Only noobs start counting at 1. Midnight = 24:00 = 00:00
Another classic meme. Love to see it getting a proper repost after all these long weeks.
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
This would go great with my idea of everyone having a GUID instead of a name.
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?
Nah just use Unix time
technically that is 64 bit unix time.
Maybe where you’re sitting. But my frame of reference has had slightly different time dilation than yours.
The 6 means 6, 18, AND 30.
The numbers on the clock actually make a lot of sense.
12, 24 and 60 are highly composite numbers (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number).
Imagine using numbers in a world where most people have no real understanding of fractions.
That is also the reason why you see the same or similar numbers as common screen refresh rates. 24, 48, 60, 120 and 240.
The 12 hour clockface design is that way because it is a similar design to that of a sundial, so people did not need to learn a new way to read the time. This also meant that for readibility reasons it was beneficial to only have 12 numbers.
Surely you mean common refresh rates like 23.976Hz (NTSC), 25hz (PAL & ATSC), 50hz (PAL & ATSC), 59.95hz (NTSC), 100hz (PAL+) and 144hz, right? /s
60 in particular is a superior highly composite number, 12 divisors compared to a paltry 8 for 24.
Everybody loves composite numbers, but I’m missing the point in which this is advantage in the context of time. The only situation I know of where time needs to be divided is in paid work, and in this case it’s always converted to base 10 money.
The decimalization of money is its own fun history, with a lot of different countries undergoing their own transitions at different times.
The Spanish dollar, which was the world reserve currency in its heyday, was divided into 8 reals (see how pirates used to refer to money in the form of “pieces of eight”) but issues with the supply of silver led to the introduction of the lesser real de vellón, which eventually settled at 20 to the dollar after over 100 years of uncertainty and confusion.
Geometry.
The first clocks were sundials, which worked by putting a line on the ground. As soon as you comparing two different lines on the ground, you are doing geometry to represent time.
When you start messing around with geometry, you need an easy way to describe the angle of an equilateral triangle. 1/6th of a circle, or 1/3rd of a line. Trying to represent 1/3 or 1/6th in base 10 is fugly. Trying to divide a circle into 10 equal sections is just as fugly.
Dividing a circle into 6 equal sections is trivial: after you draw the circle with your compass, walk the compass around the perimeter. You have just inscribed a hexagon.
You’re still missing the angle of 1/4 of a circle: the angles of a square. Those are pretty important in geometry as well. It’s fairly trivial to draw another 6 points between the first 6 on your circle.
We use a 12-hour clock because of basic geometry. The 360-degree circle is the bastard child of basic geometry and a base-10 number system.
Its possible to create a new time format/ system, the problem is how to standardise it everywhere
Easy, use the metric time.
9:30 PM would just become Hour 89.58333333/100 of the day 😉
It has been done and it is called swatch time.
Beat/Swatch time was itself inspired by French Republican time.
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Oh also the hours will start at 1 and the minutes will start at 0
Alright, I’m calling a 4.1666666666666666666666666666 metric hour meeting to discuss this!
The meeting might run to a full 5 metric hours.
“Hey sweetie, please come home by Hour 89.58333333/100 otherwise I’m gonna have to ground you for a week, love you!”
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
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.
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.
First one to notice, or rather mention at least. Thanks!
Hope you stand a better chance in life ;)
Haven’t seen this one this week. Thanks
maybe this is because i grew up in a house that had a clock with hands but no numbers, but wth do you mean “the 6 means 30”.
analogue clocks consists of two progress bars. the numbers are just for convenience.
3π/2
Poor lad never learned the code
When the minutes hand is over the 6, 30 minutes have passed
whoosh!
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.
That’s when we bring out the moondial.
The firedial works every night.
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>
Well… This post sent me down a rabbit hole -> Unequal Hours if anyone else is curious.
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.
“Precluded” means “prevented” or to “make impossible” ❤️
Oh hot damn, first time I used that word.
Maybe presaged?
Predated
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! 👍
Yup, that’s why we still don’t have any clocks to this day.
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.
