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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
In the US the day starts at 12 AM; there is no zero.
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.
the 12 is a zero point, it’s just listed as 12.
Let me introduce you to something known as military time (which, yes, even exists in the US)…
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.
Also, noon is when you set your clocks based on the sun.
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
I have not though about the time cube in years, looks like the site is gone now.
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
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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 (^_^)
Is this from Timecube?
No it is from good sense and observations of technology inherited of extremly ancient civilisations.
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.
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.
Then why don’t we use a base 12 counting system instead?
We used to. It’s called a dozen
That’s not really base 12, it’s just a special name for the decimal number 12.
It really is like that. Some people used to count with their fingers differently than we do now. They counted with the thumb on one hand, with each finger beginning (i.e. where the finger is connected to the hand) and each knuckle having a value. In total, with four fingers you get 4x3=12, which is where the expression ‘a dozen’ comes from. The other hand was used to count how many times you did this; strangely enough, with the fingers as we know them. So you could count up to 60.
At least that’s how I learnt it at some point. If anyone has more information on this, please let us know!
Incidentally, I find the binary counting method with the fingers more interesting, where you can count up to 1023 with ten fingers.
It is now, but it used to be part of a base 12 system. 12 is a dozen, a dozen dozen is a gross, and dozen gross is a great gross.
There was some rough times as it switched to decimal and you wind up with bullshit like the ‘long hundred’ being 10 dozen and a short hundred being 10 tens.
Fair enough.
I was going to bemoan not having a special character for 11 and 12 but I guess people weren’t writing things down so much in the 1500’s and maybe there were characters for those numbers.
I wonder if that’s why we name 11 eleven and 12 twelve rather than firsteen and seconteen.
Nah, eleven and twelve not having a -teen suffix is because English doesn’t have any standards and steals language randomly. Both are germanic in origin, but different time periods. Eleven and twelve come from a 12th century system of counting on your fingers (twelve basically means ‘two left’ after you count to ten), and -teen is from a 14th century math perspective (thirteen basically means ‘ten more than three’).
Huh, that actually makes some sense. How would it be written, I guess spoken you could easily go “eleven dozen and seven”, presumably you would need another symbol for 10/11. Write it as B7 if you wanted to use A/B similar to how you would use A-F with hexadecimal.
Probably take some time to get used to it from being used to using decimal.
probably the way we used to do it before we got arabic numerals, with knuckle counts and long hundreds
it depends on whether or not “eleven” would be base ten 11, or base 12 eleven.
Dozens, but not tens of something. I like English.
you can say tens of something, i don’t see an issue with that grammatically speaking.
“tens of thousands” literally derives from that phrasing even. similar to other weird anomalies like “ten hundred” which likely comes from “ten hundreds” for example
Technically speaking, any sort of arbitrarily defined grouping used in any numeral system can be used like this. For example 2^n would be relevant when discussing binary counting. You might refer to binary number groups as powers as a result.
I think some cultures used it. We use the base 10 mainly because of our 10 fingers but if you start counting with 0 (counting the closed fist) you could easily count to 12 with your hands as well.
we do, it’s literally the imperial system.
If you want a real answer, it’s probably to do with arabic numerals being a base ten system, then being adopted globally, after the standardization of a base 12 in isolation for something like time. Arabic numerals specifically probably resulting from us often having 10 fingers, so it’s a natively intuitive system from that aspect. Though representing numbers from other systems (like base 12) in systems like base 10, isn’t hard, so most often, we just don’t really think of them existing in base 12 (like time does) since we think in base 10 most of the time.
Ask someone who has dealt with the binary system about this, and they will tell you the exact same thing. Even people experienced with binary counting logic still natively translate it to base 10 because it’s more intuitive that way. It’s one of the reasons that the doubling of possibilities every additional bit is a relevant discussion. Technically in the frame of binary, you’re just adding one more place value, however due to how binary works, and how base 10 works, it’s a rather disconnected counting system (base 10 has a lot more redundant uses of numbers, binary is mathematically perfect)
It’s the same reason why different parts of the world speak different languages with different grammar rules, shit’s weird, and sometimes it doesnt get adopted logically.
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
The clock evolved out of the sundial. 12 hours on the clock makes more sense if you think of it that way.
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}.
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.
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Citation needed.
More like second means a second division of hour.
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“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.
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
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)
Inventor: Cause 12 is nil, zilch 🤪
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.”
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 person who made the clock copied it from a sundial. You can’t say it’s not logical because that’s how physics works.
Aand that’s Numberwang!
This joke has lived in my head quietly for at least a decade.
That’s wangernumb
