this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
234 points (92.7% liked)

No Stupid Questions

35393 readers
1 users here now

No such thing. Ask away!

!nostupidquestions is a community dedicated to being helpful and answering each others' questions on various topics.

The rules for posting and commenting, besides the rules defined here for lemmy.world, are as follows:

Rules (interactive)


Rule 1- All posts must be legitimate questions. All post titles must include a question.

All posts must be legitimate questions, and all post titles must include a question. Questions that are joke or trolling questions, memes, song lyrics as title, etc. are not allowed here. See Rule 6 for all exceptions.



Rule 2- Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material.

Your question subject cannot be illegal or NSFW material. You will be warned first, banned second.



Rule 3- Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here.

Do not seek mental, medical and professional help here. Breaking this rule will not get you or your post removed, but it will put you at risk, and possibly in danger.



Rule 4- No self promotion or upvote-farming of any kind.

That's it.



Rule 5- No baiting or sealioning or promoting an agenda.

Questions which, instead of being of an innocuous nature, are specifically intended (based on reports and in the opinion of our crack moderation team) to bait users into ideological wars on charged political topics will be removed and the authors warned - or banned - depending on severity.



Rule 6- Regarding META posts and joke questions.

Provided it is about the community itself, you may post non-question posts using the [META] tag on your post title.

On fridays, you are allowed to post meme and troll questions, on the condition that it's in text format only, and conforms with our other rules. These posts MUST include the [NSQ Friday] tag in their title.

If you post a serious question on friday and are looking only for legitimate answers, then please include the [Serious] tag on your post. Irrelevant replies will then be removed by moderators.



Rule 7- You can't intentionally annoy, mock, or harass other members.

If you intentionally annoy, mock, harass, or discriminate against any individual member, you will be removed.

Likewise, if you are a member, sympathiser or a resemblant of a movement that is known to largely hate, mock, discriminate against, and/or want to take lives of a group of people, and you were provably vocal about your hate, then you will be banned on sight.



Rule 8- All comments should try to stay relevant to their parent content.



Rule 9- Reposts from other platforms are not allowed.

Let everyone have their own content.



Rule 10- Majority of bots aren't allowed to participate here.



Credits

Our breathtaking icon was bestowed upon us by @Cevilia!

The greatest banner of all time: by @TheOneWithTheHair!

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

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.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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:

  • Egypt: used in astronomy, the decade, equal to 10 days, with 36 decades per solar year, with an added 5 intercalary days at the end.
  • China: the shi and ke, equal to 1/10 of a solar day & 1/100 solar day, respectively, though this has gone in and out of favor with and without modifications due to China having a long-ass (and thus varied) history.
  • Revolutionary France: 10 days per week, 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. (Although, to be fair, most common people ignored it and just used the sexagesimal time base they had always been used to. Lol.)

 

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago