24 hour analogue clocks exist. I have a 24 hour watch which only revolves once per 24 hours. It’s a disadvantage though.
The reason why clocks and watches display 12 hours at a time is so that they have space to show finer resolution of time. If you try to cram 24 hours onto a clock, it’s not easy to tell if it’s 12:20 or 12:30 at a quick glance.
Most people are not too stupid to be aware of if they are in the first 12 hours or second 12 hours of a day, so they benefit from a watch with 12 hour timescale and finer resolution so that they can more easily see exactly what time it is.
And for all the dummies posting about 12h vs 24h clocks. In the sense of saying that it’s 1pm vs 13:00. That’s not what this meme is even describing. This is about the physical layout of a clock or watch face.
I can’t believe this is the first I’m hearing of 24-hour analogue clocks! That’s so cool. But yeah, I see your point about it now allowing for very much precision at a glance.
If 12 is better than 24 we should build 6 hour analog clocks already!
You could get a jump hour watch, meaning the hour isn’t a slowly moving hand but instead jumps from 6 to 7 with a jump, avoiding potential mixing up of hours, it would make it easier to read those 24h
Like this watch
Edit: The original watch linked is a weird one, it’s not a jump hour watch but instead it has a jumping dial to turn it from a 12h to a 24h, very neat! I can’t seem to find a 24h jump hour watch apart from this 30k breguet lol
Keep it simple and just measure in terms of seconds since the Big Bang. The current time is 435,884,579,968,052,736 seconds, easy peasy
Nah just use Unix time
technically that is 64 bit unix time.
The big bang was definitely not in 1970
They had to pick a period where 32 bits would last long enough. If they had started with 64 bits, they could have used a start of time much further back.
The big bang was definitely not last Thursday
Most of that time is irrelevant to me. Let’s just start it in 1970. And I need more precision, so can we do milliseconds instead of seconds?
This would go great with my idea of everyone having a GUID instead of a name.
24 hours cause Egyptians split their sun dials and star decans into 12 parts each (probably cause 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6) which the greeks later turned into equal length hours (before the length would change over the year)
60 minutes due to Babylonian base-60 math
12 hour format is just tradition at this point, but derived from the sun dials which only worked at day, so half the time, and the star decans which only worked at night, so the other half.
pretty much every country except the US uses the 24h format on digitial clocks now
also the dude in the meme was kinda right: the day will be divided into 12 segments. and the night will too. at least originally
This all originated from the Ancient Sumerians btw. They passed it down to Babylonians.
Edit: A bit of history from what I learned from listening to Fall of Civilizations in the shower.
The Ancient Sumerians invented this sexagesimal system because if you look at your hand, you notice 12 knuckles (this is obviously excluding your thumb, as that is used for counting each knuckle), and with your other hand you will raise a single finger for every time you finish counting past 12 knuckles on your left hand. So raising your thumb is 12, thumb and index is 24, and so on, until you reach 60.
Came here to say this, you said it far better than I would have! Great addition with the edit.
It’s called a “highly composite number!” I read up on a lot of this stuff while learning about numerology and other esoteric spiritual traditions!
Babylonians: I see this as a complete win.
Isn’t this a standup routine?
His name is Dave Allen
Thanks. Nice username, mine is also a reference.
Alright, I’m calling a 4.1666666666666666666666666666 metric hour meeting to discuss this!
The meeting might run to a full 5 metric hours.
there’s 86400 seconds in a day. If we use a new unit that is slightly shorter than a second as a metric second, we can do 100000 metric seconds a day, with 100 metric seconds per metric minutes, and 100 metric minutes per metric hour, and each day having 10 metric hours.
Your 1 hour activity now takes 0.5 metric hours (it might be 20% longer, but that’s arbitrary anyways, we rounded them to the closest hour anyways)
We are only used to the current system because we have been using it.
Thanks Obama
“Hey sweetie, please come home by Hour 89.58333333/100 otherwise I’m gonna have to ground you for a week, love you!”
It is wild how people refuse to use the 24 hour clock. It is so logical and easy. kind of like the metric system……
I don’t want to believe that time goes on for that long.
I’d rather a 6 hour clock.
First thing I change on every electronic device I buy.
And really annoying when something only has 12hr mode
It only solves a small part of the issue at the cost of less convenience and consistency. Propose a “metric” time that solves more of this issue problem and I’m all for it
less convenience and consistency
What? … seriously, which convenience and consistency are you talking about.
