Military Time vs 24hr?
Why is it that Americans refer to 24 hour time as military time? I understand that the military uses the 24hr format but I don’t understand why the general public would refer to it like that?
It makes it seem like it’s a foreign concept where as in a lot of countries it’s the norm.
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as an american i must say i HATE this as well. people ask me why i use military time and i say it's because there are 24 hours in the day so it makes much more sense to me. and that in other parts of the world they call it international time with the military having nothing to do with it.
makes me wanna scream. thank you for letting me go off.
I keep telling people metric time is where it's at but they just look at me like I'm crazy
obviously we should all just switch to metric time lmao
Time is not metric
Pshh I bet you use acoustic time.
What?
Just to be devil's advocate:
Time is not really not metric, either, to be absolutely fair. The 60/60/24 thing is mostly just a continuation of the sexagesimal system used by the Babylonians.
There are also plenty of instances in history where civilizations used a decimal system of timekeeping. Just a summary of the Wikipedia page on the matter below:
Alternatively, if you make the decimal second equal to 0.8640... SI seconds, then that would allow you to have 100 seconds per minute, 100 minutes per hour, 10 hours per day, and still have clocks align with the solar day.
Hell, even our definition of the second is merely the number of "pulses" (word used for brevity's sake) of the Cesium-133 atom that corresponds to how long our second is. In other words, our definition of the second isn't based on objective truth; we just found an objective way to define the system we already use. Lol.
Mind you, I'm merely playing devil's advocate here. As much as I love the SI, and the metric system in general (both modern and previous versions), and would not be opposed to switching to decimal time if mandated, I'm okay with the system we have now. I JUST FUCKING WISH WE ALL USED 24H FORMAT GODDAMMIT THE AMBIGUITY OF 12H TIME PISSES ME OFF JUST FUCKING WHY GODDAMN IT nearby explosive barrel explodes from proximity to blood vessels
tl'dr: Our conception of time as sexagesimal, and even based on the Cs-133 atom, is not quite as objectively based as one might be led to think. Also, fuck 12h time.
Edit: There are 36 "decades" per solar year, not 3. Lol.
I remember hearing an anecdote that (I forget which band) got signed because they misunderstood the record producer when they requested a demo at 8 and showed up ready to play psychedelic rock at 8oclock in the fuckin morning
Good comment. Thanks!
Isn't the second defined by light traveling a specific distance in vacuum?
To add to that, I wish we all just used UTC. Time zones are useless, we could all just adjust to the universal time in local schedules.
Also: english could be renamed to common and it would make sense.
Isn’t the second defined by light traveling a specific distance in vacuum?
If we were to redefine the second as 0.864 SI seconds, then the new second would be defined as the time it takes light to travel 0.864x the current meter. Of course since the modern definition of the meter is defined as a light-second, changing the definition of the second would also change the definition of a meter. (One thread loose pulls another thread loose and all that jazz...) My point being that these are merely objective ways to define the units we already use, not objective proofs of said units.
To add to that, I wish we all just used UTC. Time zones are useless, we could all just adjust to the universal time in local schedules.
Although that would be absolutely fantastic in my opinion, there are uses to time zones. Most people's sleep cycles are naturally calibrated to light levels, which vary from time zone to time zone. Originally, time zones were split into equal divisions of latitude across the globe 15° apart, for this exact reason, it being the most logical way to divide them by.
What I just want is nations to stop fucking this up by using nationality and cultural reasons to have vastly separate areas abide by the same time zones. I mean, for fuck's sake, here is what they used to look like; here is what they are now. Good gods is that a complete clusterfuck... I mean, seriously, China used to be four time zones; now they're one!
If we just used UTC people on Europe could sleep from 23:00 to 7:00, people from Japan could sleep from 15:00 to 22:00 and so on. There would be no need to "localize" time.
I suppose.
changing the value of a second is not really feasible nowadays, so instead i would propose to just remove minutes and hours, and use seconds, hectoseconds and kiloseconds
Not sure if you’ve had the same experience but I had an American colleague ask me what I meant when I didn’t give the time in the 12hr format. The message was something like, “I’ve booked the meeting for 14:00”
Similar things happen to me. All of my devices are in Spanish in addition to 24hr, so anything automated is sent in Spanish to my non speaking colleagues
I'm American but work on transportation where 24hr clock is...sort of the standard.
I prefer 24hr and use it on all my devices, but outside work I pretty much exclusively communicate with 12 hr. No point in using wording I know is gonna be misunderstood when I can comfortably swap between the two.
Knowing Americans they would’ve rejected it if it wasn’t called military time. In fact I reckon if you guys rebranded metric system to military measurements there might be more acceptance to it.
You tried...
