In the abstract, yes, it’s a better system.
In reality, I’m used to the traditional twelve-hour system and if we switched over to a twenty-four hour system I would never really get it and would spend the rest of my life being confused about what time it was.
Funny this is a poll now as my watch switched to 24 hour time and I need to go back to 12 hour time.
Negative Ghost Rider, the pattern is full.
My preferred radio station publishes its schedule in 24-hour time. I wish they wouldn’t.
That’s Clarence Oveur.
This. Not to derail, but I think that’s the real reason the US hasn’t switched to Metric. I know instinctively how long, say, 8 inches is, but not 8 cm.
Now if I’d been using metric all along, I’d know that, but it’s hard to un-learn 40-odd years of habit.
No. It causes me no struggle to use the same time system as everyone else. The AM/PM modifier removes ambiguity, as does saying noon and midnight for the two times that are ambiguous.
If I use 24-hour, it would be like using metric. Sure, I can see why it’s better in many ways, but then I’d have to constantly convert to talk to everyone else, and that’s mental energy best spent on other things. Sure, converting to 12 hour is a lot easier than those other conversions, but it’s still unnecessary.
I would say I’m surprised at people preferring more 24-hour time, but I suspect a thread like this would attract the more passionate people, and people are more likely to be passionately for 24-hour time rather than passionately against it.
The 24 hour clock is officially used in Romania. We are accustomed to it but we can use both. I have no preference.
People are still confused. A day (or half a day) is an interval of time; midnight and noon are points in time that divide one day from the next, or morning from afternoon. They belong to neither interval.
I think we should go back to having the day begin at dawn instead of at midnight. It’s silly to call 1:30 a.m. “Tuesday morning.” It’s still “Monday night.”
That’s pretty much how I think of reality - to me the handoff from one day to the other takes place at 6am. (Irrespective of when the sun rises.)
And I use 12-hour time and always have. About the only benefit I could see to switching to 24-hour time is dispensing with that idiocy where 12pm directly follows 11:59am.
That’s why the Chicago Manual of Style suggestion to write the interval as June 9 - June 10 makes a lot of sense. But with 24 hour time, it makes sense to me, too, if you use 0:00 or 24:00, I know which day you’re talking about. It’s all convention. If everyone want to agree that “midnight Friday” means the transition from Friday to Saturday, that’s fine. I think of it as the time when Thursday goes into Friday. I don’t care which way anyone does it, as long as it’s universally understood. The fact that it technically is in between days doesn’t really matter. Just give me a spoken/written convention that is understood. And the Chicago style suggestion does that well. I typically do not use a.m. or p.m. for midnight and noon, but rather write 12 midnight or 12 noon, but, conventionally, it seems that 12 midnight is represented as 12 a.m., and 12 noon is represented as 12 p.m., for those who do not follow my convention.
Unless they have changed recently, our transit system uses a day that starts and ends at 4 am, and uses a “28 hour” clock. For example - a driver’s schedule might show their last bus leaving at 2530 (or 1:30 am). The times between 0000 and 0359 weren’t used. The “new day” began at 0400 (4 am).
My sister uses it because she worked in a hospital for over 40 years. I don’t really care. Either’s fine.
That’s also when I learned hospitals didn’t use the same names for work shifts that our dad used at the Post Office (Day, Swing, Graveyard). You don’t really want to say you work Graveyard shift at a hospital.
I prefer millidays.
Today.Now is 151.951
If noon is at the top, the hand is supposed to track the position of the sun, more or less.
24-hour time is clearly more practical and intuitive. Unfortunately for me, I grew up with 12-hour time, and my “feel” for each hour of the day is still associated with the 12-hour version.
I switched all my clocks to 24-hour time a few years ago and have slowly been recalibrating my brain. However, mostly what’s happened is I’ve become very efficient at translating to the 12-hour time instantaneously and relying on that, rather than building any intuition for the 24-hour version.
This is complicated by the fact that I refer to my (analog) watch quite a bit, and almost all analog watches still use 12-hour time (even those made in countries that are nominally using 24).
The date ambiguity has been an issue for a long time, and in fact used to be more of a problem, as you can tell if you look at old almanacs which describe incompatible conventions for when the new day begins among astronomers, sailors, and civilians. (Astronomical days still begin at noon, though of course any specification of a date like June 4th refers to the civil calendar.)
If you write it down, noon is obviously “m.”, not “a.m.” nor “p.m.” - think what the abbreviations mean- but I have remarked that the indicator on a digital clock flips right at that instant which leaves it reading “12:00 p.m.”, adding to the confusion. To be clear it is better to avoid labelling midday or midnight as either a.m. or p.m. - use m. / m.n. or- much better- spell the words out in English.
Seven bells, and all is well
For awhile, I’d see 12:00n and 12:00m for noon and midnight, respectively. Haven’t seen that usage in several years at least, though.
Gotta admit, I don’t like midnight being 12:00am and noon being 12:00pm, because the middle of the night doesn’t feel like a.m. When people started using that notation, it took me years to stop getting it backward.
At least the 24 hour people don’t have to deal with all that.
My problem with a 24 hour clock is that, even though I know better, my brain wants to have 1800 hours = 8:00pm, rather than 6pm. And so forth. ETA: That’s not a flaw with 24-hour time; it’s a flaw with me, having spent six and a half decades with 12 hour clocks almost exclusively. I just can’t adapt. You can teach an old dog new tricks, but it’s hard to undo longstanding mental habits.