24h only has one “inconsistency”, going from 23:59 to 0:00. How is that less consistent than 12am being after 11:59pm and 12pm being after 11:59am. Solves all parts of the issue except for one. Which is a lot better than the 12h system.
Heh thanks for explaining it, I never knew if noon was 12am or 12pm. In German we say “11 in the morning”, “12 o Clock (noon*)” , and “1 o Clock (in the afternoon)”
But typically we don’t say whether it’s am or pm, it’s clear from context if “i need to be in the work meeting at 9”
Clocks, TV listings, my work timesheet read 24h times. We read 15:00 as “three” most of the time.
Btw some software tools (my timesheet for work) differnciate between 0:00 and 24:00. I can work (theoretically) from 0:00 to 8:00 (8h in the night to morning) and from 16:00 to 24:00 (8 hours from afternoon to midnight).
So 0:00 and 24:00 are the same moment but thought to belong to the next or previous say, respectively.
This has messed with me for the longest time. 24h just wraps around at 24, simple modulo 24 arithmetic.
12h? The hour and am / pm wrap around independently, and hence I am always confused whether 12pm is supposed to be midnight or noon. Zero based would have made more sense (with x pm being x hours after noon…)
Why are the 60 minutes in an hour but 24 hours in a day? What functional difference is there between tne 12 and 24 hour clock? Are you showing up to your friend’s dinner party at 6am because you weren’t sure what time they wanted to start dinner? Are you unsure if your picnic is supposed to be right after midday or the middle of the night? Maybe your friend wanted to meet up for coffee and a bagel when you normally go to bed instead of right before you head off for lunch
Because 12 and 60 are great numbers to divide. You can take a half of it, a third and a quarter and still get whole numbers.
Iirc the French did try decimal time at one time, it was not convenient.
I asked why the am/pm system is apparently more convenient and consistent than the 24h system. I didn’t ask about 24h in a day and 60min in an hour.
What functional difference is there between tne 12 and 24 hour clock?
You need 2 numbers and 2 letters to accurately specify time in the 12h clock instead of just 2 numbers. Seems convenient to me.
You don’t need the am or pm 90% of the time because obviously a lunch date is happening sometime around noon, not midnight. A lunar eclipse or meteor shower isn’t visible while the sun is up, or a midnight snack isn’t happening in the middle of the day. Obviously if you are talking trains and flights, you need AM and PM. But people who are used to 12 hour time don’t want to figure out when 16:00 is, so they don’t.
If you know basic addition and you know how a 12 hour clock functions, then you know how a 24 hour clock functions. If you can’t figure it out, that doesn’t make it inconvenient, it just makes you incredibly stupid.
Fun fact: Many countries use both systems actually.
For speaking, it’s quicker to say something like: “The party starts at 8” instead of “The party starts at 20 o’clock”.
For writing though, you would never use the 12 hour system.
i’m pretty sure for 90% of europe there’s been a generational shift from saying “four in the afternoon” to just saying “16”, after digital clocks started replacing analog ones.
There was a metric clock after the revolution, it didn’t last long, because it was bad. It made the day (as in, the 24 hour day) 10 metric hours long, and contained 100 minutes and 100 seconds. Meaning a metric hour is about 2.24 standard hours. Having only 10 hours in a day meant it was harder to schedule things, and you had to be much more precise. 10 is also just not as divisible as 12 or 60. There’s a reason why base 12 systems have staying power, even when they’re converted into base 10 and feel clunky.
My suggestion for a better metric clock, still keeping the standard base 10 of metric, would be to divide the day into daytime and nighttime hours, and giving each of them 10 so it feels all nice and frenchy. 100 minutes, 100 seconds.
That makes the metric hour about equivalent to 72 standard minutes, and the metric minute about 43 standard seconds
1 metric second would be a little less than half our current second.
The day is nearly divided into two segments, daytime (DT) and nighttime (NT) that parallels the am/pm system. I don’t particularly like this, as I prefer a 24 hour clock in our currently system, but it’s still an improvement on the actual metric clock from the revolution.
Now, if you want an actual improvement, and not just a clock that goes well with your other systems of measure, you’d need to attend on my Ted Talk on why we should transition to base 12 for everything (not go to the American/imperial system, but actual base 12. As in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, X, E, 10). The meter can stay the same physical length, the dozenal kilo would balance a scale with old one, but divide everything in the new system, giving us significantly more ways to divide things evenly, and keeping the nice round “10s.”
