XKCD: It's more than a comic

We're a 24 hour society now. Energy savings are moot. Car accidents spike due to people driving to work in the dark extra tired.

The principle pragmatist argument in favor now is that people stay out longer after work and spend more money when it's lighter later.

Fresh-eyed movie blog

I drive east to go to work in the morning and West to go home at night.

The change in hour makes it so that the sun is never so low in the sky I can't hide it behind the blinds, and for that alone I am grateful.

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

Yeah I think we should stay? Stop using? DLS

Maybe we should transition into a system where the time of the day depends on whether the sun is up. In Finland, that would mean in the middle of the winter there'd be a spell of several weeks where it would barely ever be more than 6 in the morning, and that only for a couple of hours; and in the summer, there'd be weeks when it would never be later than (say) 4 PM or earlier than about 7 or 8 AM.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

That would making scheduling a nightmare.

It certainly would. It would also remove any semblance of a daily rhythm and sense of how long one has been awake and so on, even more than the change in the daily amount of light already does.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

And it would totally screw up any information systems that depend on accurate timekeeping, which is all of them. No thanks.

edited 18th Apr '17 12:12:14 PM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

Can you even imagine trying to maintain accurate payrolls? "Let's see, how many hours did this guy work this week? Well, it says here that they worked from 8AM to 1PM, so that could be anywhere from 4 to 14 hours..." Let alone trying to figure out business hours.

At this rate, if the difference between "using" it and "not using" it is negligible, then we'd have to ask if the cost of implementing the change is worth it. We have essentially written it into culture.

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

I say abolish the stupid system.

While we're at it, fuck timezones, too. Implement a 24 hour clock worldwide. Screw this am/pm crap. At least half my friends are online and in different countries. I'm sick of doing high level math to figure out how to schedule four people for a game of anything.

Absolutely not. There are standards for what each time is. I will not have High Noon happen at 6pm.

Implement a world-wide timekeeping system? Sure. Change our current one? Nahbruh

Say to the others who did not follow through You're still our brothers, and we will fight for you

Besides, then McCree's line about it being high noon somewhere in the world becomes much less funny.

edited 18th Apr '17 2:31:07 PM by danime91

Time zones make sense, and I've never understood why people have problem with transitions between a 12-hour and 24-hour clock. Usually you can tell from context what people mean by "half past 4" or "around 8", without needing to specify whether you meant AM or PM. If someone does prefer to say "16:30" or "around 20:00", I don't see why that's a problem, either. Takes a bit more time to say it but you're slightly more precise, eliminating the need for the other party to figure out from context which half of the day you meant.

In Finland, these are used completely interchangeably. I suppose in written communication and official contexts you're more likely to see the 24-hour format, whereas most spoken communication will be 12-hour format and context-dependent; but even in casual conversation, it's completely normal to say "16:30" instead of "half past 4". Well, except that we don't say "half past 4" - we say "half 5", meaning it's half an hour to 5. When I lived in the UK for a bit, I heard "half 4" a lot - I was alert enough to make sure they meant "half past 4" (simply omitting the "half" for brevity), rather than "half to 4", which is what that expression would've meant in my language. I guessed right: it was half past 4. (You also hear "ha' pass 4" - say something often enough, and you'll start skipping syllables. That's how spoken language works.)

edited 18th Apr '17 3:30:21 PM by BestOf

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

Every time someone says "20:00", I have to subtract that from 24 in my head to figure out what time it is.

Military, so I find myself almost exclusively using the 24-hour format now.

I've seen the association between the 24-hour clock and the military in a lot of American media. I wonder if that association exists in other countries, as well.

I also know that in US English, especially in military contexts, for some reason people add the words "hundred" and "hours" in places where they don't make a whole lot of sense. I understand that it comes from reading the number out as if it was just a 4-digit number (but never pronouncing thousands, for some reason). It just seems inconvenient. If we're planning to meet at 16, I don't know what we gain by saying "sixteen hundred", let alone "sixteen hundred hours". What' wrong with "sixteen"?

If we're meeting at 08:45, I'm not sure what we'd gain by saying "zero eight forty-five" instead of "eight forty-five", either. Presumably there's some reason, to do with ensuring that the message is received and understood even in difficult circumstances, but for everyday convenience, I don't know why you wouldn't omit the zeroes.

Does the British military also have the format "sixteen hundred (hours)", or is it just "sixteen"? I'd presume it's the latter, but maybe the Brits actually had the less convenient version and the Americans copied it.

Quod gratis asseritur, gratis negatur.

^_^ Plus, it leads to the fun joke about the reporter interviewing a pilot about the perception of promiscuity among airline personnel and asking how long it's been since they've had sex.

Pilot: Last time? 1957.

Reporter: Wow! That's a long time.

Pilot: Not really. It's 2238 right now.

In the US, the only people who use the 24-hour clock (in my experience) usually fall into one of three groups: people who are or were involved with some sort of global organization where such a thing is necessary (military and such), people from another country where they use a 24-hour clock, and people use it out of preference because they want to be more specific or precise.

I also don't know much about the military, but I'd assume saying "oh __ hundred hours" is just for clarity's sake. Saying "Meet you in the dining hall at nine" would work in a casual conversation, but in something more formal with less context, the question of "nine what?" starts cropping up. Most people would get the general idea, but there's always the possibility for miscommunication.

edited 18th Apr '17 8:26:22 PM by Incognitoburrito

It was going so well until it exploded.

Th daylight saving change also gets annoying for the 24 hour segments of society, it used to be that the change would happen during the night so it wouldn't matter, but so much work is done at night now. You get twice yearly confusion over licensing hours for pubs and bars because everyone's clock updates automatically but not everyone what's to put the change into effect yet.

Trying to write your hours for the week can be confusing when you have to specify that you worked the same hour twice, or that you worked until 4am but didn't work between 2 and 3am because that bit of time was skipped.

Licensing problems used to be avoided by licences ending at 1am, but that's not how it is anymore.

edited 18th Apr '17 7:48:21 PM by Silasw

“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran

Wait, what?
"Subtract that from 24"?
That would give you 04:00, which is nowhere near the actual time...

"And as long as a sack of shit is not a good thing to be, chivalry will never die."

I use the 12 clock notation when speaking, but I prefer the 24 hour notation when written out (so "at 8 o'clock" and "20:00" is OK, "8:00 PM" is not). And I am always confused about 12:00 AM/PM. Which is noon and which is midnight?

The universe is under no obligation to make sense to us.

That one confuses me too. It finally stuck in my head this way: 12:00 is the clock equivalent of zero.

So linguistically it's confusing that 11PM is followed by 12AM. But if you think of 12:00 as zero, the point where everything resets - not to mention that midnight in military time is 00:00 - then of course 11PM is followed by 12AM.

(Or you could remember that AM is Ante Meridian and PM is Post Meridian, and Meridian is noon. So 12:15 Post Meridian is in the afternoon.)

I still have to think about it every single time, though.

Well that's not very nice.

I like to keep my audience riveted.

I would be deeply impressed— and somewhat scared— at the suction power of that vac if it actually managed to pull in any birds from that distance.

Indeed. It's one of those things about physics: air is much heavier than people realize, and a vacuum pump that could draw in birds from thousands of feet away would have absolutely catastrophic effects on anything nearer. It would be a good subject for one of those apocalyptic What If? blogs — a "make your own tornado" machine.

edited 19th Apr '17 7:32:07 AM by Fighteer

"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"