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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.
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
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
turns out Americans really love the modulo operation, no wonder programmers are paid so well there
Aand that’s Numberwang!
This joke has lived in my head quietly for at least a decade.
That’s wangernumb
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
They don’t know how to switch bases
🤣😂🤣
😶
Wait until you use dms to navigate a map
That’s fun
Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI
why has all this worked just fine for a century and suddenly gen Z can’t make sense of it? do you guys not ever stop to wonder if maybe the devices are making you stupid?
Pretty short-sighted take. Sure, they worked for centuries, and still work today. Lots of things worked for centuries, still worked, and were still replaced by a better thing. Henry Ford famously said that, if he asked the consumers what they wanted, they’d have said faster horses. Just because something works doesn’t mean it’s the best way, or the way that makes the most sense. Change can be scary, but it’s not inherently bad.
ok genius. tell us what we should replace our clocks with.
Nah, not my job. I don’t claim to have any better solutions, I just know that for almost every problem we’ve ever solved, we probably haven’t found the MOST efficient solution. People should be questioning everything, even the most basic, because that’s how stuff gets better.
Personally I love the dozenal clock, which divides a full day in 12 equally sized chunks (of two current hours) then each of those are equally divided into 12 chunks (of 10 current minute) that gives you your two main “clock hands” the larger one circle around the clock once a day, the other one 12 times a day (every two hours), the number on the clock would go from zero to nine then dek and el (like the famous dozenal proposal), the number zero would be at the bottom that way the main hand of the clock would roughly follow the position of the sun around the clock when facing south. Then you can have a third hand on the clock which circles 144 times a day (every 10 min), and then a fourth hand would do a full rotation every 50 second. The time would be denoted using one digits for the position of each hand,
Here are a few conversion examples:
1:2:3 would mean 2 hour 22 minute and 30 seconds in the morning,
4:5:6 would mean 8 hour 55 min 00 sec in the morning
9:X:E (nine dek el) would mean 7 hour 49 minute 10 sec in the afternoon
Of course you wouldn’t need the full precision, we usually round the the closest quarter 9:X:E (nine dek el) would probably be rounded up to 9:E (nine el) for 7:50pm
I’m actually a millennial and when I first read this post, it occurred to me I didn’t really “get” why clocks were 12 hours. I think years ago, I had seen a video on it, but for the most part, I didn’t have a working knowledge.
The fact is, we take a lot of things for granted, everything from mundane things “Why do clocks have 12 hours?” through to complex ideas. “What do LEDs light up?”
This post (the OP) reflects the opposite of what you’re suggesting, that the devices are making people stupid. This post is the start to curiosity. I suspect the author likely took time to look up exactly why clocks have twelve hours, and by extension likely caused many people who viewed it to do the same (myself included actually).
Device exposure has it’s problems, certainly, but I don’t see this specific post as an example.
if you don’t understand how clock relate to the reality of our world, i don’t know how to you. we live in two different worlds.
I guess I truly don’t understand this comment, like I accept that hours divide our day into 24 segments, of which 12 are represented on the face of a clock.
I also accept that these hours are divided into 60 segments of which 5 are expressed between each of the 12 hours - which of course logically follows through basic division.
I even know the origin of O’Clock “On the clock” and contrary to the post why 6 means 30 (again this part is just math).
What I am referring to are the finer points of why 12 and not 24, or even why divide the day as 24 and hours into 60 minutes. I guess perhaps I do live in a different world, I can of course easily obtain the answers to both these questions through a simple search. My comment was more in regard to how such knowledge is something I didn’t have on a holster, given that my day-to-day isn’t predicated on knowing it.
I will also say, all knowledge is acquired. You by default, don’t know anything, and have to learn it through experience and education. I make a point of being excited when people don’t know something, especially if it’s something I’m passionate about. This is actually a concept expressed well in this comic.
Well said.
How does the clock relate to the reality of our world?
i don’t know how to help you. we live in two different worlds. would you like for me to explain how to use a tooth pick as well?
I guess we live in a world where things got invented by humans at some point in time, while you live in a world where some higher power just baked 12h clocks into the fabric of reality for humans to just discover. Yeah, I am not sure how we can easily find common ground.
We are asking questions about the world and its rules to learn, study and question them, you demand acceptance and unthinking submission to it.
go ahead and waste your time reinventing the wheel then. that’s obviously super important in our current state of affairs.
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.
Also, noon is when you set your clocks based on the sun.
Personally, I enjoy this kind of discussion at parties.
You sound fun at parties
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 🥳
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 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”
the 12 is a zero point, it’s just listed as 12.
You don’t know what a.m. and p.m. mean.
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.
