Time is math I think

The clock evolved out of the sundial. 12 hours on the clock makes more sense if you think of it that way.

- 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
  
  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.
- 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.

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.

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.
  
  Atomic measurments, it's why atomic clocks are the most accurate.
- 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.
- Is this from Timecube?
  
  No it is from good sense and observations of technology inherited of extremly ancient civilisations.

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.

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
- 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.
- Also, noon is when you set your clocks based on the sun.
- 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

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
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duodecimal

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.
- 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.

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}.

Aand that's Numberwang!
- This joke has lived in my head quietly for at least a decade.
- That's wangernumb

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

The day starts at zero, the only way that makes sense.
And that's why the way that am/pm is indicated is fucking lunatic.
- I grew up with a 24h clock and I still mix-up 12AM and 12PM.
  
  I don't strictly mix them up anymore. But the confusing part is to switch from pm to am at midnight, but still use 12 instead of 0. Which day is it then?? The same day according to "12", but the next day according to "am".
  And so you're going 11pm -> 12am -> 1am. That's the part that has never made sense, and never will.
  
  I need to think of it as 12:10 am or 12:10 pm to orient myself.. is the 12:10 at night? Then midnight is actually 12:00am since it doesn't go 12:00pm to 12:01am.

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

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?

"The day starts at night" sounds silly because it seems to be a contradiction. But really, how else could it be?
Either, day starts at day ... but then it was already day. Or, day starts at night ... unless we come up with additional entities like dusk or dawn.
And since we haven't introduced them yet, day has to start at night, as a necessity.
Of course the actual silly thing is that it's still night right after day has started.
- The silly thing about this joke in the OP is that day means both "when the sun is up/the opposite of night" and "a period of 24 hours". English has a lot more words than my native language of Norwegian, but in this case we actually have separate words for the two aforementioned things.
  
  What are the words?
- starts at midnight?

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.

They don't know how to switch bases
🤣😂🤣

The Babylonian calendar and relation between time and distance is incredibly interesting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar
- I heard they do it that way because they count using their thumb and their finger joints, instead of their individual fingers.

Try 24-hour time for a month. It's slightly weird at first solely because 1) everyone else uses 12-hour and 2) you've used 12-hour your whole life, but after that it's great and frankly better than what you use now. Translations between 12-hour time become 100% automatic, so you can use it in your personal life without feeling like you're switching (you might even get one or two friends to join you). The following are advantages just for you, not accounting for the larger advantages that come when everyone is using it:
You can drop the AM and PM on digital clocks with no loss of information. It's a small thing, but this gives me room for a seconds position on the clock on my taskbar. (Side note: given 8 billion people on Earth and given how often time shows up, I feel like these trillions of miniscule savings getting rid of AM and PM might add up to something actually meaningful.)
You'll never have that experience where you oversleep during a nap so badly that you get confused if it's AM or PM.
Most intervals we usually talk about for things (e.g. "I have school from 6:00 AM to 2:00 PM" or "I have work from 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM.") do not include midnight in their range (e.g. "I slept from 9:00 PM until 6:30 AM"). Thus, arithmetic is easier because you don't have to account for the modulus (at worst in the latter example, it's the same). For example, when I go to school from 06:00 to 14:00, that's just 8 hours. When I work a 09:00 to 17:00, that's 8 hours. It's just the actual arithmetic. It's currently 10:00 and the assignment is due at midnight? Then I have 14 hours left to get it done. Whereas for 12-hour time, I need to account for the modulus: "okay, there's x hours on this side of the 12 hours and y hours on this other side; add those" is how I probably do it in my head. Subtracting times is especially nice. For example, if something has been happening since 00:30 and it's now 13:45, then I just need to subtract 30 minutes from 45 and I immediately have my answer. 1:45 minus 12:45, meanwhile? Nah. This also makes timezones much easier to do mentally. If I have +14 for my time and it's 06:00, then I know it's 20:00 there. Trivial. You do lose that sweet spot where something is exactly 12 hours apart, but that's miniscule compared to how easy everything else is.
Starting at 00:00 for midnight instead of 12:00 is just so much nicer. 12-hour time has no 0, which to me is just kind of stupid. Namely for aesthetic, intuition, and arithmetic reasons.
If speaking to someone internationally, intuitively knowing both formats means you don't even need to think about a conversion (let alone do one at all once you really get it down). Lots of countries use 24-hour time orally and written, and even more use it just in writing.
Date and time formats use 24-hour rather than 12-hour time, so you can read these automatically instead of needing to convert.
This one's very unobjective, but I feel like I've been less inclined to go to bed late when dealing with larger numbers. "Oh, it's just nine" versus now the 20s are "late" and when I really need to start thinking about how and when I'm going to bed. Obviously it's possible this is just my monkey brain being weird in a specific way and that nobody else would have this, so pay attention to the other reasons instead.
(Not beneficial to an individual using it on their own as an adult, but I wanted to bring it up.) It's arguably slightly easier for kids to learn. Kids aren't up at midnight, and so they don't really have to care about the clock rolling over while they're fast asleep (if they do, they get the much more intuitive '0' than '12'). On the other hand, the clock rolling over at noon means you as a kid really do need to understand how that works.
It's just objectively better in most meaningful ways, and like the metric system:
Its benefits are most evident if you grew up with it and everyone around you uses it.
Its benefits would still be evident if everyone switched to it but hadn't grown up with it.
Even if you didn't grow up with it and no one else around you uses it, it can still benefit you to use it.
- As is so often the case, wikipedia has a helpful map https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/24-hour_clock#/media/File:12_24_Hours_World_Map.svg
  For all of exclusively 12 hour, exclusively 24 hour, 24 hour in writing but 12 hour in speech, and just using both at random, there are entire regions of the world using that system
  