1 metric second would be a little less than half our current second.
Global electricity output would instantly more than double!!!
Dammit, that wasn’t supposed to post yet. I’m still in the process of revising! Lol.
Not to worry, we will use the Babylonian watt for
megaimperial-tonne-fortnights to come.
I’d prefer base 10 time than base 12. Until then I’ll just keep with am pm
I’d prefer base 12 for everything
We should all also use GMT and forget about time zones.
You mean like metric time?
Haven’t seen this one this week. Thanks
The clock makes so much more sense when you rewrite the 12 as a 0
I never confirmed this, but I noticed that in parts of West Africa, people wouldn’t say “afternoon” until after 1:00pm. Since greetings were important, I started noticing it more and more when peoe would say “good morning” during lunch at 12:30pm. As if the 12 noon hour is still part of the time segment.
My pet theory is (circa 10000 BCE) that ‘houses’ and ‘hours’ are related words, the 12 hour clock matched the zodiac, each hour/house was 1 Assyrian ‘watch’ and they had no trouble day or night (constellations at night, sundial during the day), they were easy to build, easy to communicate, easy to understand and efficient.
Then the Egyptians stole the technology (Circa 6000BCE) said ‘12 hours in a day? I got you bro’, fucked it up and it all went downhill from there.
Feel free to quote me in your prize winning scientific paper.
How important is it to your theory that “hour” is related to “house” in… ancient Assyrian language? Because they’re completely unrelated in English, “house” coming from Germanic hus and “hour” coming from French ore. If we look at ancient Greek, the two are hoora for “hour” and oikos for “house”. I think English post-vowel shift has to be the first language where those two even sound similar.
Not central, just suspicious, but… this is ‘house’ as in astrological house as in the first part of the word ‘horoscope’, not house like a house you live in.
My background in linguistics consists of a couple chompsky soft-science books and a love of tolkien, but if you actually know something and wanna chat I’d honestly love to dig in on this seriously. DM me.
I get the joke, but the sundials of ancient civilisations precluded clocks.
Sundials also didn’t work very well at midnight for some reason, what’s ya point?
Sundials also didn’t work very well at midnight for some reason, what’s ya point?
Noon is the center of the dial. Midnight is just the opposite of noon.
I cannot tell if this is sarcasm or not. This is peak Poe’s Law.
That’s why for a long time, and even longer in the Royal Navy, the new day started at noon and not midnight.
You’re just not holding the flashlight properly.
If you hold the flashlight right they work 100% of the time.
Instructions unclear, I think my fleshlight is broken…
Dial it back a bit son
Back in, or back out? Please be clear or I’ll have to keep trying both ways. Over. And. Over. And. Over. Aaaannn…fffff.
<connection reset by peer>
That’s when we bring out the moondial.
The firedial works every night.
It’s all the Babylonians fault
Those fuckers could count to 60 on their fingers. Witchcraft!
Using binary, we could count to 1023 with 10 fingers but only 511 with 9 fingers
Boys could count to 2047.
Well… This post sent me down a rabbit hole -> Unequal Hours if anyone else is curious.
Yup, that’s why we still don’t have any clocks to this day.
“Precluded” means “prevented” or to “make impossible” ❤️
Oh hot damn, first time I used that word.
Maybe presaged?
Preceded maybe? Precluded sounds like it should mean something similar for sure tho
Ah yes, I knew I was messing two words up and forgot preceded! 👍
Predated
We will also use 3 sticks to tell the time.
Time is linear. But this will be circular.
Time …line? Time is not made of lines. It is made of circles. That is why clocks are round!
Why don’t I ever get the fucking sniper rifle?
Let’s just switch to metric time. https://metric-time.com/
We’re on Metric time already, the base unit of measure for time in the Metric system is the second. This is decimal time.
Holy shit, that actually looks so neat and organized, I want it 😭
Ugh I can hear it now
In our relentless pursuit of innovation, we are proud to announce the switch from the outdated 24-hour clock to Metric Time™.
Effective immediately, your standard 8-hour workday will now be… 8 metric hours.
That’s 80% of the entire day. Because nothing says “work-life balance” like leaving 2 hours for life.
Embrace the future. You’re already late.
Clocks are based on sundials. The little hand roughly follows where a shadow would be. The rest is just what people agreed on made the most sense.
Only noobs start counting at 1. Midnight = 24:00 = 00:00
