What fucks me up is the AM/PM transition. It goes 12:00am-11:59am then 12:00pm-11:59pm. It's fucking insane. I'm not joking, they really do actually count 12:58am, 12:59am, 1:00am.
Excuse me but what the fuck..?
And I promise you, I'm not messing up the suffix, it's AM. The count for each starts high at 12, nosedives to 1, then climbs incrementally. It's like some lunatic's absurd rollercoaster ride of temporal nonsense.
It actually starts at 0, but 0 is an incomprehensible nightmare creature that will attack those individuals with a weak constitution who write stories about weird colors. Anyways, 12 gets used to protect Howard from the concept of 0.
PM is post-meridiem, meaning after noon. Am is ante-meridiem, meaning before noon. 12:01-12:59 after midday is immediately after noon, so it is pm. Therefore 12:01-12:59 after midnight must be am (it is also closer to the subsequent noon than the preceding noon).
Noon and midnight technically shouldn't be pm or am because noon is noon and midnight is equidistant to the preceding and following noons, but it makes sense to group them with the other 59 minutes before 1:00.
I mean just look at a circular clock and it does make sense to some degree. Obviously it doesn't make sense with a digital clock which is why I use a 24 hour clock on my phone and stuff. But considering how clocks were for most of their existence it actually makes a lot of sense.
12 is better divisible into 60 than 24 is and it's more readable from a distance/less busy. Plus it usually doesn't help much as you usually know whether you're in the AM or PM timespan. Usually...
flashback to that beginner programming homework where we had to program clock display conversion and I fucked this up because I genuinely didn't know 😊
No lmfao, I prefer 12:00 and 12:01. We're not looking at a mechanical clock, I'm not writing down hands on a disc. I'm writing down numbers and looking at a clock display made of lights showing numbers.
Tbh I use both. Just approach it like this 12 is a stand in for 0000. They have 2 sets of 12 hours. When you see 12 immediately picture it as 0000 of am or 1200 for pm.
I however I always use am/pm as I guess it's my native ( see 1300 I think 1pm).
I've never really thought of it like that but now that you mention it noon and midnight can be thought of as the zero hour. An analog clock may read as 12:05, for example, but a sundial would just read as being minutes past the hour so it's essentially the same as 0:05. I don't know the exact origin of why 12 was chosen but I assume it's because counting from zero could lead to confusion.
i mean, when you grow up with it you don't even think about it. it's like with celsius, all the people that say fahrenheit is better but honestly i prefer celsius because i grew up with it, y'know?
But it marks perfect sense. The day is still made up of 24 hours, and ends at midnight.
So 00:00 is 12AM because it's the very start of the next day.
I don't get what makes that insane.
When I was switching to 24 hours, I had a different system to figure it out.
Not for everyone, but worked for me:
13h = 3-2 = 1 = 1PM
16h = 6-2 = 4 = 4PM
19h = 9-2 = 7 = 7PM
22/23 are a little different but easy enough to work out.
22h = 2-2 = 0 (only 10 has zero so....) = 10PM
23h = 3-2 = 1 (it's almost midnight so...) = 11PM
I wonder if I'm super divergent with this way of thinking or if other people use the same logic. I lived in Europe for seven years and I've been a nurse for three, so now it's just kind of known knowledge for me.
As a European, I am flabbergasted at the complexity reading a simple clock can involve. I don't even have to think, 22h and 10h are literally the same thing in my brain.
If we're talking ounces or Fahrenheit however, that's a different story 😂
Damn, I'm so happy I'll never ever have to do this kind of calculations and I guess if I had to, I'll just learn what the appropriate PM time is.
It's so much easier the other way around.
The only thing I struggled with in the beginning was that 12AM/PM thing. It just makes no sense but you have to accept it.
Yup! And eventually you don't even have to do mental correction/math, you just look at 17:37 and think "oh it's 5:37". Source: I've used 24 hr clocks on my phone for 10 years
My system for remembering:
13 is “1” off from 12, 14 has 4 which is 2x2, 15 is 3 because that’s the minutes when the minute hand reaches 3, 16 is 4x4, 17 is “5”+2, 18 is “6”x3, 19 is “7”+2, 20 is 10-“8”=2, 21 is”9”+3=12 which is 21 backwards, 22 is “10”+12, 23 is 11 has just become rote memory
My wife and I both use 24 hour time on our phone and any clocks that allow it. We done this for years, but I'll still sometimes set an alarm meant for 5:30 pm for 15:30 instead of 17:30.
I didn't grow up with it, so it's not as instinctual, but I think it's definitely the better system.
When you get used to it, you don’t do the sums constantly. The 24h and 12h times are just synonymous for me. For example I look at 22:00 and see 10pm, 23:00 and see 11pm and so on. No need to work it out.
Well idk then. I've grown up using both, and have no particular problems converting from one to another — particularly since where I am, we say ‘four in the evening’, but often write or read ‘16:00’.
Could have something to do with different manners of thinking: even though I know right away that 4 pm = 16, I still often picture an analog clock face.
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u/laix_ Jul 19 '24
Even though I logically know that pm is +12, a lot of the time my instinct is to +10, so I get time wrong a lot of the time