this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. A showerthought should offer a unique perspective on an ordinary part of life.
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I use these all the time, my kids say "just tell me what time it is."
Seriously, though. It takes less brain processing power and just about the same speech-time to just say the dang time.
If your brain works in digital time, this is true.
Us olds have to translate the other direction.
It’s like hearing someone say “why doesn’t everyone just speak English? Why go through the extra effort of speaking Spanish?” because you assume everyone’s internal monologue is in English.
What do you mean if your brain works in digital time. This doesn’t translate for me and I grew up with regular clocks and wrist watches. All time is the same. A clock with both hands facing 12 is and always has been twelve o’clock. Clock face or digital clock. They give the same time. Comparing two devices that give the same information in different ways to language is absurd.
Your comparison could work if the subject being discussed was 12 vs 24 hour time keeping. Then there is a translation between the two.
Analog clocks lend themselves better to thinking in fractions of an hour or day, like this post is talking about, as an hour and a half day are both represented as a circle
Digital clocks lend themselves better to thinking in terms of number of minutes and hours directly. When working numerically, fractions of 60 are generally less intuitive, and fractions of 12 often so as well. Most people who don't work with angles often think of fractions in terms of percent, or powers of two.
"Quarter past" kind of tweaks the brain wrong when a quarter is intuitively 25.
Really? I've always found them very pleasing.
They chose 12 precisely because it's easy to divide!
I wish our numeric system was base 12 instead of base 10!
You're on Lemmy, of course you like fractions of 12. It is a very convenient base, having so many factors, but most people don't think like that
That might be the most obscure stereotype I've ever read. 😆
It’s also precision. I think this is the biggest thing we’ve lost is some expression of precision.
Actually a digital clock with both hands pointing at twelve is not a digital clock.
oh i think this may be a cultural thing, here in europe when we say "digital time" we specifically mean 24-hour time because "AM/PM" isn't used here.
It's the difference between saying "dinner's at seven" and "lunch ends at 13:30"
Ahhh!!! That totally makes sense. I took the comment to be about digital clocks specifically vs analog clocks. Not about the type of time keeping. Then the translation analogy totally makes sense and works! Gotta love learning new things from people. Thanks Swedneck!
It's inefficient is what I'm suggesting.
It is a one syllable difference, at most. Fif-teen versus Quar-ter-Past. Or Thir-ty versus Half-past. And for-ty-five versus quar-ter-till.
But it is also about precision. If I say "Let's meet up at 4:45" that implies a lot more specificity than "let's meet at quarter to five". The firmer is an exact time people should meet at and the latter is "around that time".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag goes into the difference between analog and digital time and what that means with thought processes. But a lot of it boils down to thinking in terms of "parts of a whole" versus "specific times".
I'm curious why it got the name digital time.
Because it is expressed as digits (numbers)
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it's not like people generally pronounce it fully anyways, it'll come out as "qua'tr" or "quartah" depending on dialect
All of which is still two syllables?
The most inefficient part of human brain is having to consciously process things. So going with whatever patterns you're used to is always going to be faster
When people report the time they aren’t reporting their internal dialogue they’re reading what it says on the display. What it says on the display is “four twenty three” not “halfway between quarter and half past four”.
OP didn’t say anything about reading time off a digital clock.
What about the opposite scenario of reporting the time you read off an analog clock? Would you translate to digital first?
In your specific scenario, sure, it would require extra work to convert it, so I’d just read it as is.
But when making plans, and especially spans between two different times, my brain thinks of time as portions of a pie chart, and I’d have to translate 3/4 to 45 minutes.
I think there's bigger problems if you have to process the time. If you've never heard it in your life, maybe you'd stop and think, but it's honestly just something you learn and know, no thinking required.
It's like when people don't know 24 hour time, when it's something you've just grown up with, there's no thinking and then you are confused when you hear people have to think about it or "calculate".
24 hr time should be the global standard too, IMO. Reduce all possibilities of confusion, I say.
To be honest, it's mainly just USA that just use 12-hour (and call 24-hour "military time"?), the large majority of the world use both interchangeably.
Also adopt UTC as global time while we're improving things. No more messing around with all those different time zones, one is enough.
If we're doing this I'm referring to the hour past midnight as 0:XX and not 24:XX and you can't stop me
Maybe I'm missing the joke, but I'm pretty sure 00:XX is correct.
Please do not judge me too harshly if I'm wooshing.
so would just saying am pm all the time.
I have a friend that had issues telling time with analogue clocks when we studied together in a university. It really is just the matter of what you grew up with.
My kids also hate that all my devices use 24 hour time >_>
I've been using 24 hour time for the past few years and I still have trouble with it from time to time and have to calculate it in my head.
Also, a different example of something similar is how old I am. Despite knowing my birth year, I still struggle recalling how old I am I still have to take a moment to calculate it.
I did the same thing with my parents, mostly because they'd just say "quarter after" but would never say any number. If you made a word cloud of everything I've ever said in my life, "after what" would be gigantic in the center with every other word tiny around the edges.
This just triggered a deep memory from within me. My brother used to say "half past" when I asked him the time, and when I would say "half past what?" the response was always "Half past the monkeys ass, a quarter to his balls"
I still don't know what it means or where it came from, but when I was 8 years old, it was hilarious.
Even worse than that imo is 'quarter of'. I swear to god it's been used to mean both before or after whatever hour they're talking about
mfrs think I know what hours its close to when I probably don't know the day and am lucky to know what month it is.
Anyone using "quarter of" to mean X:15 is just incorrect. That's "quarter after".
When you say quarter of, you are supposed to say the next hour. Quarter after 4 is a quarter of 5.
That's... I guess that makes sense but that's really weird and ambiguous.
Quarter after four is 4:15.
Quarter of five is 4:45. Also quarter to five and quarter til five.
I'm seeing other comments that suggest I might be wrong. Especially in regards to other languages.
I would not have guessed that meaning of "of." I think we should stick to "til" or "past" for clarity.
EVERY TIME
"It's a third past the hour, ya dang kids!"
You're failing at your most important job.