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.
this post was submitted on 11 Sep 2025
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Only noobs start counting at 1. Midnight = 24:00 = 00:00
Let's just switch to metric time. https://metric-time.com/
We're on Metric time already, the base unit of measure for time in the Metric system is the second. This is decimal time.
Ugh I can hear it now
In our relentless pursuit of innovation, we are proud to announce the switch from the outdated 24-hour clock to Metric Time™.
Effective immediately, your standard 8-hour workday will now be... 8 metric hours.
That’s 80% of the entire day. Because nothing says “work-life balance” like leaving 2 hours for life.
Embrace the future. You’re already late.
Holy shit, that actually looks so neat and organized, I want it 😭
Haven’t seen this one this week. Thanks
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.
60 in particular is a superior highly composite number, 12 divisors compared to a paltry 8 for 24.
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
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.
We will also use 3 sticks to tell the time.
Time is linear. But this will be circular.
Time ..line? Time is not made of lines. It is made of circles. That is why clocks are round!
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 😉
No use imperial, eg. 1 gallon is equal to 2,4899 feet mutliplied with 8,67763 nuggets, therefore you need to work five big mac longer
It has been done and it is called swatch time.
Beat/Swatch time was itself inspired by French Republican time.
24 hours cause Egyptians split their sun dials and star decans into 12 parts each (probably cause 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6) which the greeks later turned into equal length hours (before the length would change over the year)
60 minutes due to Babylonian base-60 math
12 hour format is just tradition at this point, but derived from the sun dials which only worked at day, so half the time, and the star decans which only worked at night, so the other half.
pretty much every country except the US uses the 24h format on digitial clocks now
also the dude in the meme was kinda right: the day will be divided into 12 segments. and the night will too. at least originally
This all originated from the Ancient Sumerians btw. They passed it down to Babylonians.
Edit: A bit of history from what I learned from listening to Fall of Civilizations in the shower.
The Ancient Sumerians invented this sexagesimal system because if you look at your hand, you notice 12 knuckles (this is obviously excluding your thumb, as that is used for counting each knuckle), and with your other hand you will raise a single finger for every time you finish counting past 12 knuckles on your left hand. So raising your thumb is 12, thumb and index is 24, and so on, until you reach 60.
Came here to say this, you said it far better than I would have! Great addition with the edit.
It's called a "highly composite number!" I read up on a lot of this stuff while learning about numerology and other esoteric spiritual traditions!
24 hour analogue clocks exist. I have a 24 hour watch which only revolves once per 24 hours. It's a disadvantage though.
The reason why clocks and watches display 12 hours at a time is so that they have space to show finer resolution of time. If you try to cram 24 hours onto a clock, it's not easy to tell if it's 12:20 or 12:30 at a quick glance.
Most people are not too stupid to be aware of if they are in the first 12 hours or second 12 hours of a day, so they benefit from a watch with 12 hour timescale and finer resolution so that they can more easily see exactly what time it is.
And for all the dummies posting about 12h vs 24h clocks. In the sense of saying that it's 1pm vs 13:00. That's not what this meme is even describing. This is about the physical layout of a clock or watch face.
This is what the minute and second hands are for, though
You could get a jump hour watch, meaning the hour isn't a slowly moving hand but instead jumps from 6 to 7 with a jump, avoiding potential mixing up of hours, it would make it easier to read those 24h
Like this watch
Edit: The original watch linked is a weird one, it's not a jump hour watch but instead it has a jumping dial to turn it from a 12h to a 24h, very neat! I can't seem to find a 24h jump hour watch apart from this 30k breguet lol
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It is wild how people refuse to use the 24 hour clock. It is so logical and easy. kind of like the metric system…..
You mean like metric time?
Metric system should be replaced with something base12 thh
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I get the joke, but the sundials of ancient civilisations precluded clocks.
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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.
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