1w ago

Time is math I think

231 comments

Should've started at 0. Why is 12 < 1?
- Inventor: Cause 12 is nil, zilch 🤪
  @zea64 @ByteOnBikes
- 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
  
  Measuring tools started from 0 way before the digital era. A clock is a measuring tool. The reason is, people were too used to saying "12 o'clock" and seeing a 0 would throw them off
  
  Measuring tools started from 0 way before the digital era
  that's true, but when you're measuring something the value you get is a cardinal, not an ordinal. I agree that we have been using 0 as a cardinal for a long time. however, we've been using 0 as an ordinal only since 1950s
  people think of time as a sequence of events, hence there's 1st (1 o'clock), 2nd (2 o'clock) and so on until the 12th (12 o'clock)
- 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
  
  You mean analog 24-hour clocks? Those things are cursed. You still say “zero twenty-five” even if there’s no 0 on the face.
  And clocks that only go to 12 and repeat are just regular clocks.
  😂
  
  regular clocks.
  https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e/Clock_24_J.jpg
  
  JJ?
  
  Jeans o'clock
  
  My friend, that picture you linked to is anything but a regular clock.
  It is a clock, but it looks like whomever designed it wanted to also make it a sundial yet without having the foresight to convert it into a 24-hour display. Double cursed.
  
  It's an example of the "1-12 twice" that I was referencing
  
  No, you're a towel

231 comments