As an American who uses the 24-hour time, so many people use 12-hour I basically still use 12-hour.

  • Cevilia (they/she/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    5 hours ago

    I’ve never understood the 12 hour clock. Like, you just decide to reset the time at lunchtime or something? Why not have an 8 hour clock and reset the time after breakfast and just before teatime, it makes just as much sense

    • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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      4 hours ago

      You’ve never seen an analog clock?

      That’s where it comes from, and that’s where it makes perfect sense. (An 8 hour reset wouldn’t) No need to carry that over to digital clocks however.

      • Cevilia (they/she/…)@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        3 hours ago

        Why wouldn’t an 8-hour reset make sense? Just have 8 numbers instead of 12 and spin the hour hand a little faster.

        A 12-hour analogue clock barely makes sense anyway. Mine’s 24.

        • SpongyAneurysm@feddit.org
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          3 hours ago

          Well, time measurement and the division of the day into 12/24 hours is of course entirely a human concept and thus a bit arbitrary and made up, so yes, you could divise a system with 8 hour splits, sure.

          But the 12-hour system makes sense as soon as you buy into the 1 hour = 60 minutes convention and split that up into 5-minute blocks. There are 12*5minutes in an hour, so after 12 hours your hour and minute hand reach the same position again, thus the reset.

          That doesn’t work so well with 8 hours, because you’d have to divide the hour into 60/8=7.5 minute blocks, which is pretty awkward.

          Or you’d have to define the hour as having 64 minutes and divide it into 8*8 minutes blocks. And theres a dualist religion in my favorite fantasy RPG world, that would award you sainthood if you did that, but that’s not the world we live in.