Lots of countries use a different calendar than we do, and use different systems for numbering the year, etc. Are there any countries that predominately use a clock that isn’t our standard 12 hour, 60 minutes clock? (Other than the obvious example of military time where you count up to 24 hours instead of counting up to 12 hours twice)?
Sure that long lost tribe in the Amazon they haven’t contacted yet doesn’t have it.
ooo ooo let me spam you my vague memories
Sure – I think the Babylonians came up with the base 12 (?) or whatever the 60seconds/60minutes/24 hours thing is.
So any country that hasn’t evolved since Ancient Babylon is probably using something else, which would be like:
Sun over there = morning
Sun = Day
Sun really high = Midday
Sun over there = Evening
No Sun = Night
But this leads to the question, if they haven’t developed or caught on to the 60-60-24 thing yet, they probably don’t have the ability to tell precise time, or the need to.
The French developed a clock that ran on metric time. It had…20 hours in a day, I think? They did a whole bunch of metric things during the French revolution. Doubt that anyone uses that clock exclusively, though I’m sure someone has tried.
10 hours per day, divided into 100 minutes, each divided into 100 seconds. The fact that it really never caught on is illustrated by the fact that most surviving clocks had a third hand which displayed 24 hour time as well:
Nevertheless, I would love to find a modern analog movement that displayed French Revolutionary Time. In other words, has somebody constructed a movement with an hour hand that turns once for every ten turns of the minute hand?
Why do you call this “military time”? It’s the usual way of marking time outside North America.
Probably because the poster is USAian, and in the US it is referred to as military time? I spent 20 years as a military dependent and I am more comfortable thinking in miltary time, and writing my dates as 01AUG10 instead of 08/01/10 or eurostyle as 01.08.10. I also tend to default to printing in block letters in black pen [it actually bothers me to fill forms out in blue or some other color]
Oddly enough, my corp in EVE Online is euro, and is trying to actually find american players - but a number of players when we try to recruit them don’t want to play with euros =(
I actually wrote a program to display an analogue 10/100/100 clock.
It’s amusing but pointless.
Where I lived in northern Cameroon used standard clocks, but few people had them and so they were not a common way to tell time. Instead, people would tend to mark time by the Islamic calls to prayer, saying stuff like “the meeting is just after the second call to prayer” or “I’ll stop by at the evening prayer.”
Swatch Internet Time is worthy of mention.
[quote=“aruvqan, post:6, topic:551753”]
Probably because the poster is USAian, and in the US it is referred to as military time? I spent 20 years as a military dependent and I am more comfortable thinking in miltary time, and writing my dates as 01AUG10 instead of 08/01/10 or eurostyle as 01.08.10. I also tend to default to printing in block letters in black pen [it actually bothers me to fill forms out in blue or some other color]
[quote]
I exhibit all those same attributes for similar reasons. I’ll point out though, that in my travels, even though official timetables generally do use the 24 hour clock, common vernacular still generally uses am and pm.
What corp? I’ve been managing my skill queue for a year and need someplace to go when my current job gets me back home. Euros okay, as long as I don’t have to learn Czech.
Also there is New Earth Time.
There’s one here, though I wouldn’t bet that its timing been recalibrated to equal a ‘metric day’.
Tapioca Dextrin, Maserschmidt, thank you. I’m surprised that manufacturing an obviously limited run of movements with something other than a 12:1 ratio for the hands can be done cost effectively. Pity the $15 job apparently turns twice/day. If it turned once, you could buy one of those, and replace the face with a “French Revolutionary” one. Actually, I’m suspicious of that one as well.
You used to see something like this among Christians, too (and might still, in monasteries), based on the “canonical hours”, times the monks would traditionally pray.
Really? People in London say things like “I work a nine to seventeen job” or “If we hurry we can catch the twenty one o’clock show at the Regal.” I’ve watched a lot of British television and movies and I’ve never noticed anything like that.
In 2008, I went to the Chinese province of Xinjiang, which is a vast territory in northwestern China. For some reason, China is in one time zone, although the country is roughly the size of the United States (imagine LA and NYC the same time). So, what the locals did was to have their own local time which was 2 hours behind Beijing. In Kashgar, it was always good when asking about a time for something, was it on Beijing time or Xinjiang time.
I was there in the summer, and because of the time zone, the sun did not go down until 11 PM which I thought was pretty trippy. I would call 9 PM, “9 in the afternoon” for laughs.
What is the time zone for the North or South Poles? Could someone walk like, a 1/2 mile in any direction, walk a circle around the pole and go through all the time zones?
In Britain we use both, but never use constructs like seventeen o’clock - if you use the 24 hour clock you just say, for example, ‘seventeen twentyfive’.
The 24hr clock is mainly used for timetables and such like but if you said: "I’ve scheduled the meeting for 16:00 everyone would understand what you meant.
That’s because 24 hour notation is used in time tables and such. In everyday life times are given using the 12 hour system. I remember watching a British school TV programme dealing with teaching adult people how to convert times between the twain. It seemed quite ridiculous to me who had grown up with it.
Thailand uses four 6-hour periods, so 8 a.m. is the equivalent of “2 morning”, 9 p.m. is “3 evening”, etc. They also use the 24-hour clock, but never the two 12-hour periods.
(Thailand is in the tropics so doesn’t bother with summer time, but then-P.M. Thaksin wanted to change Thailand’s clock by one hour, so that the stock market opened at the same as those of Singapore, etc. Changing just the opening hour of financial institutions wouldn’t have been good enough: Bangkok’s elite would then have had to compete with the lower classes in the morning traffic jam. The proposal was finally rejected when citizens complained that kids would be waiting for schoolbuses in the dark.)