Sequence starting at 12, 01, 02, 03 etc. is "human oriented"?

What do leading zeros have to do with whether people use 12 hour time instead of 24 hour time?

Why is this stuff challenging, it feels like reddit over here. My point is that saying "we will meet at 4" is more human scale than "we will meet at 16" because it segments the context window into morning and afternoon for which most humans and situations do not require additional external context to put meaning to.

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Yizahi 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Leading zeroes have obviously nothing to do with my question. Reordered integers did though.

You'd be surprised but people in Europe also don't say "sixteen o'clock", they say "four" or "seven in the evening" if it is ambiguous. But at the same time the physical clocks and texts between people have completely clear and unambiguous time, one can understand it instantly. Why with British/USA time, when the clock is between 12 and 1, I always need to stop and analyze which of the bullshit time segments it is referencing, because of the wrong order of numbers, starting at 12, then going back to 1, then forward to 2 etc.

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roryirvine 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

In the UK, it's pretty normal to say "oh two twenty-three" for 0223 or "fourteen thirty-five" for 1435.

But when being less precise, we might say any of "half two this afternoon", "two thirty pm", or "fourteen thirty" depending on context.

As we do still use the 12 hour clock in less-formal situations, using an "oh" prefix for times before 1000 gives an extra point of disambiguation.

	▲	nickserv 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting that you say the 'o' to explicitly indicate the 24h format. In France we just say "let's meet tomorrow at 8 hours" for example, to which the person has to ask something like "Wait, do you mean at 8 hours or 20 hours?" It's usually obvious from the context, but not always.