The reason for 12-hour clocks is most cultures worldwide have variable length hours of over a year. For Western times this comes from Greeks who had 12 day and 12 night hours. Early water clocks in antiquity would attempt to make that adjustment automatically.
It came from the Sumerians, not the Greeks.
The Greeks specifically build water clocks with variable length days.
We should just use second notation for everything.
I’ll be there in 5 min? I’ll be there in 2 or 3 hundo!
See you tommorow? See you in in 86K!
Next week? About half a Megasec!
Doesn’t Megasecond sound better than Fortnite?
There is a fun fun sci-fi book called "Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge. The Humans use epoch time with si prefixed Seconds for time,
That is a great book. Did you read the sequels?
On the gripping hand, the Brownies could make way better clocks than we could.
Ehhhh, no. There are very important reasons we divide the time this way. 24 is a highly composite number (a number with more divisors than all numbers preceding it; like an opposite of a prime number). This allows us to easily divide the day into halves, thirds, quarters and sixths. So is 60, with even more divisors. My guess is the same thing goes for the switch from Roman to Julian calendar (ten to twelve months in a year)
The history of the calendar in Roman times is actually an entire topic to itself.
The pre-Julian calendar required fine tuning every year in winter to keep the rest of the months aligned with the seasons.
Technically not a difficult job to keep the calendar running smoothly and consistently, but the person in charge of the calendar in Rome was a politician, so they would play political games with the length of the year.
Caesar wanted a calendar that would run on auto-pilot to strip power away from those politicians.
By sheer coincidence when Caesar made his reform, during the the changeover of calendars while he was in charge, he got to rule over a 400+ day long year.
Ahhh. This is it. This is the good stuff. Lemmy is really coming along I missed this.
Thank you :) I love how lemmy has all the smart people.
It's thanks to post like these that I now have to find videos on how to clock was invented and burn my weekend being productive. Thanks stranger!
So make it 24 then. What's this 12shit?
The History of the clock is actually pretty interesting https://www.britannica.com/topic/12-hour-clock
Swatch tried Internet Time: www.swatchclock.com
Yeah that didn't fly at all ..
Thank goodness for the stardate!
Why hasn't the Metric world found a better way? I want a clock based around multiples of 10, dammit!
One benefit of base 12 and base 60 over base 10 for everyday use with things like time is simple factorization. You can divide 12 hours evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, and sixths, and 60 minutes evenly into halves, thirds, quarters, fifths, sixths, tenths, etc. With base 10, you've just got halves and fifths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time?wprov=sfla1
The French tried at the same time they adopted the rest of the metric system but it just didnt offer much advantage vs changing out clocks.
With digital clocks it would be simpler now.
It was called the French Republican Calendar. Didn’t last very long.
Some people briefly tried that during the French Revolution, but it never caught on.
Chad American broken clocks: right twice per day Virgin Bri‘ish broken clocks: only right once per day
pwnd
A slow clock might not be right in your entire lifetime.
Inventor for sure used the
imperialbarbarian measuring system
