese clock from the 17th century that does exactly that). China had reliable, accurate water clocks by the Tang dynasty, while Europeans developed circular mechsnical clocks in the late Middle Ages. In neither case was it practical to make something as clever as the wakusei clock, so analogue clocks were marked the mean length of a shi or an hour as a reasonable approximation. Since there are 12 hours from midnight to noon and 12 from noon to midnight, that led to the 12-hour time system we know today.
Am American, use 24 hour time. It’s only called military time here.
I find the 12-hour practical for daily life. But I put my phone on 24 hour time when I’m traveling and find that to be helpful.
Something that’s been growing on me, but that I’m still unsure of, is 24-hour time that goes beyond 24 to reference the next day. I was in Japan recently, and there were many restaurants that would write their opening hours as, for example, 18:00 - 25:30, to represent that they are open until 01:30 the next day. Was confusing at first, but makes maths easier and means that intervals of time never count backwards! From memory, OpenStreetMap use this system, too.
Sounds sick! I’m in favor of standardizing this.
Japanese people that understand 24h notation‽ In my experience with language exchange I’ve always had the issue that language exchange partners didn’t understand 24h notation at all!
I also can’t remember seeing this notation on opening times in my visits there, but maybe I haven’t been paying close attention…
I be taking naps on accident like once a week. I need to know if I’m waking up at 8am or 8pm
24-hour-clock being a military thing is kind of a USA-thing anyway, in many other countries it’s just normal.
In Brazil, the 24hr clock is standard for most people.
There is, you have two sets of numbera for each hour marking like this:
or like this:
This requires no change to the time mechanism, so you can pretty easily modify the face of any standard analog clock to be like this.
How is this actually an improvement over the standard design? I already know that the clockhand pointing to 1 means that it’s either 1 am or 13 o’clock/1 pm, but it still doesn’t tell me unambiguously which one it is.
Well yeah, functionally it is the standard design. In terms of making a readable clock, this is probably the most practical. Anything more would require some major changes to the mechanism.
Well, unless you’re hanging out near one of the poles, it’s pretty easy to figure out which one it is with minimal effort.
That first one having “24” is making my eye twitch.
Having a 0’o’clock is something that delights me to no end. I’m from the US but moved a bit ago and I get unreasonably excited to see my clocks showing all 0s
Don’t hospitals use 24 hours too?
I think so. I work in EMS and we use 24 hr. All my clocks and devices are set to 24 hr and I am irritated when I can’t change them off the 12 hr clock. It’s safer, if I tell you a medication was last administered at 10:00 there’s room for error, but if I tell you it was given at 2200 there’s no confusion.
Not sure if this applies to you, but how does EMS work with time across timezones? Like if a patient is airlifted from one location to another and crosses timezones? Is that another source of error, or is generally things being an hour off by accident not an issue?
I’ve never dealt with that, but I worked night shift for a long time and so I’ve worked when daylight savings time happened and stopped happening and run calls during that time shift. Usually you just note it when making report at the hospital and then when you are writing the chart you manually adjust the time so the computer is happy and lets you close your chart (so you keep things linear, even if it then means your documented times aren’t actually accurate as to when things happen) and write a note in your chart that the call occurred during the time shift of daylight savings times and that anything that is time stamped after XXXX actually occurred at XXXX.
I have one and it isn’t that hard to read. The top is still 12 but the bottom is midnight with 6 and 18 in the 9 and 3 place respectively.
All those Roman numerals would confuse the fudge out of them.
I believe its roots have more to do with the railways than with the military. I have never called it military time to be honest.
While trains were the big “clock unifiers” back then, here in Europe, the 24h clock is generally the local version of “time”, without the “military” part.
Psst, confused American, let me give you a secret: Nobody uses the 24-hour clock in speech, we.just write with that and call 13:00 “1 PM” or something like that in our local language.
?
I wasn’t confused before, but now I am. If you have to do the conversion to 12 hour to speak, what’s the point?
We use them interchangeably in speech. Whichever one currently rolls off the tongue better. Idk about trashboy’s “nobody”.
I’ve used it since I was 12 🤷
You mean since you were 0?
Didn’t get it at first, but scared my cat when I did XD
The US military also uses loads of metric things. “Real Americans” won’t touch those, either. Apart from 9mm guns and ammo.
750ml Bourbon
Except we refer to that as “a fifth”.
What’s it say on the bottle?
I’m not american and I too prefer the 12 hour clock. 24 hour clock has never been intuitive for me. I always have to put in brain power to convert it in my head.
Military grade is defined as the lowest quality required to be used by the military, often resulting in the cheapest product that is still suitable for military use.
I always saw it as “a ton of money is thrown at R-D on this one specific thing to make it do that ken specific thing really well”
Almost, it’s “a ton of money is charged for this minimally useful thing made by the lowest bidder”
No military equipment except the m16s work quite like its supposed to.
Not quite. It’s anything that meets the minimum for the military. This, for most normal items, means getting the job done and lasting long enough, with an emphasis on low cost and bulk production. The result is “military grade” usually being the absolute worst that still works.
As someone that outdoors a lot, this shit is great for many items. If I base camp, all my water containers are military, and I have 120mm ammo boxes for food and stuff because animals, water, and air can’t get in. Heavy and inconvenient as hell, but cheap af and works well—that’s military crap for you.
…absolutely zero people that have been in the US military agree with your assessment. Doesn’t matter the branch or MOS.
That’s not an assumption lol. Literally what 810 is.
Shit to get the job done. If it didn’t work for you, it did for 9 others, so it worked and the job was done.
Hahahaha… no. It is the lowest quality highest expense piece of shit from a company that spent most of its money during the bid bribing those running the bid. Sorry not ‘bribing,’ simply giving gifts, dinners, and event invites.
Every single Harbor Freight tool is the same quality, and in many cases come from the exact same production line, as tools sold to the military that have a 100x mark up. This isn’t even a controversial fact. This is something every single service member that was a mechanic knows. The military pays $115 for a single hammer that will break exactly as fast as a $5 special. But the $115 hammer was made by a company that was made in Congressman Fuckwitzberg’s district and paid off the board members reviewing their app more than other brands.
Are you trying to say that army is equipped with shit to the same grade the Russian army was equipped when they invaded Ukraine? The US and Russia look lot more similar than one would think
Only an American would think that the 24-hour clock has anything to do with the military in the first place.
I personally don’t associate it with the military, but I’m the exception to that. Lots of people call it “military time” here.
