The sound of Babylonian growling intensifies... (Babylonian / Sumerian cultures used the base 12/60 system)
this post was submitted on 23 Mar 2025
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The clock evolved out of the sundial. 12 hours on the clock makes more sense if you think of it that way.
Wait until you use dms to navigate a map
That's fun
Aand that's Numberwang!
This joke has lived in my head quietly for at least a decade.
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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."
They also tried to implement a metric calendar, ya know I think I know why they started using the guillotine on the revolutionary leaders.
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For an analog clock the reason for 12 hour time is that twelve divides evenly into 60 and 24 does not. Get rid of the whole 60 min/hour and 60 sec/min that make dividing a clock dial into 60 segments extremely useful and then we can talk about why there are twelve hours on it.
Reminds me of the collective confusion in english class when they taught us that 12:15 am is in the night and 12:15 pm is at lunchtime.
Imo anyone using 12:XX am for midnight for the sake of "symmetry" with 12:XX pm or whatever is adding pointless complications on top of the already pointless am/pm system. Midnight has no reason to not be 00:XX am in that system
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Just remember that m is midday, when the sun it high in the sky. Anything with an a is before that moment, everything with a p is after that. It's not that hard. Now, making heads or tails of thumbs, feet and miles. That's a head scratcher.
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