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netikras
213d

You think americans are weird with their imperialistic units [inch, ounce, yard, pound, mile, ...]?

You think canadians are weird with their mixture of imperialistic and metric units [miles, liters, ...]?

Well I think we are all weird with our am/pm nomenclature when we start counting at 12 and end with 11 [12pm, 1pm, 2pm, ..., 11pm, 12-fucking-AM]

good luck making sense of that one!
"please run this command at 12pm sharp" -- is that noon or midnight? Did the chap writing this know which is which?

rant

kilometer

liter

makes no sense

inch

weird people

canada

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  • 15
    213d
    which is why 24hr time is best :)
  • 5
    213d
    That's why military and international aviation agreed on 24-hour timing long ago. But we are still using the Gregorian calendar with all its quirks, so we need to convert to epoch seconds, an unintuitive measurement that no human can read, so we have to convert back to the Gregorian calendar and localized time formats so we can keep wondering what time and date is 1/2/24 12:00 P.M.
  • 2
    213d
    To be fair, in your day to day life, it's easier to say "It's one" than "it's thirteen" and so on, it seems to work quite well in spoken language and for quick processing by the brain, though maybe that's just part of our nurture now. But when it's written somewhere, I prefer the 24hr format. It's much easier to parse from text with my eyes. It's weird
  • 1
    213d
    Agree! The AM/PM system and its weirdness for the number 12 ist the most retarded shit that I had ever have to deal with.
  • 5
    213d
    What is this "we"? I use 24 hours system in my country. Thanks goodness.
  • 0
    213d
    After night a day comes and therefore AM starting at midnight makes sense to me. But not 12 or 60.
  • 0
    213d
    Britons and Germans have their own regional time systems. "Halb sieben" is 6:30 or 18:30 but not 7:30 or 19:30 which could become "half seven" in the U.K. as a short form of "half past seven".

    In some German regions, people say "quarter seven" ("viertel sieben") for 6:15 and "three quarters seven" for 6:45.

    The best though is that German idiom literally asking "how late is it?" meaning "what time is it?"
  • 1
    212d
    @usr--2ndry I believe that it’s not exclusively German. Something very similar is also used by Russians, for example.
  • 2
    212d
    Who the fuck uses am-pm?
  • 1
    212d
    @iiii Murica
  • 1
    212d
    @Hazarth "To be fair, in your day to day life, it's easier to say "It's one" than "it's thirteen" and so on" - no. that's just a matter of what you're used to.
  • 0
    212d
    @tosensei and that’s only a very small advantage and applies to situations where you ask for the current time. For anything else, like asking when something happened, it’s ambiguous.
  • 4
    212d
    To be fair, that also causes confusion. I often have to elaborate, eg "the plane will land at four thirty. In the afternoon"
  • 3
    212d
    UK has all road markers in miles. But a lot of the UK population thinks they are in Kilometers. Which is hilarious.
  • 0
    212d
    At 16:20 I remind my coworker that it is 4:20. He would be less amused at 4:20 AM if I did that.
  • 1
    212d
    Imagine all the digits after 12:00:00.000pm. One of them is bound to be positive, so any moment in which you see this number on the clock is pm.
  • 0
    212d
    @lorentz that is how I thought about it.
  • 2
    207d
    @Hazarth that wont save you. Because then you encounter people which still struggle with concept of zero and claim day is not 00:00-23:59 interval but 00:01-24:00, so 00:00 on their clocks means end of the day
  • 1
    206d
    American here. Most of us don't like imperial units. We just don't know how to get rid of them.
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