  I think it's a US thing.
  I use 12h clock when context provides the am/ap variation, 24h otherwise. I have had americans tell me I sound militaristic when I tell them my flight lands at "seventeen fifteen ". I guess they are right, the NATO format for time uses 24h clock.
  
  Haha
  Remember me when you learn this about the metric system
- I switched to 24 hour time because I work over night and have an inconsistant sleep schedule. It makes it easier to determine how much sleep I got and the exact time of day when waking up.
- Is there a lemmy community devoted to the superiority of 24-hour time yet?
- It's interesting how different people process time. For some, pure numbers make sense, and adjusting to 24-hour time is a trivial matter. But for others such as myself, who came to understand time on analog clocks, we understand time visually, especially by the angles on a clock face.
  It's intuitive to me to "do math" on time by imagining what the angles of the hands would look like in two (or more) instances. If I need to get up by X time, I can glance at a clock and immediately know I need to go to bed by Y in order to get 8 hours of sleep, just by comparing where the clock hands would be in the morning. I rarely have to actually calculate anything, and even when converting between time zones, having an analog clock base means just counting the difference around the circle. Using a digital clock, by contrast, means having to visually interpret those numbers as they would be represented by clock hands. Those clock hand angles represent "the time" to me in a way that numbers on a digital display cannot. I understand 24 hour time, I've even used it professionally. But considering that it requires multiple conversions to arrive at the format (visual angles) that my brain uses to understand time, it's far too much work for me, personally, to use in daily life.
  I'm not advocating for or against any particular system, and I hope that others can benefit from the switch you suggest. I just think it's important to note that some of us have a visual concept of time, and/or don't easily abstract time onto pure numbers, and that difference can make switching from an analog 12-hour system to a digital 24-hour system more difficult.

12/24 hours come from the idea that there are 12 day hours and 12 night hours. Historically most clock systems counted hours since sunrise. Counting since midnight is a recent change.
Where the 12 comes from? No idea. That's a decision that was made several thousands years ago. It could be from some smart counting of fingers, joints, etc. It could come from the fact that 12 has a lot of dividers. It could be religious reasons (zodiac has 12 animals). Honestly no idea.
- 12 has more divisibles than 10.
  12, 6, 4, 3, 2, 1
  10, 5, 2, 1
  Some suspect 12 was picked because you can more easily divide up into more useful time chunks.
  Edit: you wrote this in your comment and I missed it somehow.
  
  Then why don't we use a base 12 counting system instead?
  
  Historically double length hours also existed: 6 hours for daytime and 6 hours for nighttime.
  One can't rule out the convenient dividers argument but I think that can't be the only reason.