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
Base 12 you filthy casual
Actually, they used base 60.
at least it isn’t base decimal
Every base is base 10 if you write it in its own base
yes that is why I specified decimal, I am a jan misali enjoyer
Love Jan misali, but I disagree with him that base 6 is preferable. Base 12 is best base.
Too much maths 🥴
This is !mathmemes@lemmy.blahaj.zone.
This guy bases.
I’m from c/all and WTF does this mean? I understand base 10, 2, and 12 and the concept of a base in general but…wut???
The number 2 in base 2 is 1x2 + 0x1 and is written as 10.
The number 3 ib base 3 is 1x3 + 0x1 and is written as 10.
The number 7 in base 7 is 1x7 + 0x1 and is written as 10.
The number 268 in base 268 is 1x268 + 0x1 and is written as 10.
c/eli5
i got you, so basically, in a “base” system, each given “number position” or place value, as we call it holds the value equivalent to it’s base, so in base ten, the first position, holds 0-9, the second one holds 0-9 as well, but it’s tacked on the beginning of the last place value, so it’s an additive system.
In binary for example, 00 would be 0 in base 10. 01, would be 1 in b10, 10 would be 2 in b10, and 11 would be 3 in b10. This is because in binary, the first position is a value of 1, the second is 2, the third is 4, the fourth is 8, etc. It doubles everytime you add one more place value. So in binary you’re representing any given number, from the most mathematically optimal way to create that number, given a set of values. The 0 or 1 in that place just denotes whether or not that value is “present”
The same thing happens in base 10, or base 12, or base 8. With base 10 it’s just a lot more intuitive to us.
The joke here is that in base 268, that 10 in base 10, is actually a representation of the highest possible value, in any given base system. So technically in base 268, you would use 0-267 (im using base 10 here as a reference, this wouldn’t be done in base ten obviously, this is why i really like binary as an example, because it’s mathematically simple, and very intuitive to comprehend), and when you reach 268, you would roll over, and add an additional place value. Making it 10.
This is true for every base system, due to how base 10 is represented in those systems, it’s a confusing joke because the human brain is wired to think about it base 10, when it isn’t.
Oh I’m sorry, I’m an engineer and learned about bases in college. I was just saying how the above comment was pretty much exactly what I’d expect to see in a c/eli5 post! Super succinct
Oh boy, I am not sure I have the vocabulary to explain this effectively. But I will try!
Okay so normally when we say “base 10” or “base 2”, the number in that description is itself in base 10, right? Like the “10” in “base 10” means the number of fingers most humans have (including thumbs), and the “2” in “base 2” means the number of things in a pair.
You will note, though, that for that “10” to mean what it means, and that “2” to mean what it means, they must be in base 10 themselves. A pair of things in base 2 is 10 things, right? So then if you write the “2” in “base 2” in base 2, it’s “base 10”. And this holds true for any base. How do you write a dozen in base 12? 10. So base 12, written in base 12, is base 10.
There is an old unix calculator program called bc where one can change the input and output base.
If you change the input base and then the output base strange things happen as bc interprets the output base number in the input base .
ibase=2 obase=10 The output base is now 2 (in base 10)Nailed it. This was a perfect explanation. Thank you!
Based
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
1 day greenwich time is bastardly queer and dooms future youth and nature to a hell.
Classic Gene Ray
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.
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.
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.
is it not dependent on mass at all? It’s possible given that this is the metric system that this is actually just a convenient retroactive truth about meters. I suppose it wouldn’t necessarily be, but then you’re accounting for gravity as well, which means you’re going to need a pretty effective approximation there. As well as a way to account for any mechanical losses as well.
I’m not sure the metric system even existed when we developed the first mechanical time keeping devices.
So I did some digging and the use of 1-second pendulum as a unit of length predates the metre by about a century. It’s very possible it informed the choice of ratio to use when defining it properly, like we did with the recent definition change.
It’s all on Wikipedia if you want to dive in yourself.
that sounds about right. About what i expected, i’ll have to do some reading sometime i suppose.
The mass cancels out.
I don’t know if it’s purely a coincidence. The meter comes from the Earth’s circumference (1/10 000 000 of the pole-equator distance) and I believe the second is much older, which points to a coincidence.
it makes sense that the mass does cancel out, it is a change of potential and kinetic energy at all, i suppose i’m just conflating more complicated things with it lol.
it’s pretty likely to be a coincidence, but if i had to guess it’s a “lucky coincidence” one that was intentionally chosen because of it’s convenience. Rather than by pure happenstance. There’s not a particularly good reason 1 meter needs to be 1/10000000 the pole equator distance for example. So that would be pretty easy to reverse fudge nicely.
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
deleted by creator
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.
Thank you. I add it on the list (^_^)
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?
Is this from Timecube?
No it is from good sense and observations of technology inherited of extremly ancient civilisations.
