• Tanis Nikana@lemmy.worldEnglish
    72·
    9 days ago

    I never understood AMs and PMs. We start at 12, count upwards to 11, and do that twice? No fuck that, I just use a 24-hour clock.

    • Apytele@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2·
      6 days ago

      Working healthcare for 10 years and 100% of my clocks are in 24h time. Can’t accidentally set my alarm clock for 6am instead of 6pm!

    • Not a newt@piefed.caEnglish
      60·
      9 days ago

      What’s worse is that you get 10am, 11am, 12pm, 1pm… Who the fuck thought that was a good idea?

      • Soggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        8·
        8 days ago

        Ante meridiem and post meridiem. Before and after noon. (Noon being true noon, when the sun is at it’s highest point) Everything after 12:00 exactly is after noon and it makes more sense to change the notation there than 12:01.

        • redjard@reddthat.comEnglish
          1·
          8 days ago

          12 should be 0, 0:00 is noon and 0:01 the minute after.

          1:23 is 1•60+23 minutes after noon or midnight.

          • Soggy@lemmy.worldEnglish
            1·
            8 days ago

            Without doing any further research, I bet it’s a holdover from using Roman numerals (which has no 0) on clock faces.

            • redjard@reddthat.comEnglish
              2·
              8 days ago

              I recall 0 had a fear around it, in the same way as negative numbers and complex numbers. People didn’t consider it real and refused to use it.

              Zero as a placeholder for arabic numbers was used long before people became comfortable with “a number without digits”; zero was just a placeholder, not a digit.

              I tried finding when zero as a number became used, but found that really hard since everyone instead talks about the digit/placeholder.
              Best I found is number.wiki which states India started using it as a number around 600. The introduction and popularization in europe around 12-1600 had it introduced as purely a placeholder though. “The nine Indian figures are: 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1. With these nine figures, and with the sign 0 … any number may be written”

        • Not a newt@piefed.caEnglish
          15·
          9 days ago

          That doesn’t make it any better. In fact, it makes it worse, as you now got an am/pm shift in the middle of an hour. Compare this to the 24 hour time: it starts at midnight (00:00:00), and grows predictably up to 23:59:59.

        • bjc@scribe.disroot.orgEnglish
          3·
          8 days ago

          are you saying am/pm change happens one second after 12? because no, they happen at the instant of 12.

    • Midnight Wolf@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      8 days ago

      More complex (so more cost), harder to read at a glance, you’d want to start at the bottom so that midday is at the top to align with the sun, absolutely minimal difference vs 12h clocks. This assumes a physical clock (face), not digital, but by the time (heh) digital came around it’s not like anybody is going to change anything.

      Now you understand am/pm.