😶

For those nerdy enough to want an actual answer.
- It kind of checks out that the people that made the first fully functional writing system were also the kind of massive nerds (complimentary) to do their maths in base 60
- Still doesn't explain why the clock goes from 1 to 12, and not 0 to 11.
  
  It does. 0-11 and 1-12 contain the same (12) amount of hours. Saying "twelve thirty two" just rolls off the tongue easier than "zero thirty two" or "o thirty two".
  Not to mention zero is a much later invention than the sexagesimal system.
  Also here's a clock with zero on it.

actual fun facts: the minute hand is called that because it moves a minute amount.
the second hand is called that because the minute hand was first!
- Citation needed.
  More like second means a second division of hour.
  
  that's what i said! that's why they added another hand!
  i was not very clear though thank you for straightening that out :)

Wait until you use dms to navigate a map
That's fun

Should've started at 0. Why is 12 < 1?
- The 12 hour division of the day is about a thousand years older than the idea to write zero as its own number, which I think could be the reason
  
  this, but also, while the number 0 to denote absence of something has been the norm for some time, counting from zero wasn't much of a thing before the digital era
  edit: more to support my theory, before the 1950s (the advent of computing) zero wasn't really used as an ordinal at all
  https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=zeroth%2C0th&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=0&case_insensitive=true
- It does, in most places outside of the US.
  24-hour timekeeping (aka military time) solves a lot of weirdness about clocks, but not all of it.
  
  Ehhhh that doesn't really answer the question though, as non-digital 24 hour clocks still often have the numbers 1-24 rather than 0-23. Or sometimes even 1-12 twice

Reminds me of: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI

It's better than decimal time.
- Incorrect
  
  Decimal time was failed by decimal counting being such ass. Dozenal numbers and dozenal time would be utopia

The person who made the clock copied it from a sundial. You can’t say it’s not logical because that’s how physics works.

86,400 is not a perfect cube (or any other power) so unless you change the number of seconds in a day you’re not getting a way to perfectly represent 3 different sized time measurements in the same circle without something like 6=30m/30s
We could just change time… again… to make seconds slightly longer and have there be 85,184 seconds in a day. And then 44 seconds in a minute and 44 minutes in an hour and 44 hours in a day…. But 44 is a lot of numbers to put around a clock just because you’re too lazy to multiply by 2 or 5, shit 2nd graders can do so…. Nah.

So ancient Mesopotamians used to count on their hands slightly different. They wouldn't count their thumbs, instead they would count each knuckle with their thumb so, 3 knuckles per finger and 4 fingers each hand
- You can do this too - you have the same hands :)
  
  cries in Habsburg

fun fact during the si process there was also a proposal to make a minute 100 seconds and an hour 100 minute and a day 10 hours (and adjust the second length so that it still syncs up with the sun ofc) but it never got implemented, probably because auf big clock-manufecturing puts on alu hat

Reminds me of this SNL sketch: https://youtu.be/JYqfVE-fykk

There are watches that are called "slow watch" which has a single hand and a dial that goes from 0 to 24. They kinda make more sense than regular watches.
- I have one, and that they do, except for the people trying to sneak a glance of the time haha. "Huh?"
  I rather love mine, to me there's little reason to prefer a 12 hour clock when you have minute and second hands on the 24 also (my version does, it's not a "slow watch")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI : reminded me of this, my Dad used to love this!
- Thanks for sharing; that was great!

Don't make me start telling you the time in bells

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.
- 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.

How many centiseconds in a day?
- 36*24=864?
  I think, I'm pretty high right now, and all the numbers seem to be dancing around a bit.

Me developing anything:

I have come to conclude that probably, a terrible amount of these inconsistencies is to make it artificially hard, to "keep out the lower classes" from thinking, or sth. Similar to how the white population in the US made living in suburbs artificially difficult (car dependency, HOAs, ...) to keep the "poor" (a.k.a. black) people out. it's thinly veiled racism.
- Or maybe it's just a way to overlay multiple levels of information over the same circle.
- id argue its also thinly veiled racism to imply black people are too stupid to understand clocks
  
  nono that was not what i was saying, sorry if it came across that way ... i was making an analogy to housing, but maybe it came across wrong. i'm sorry
- It's dangerous making conclusions from big assumptions.
  Is the kind of reasoning that leads to bias.