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Comment by joppy | Hacker News Reader

Are you sure this is not just the amount of exposure to each type of clock?

On the other hand, I’ve noticed that children who understand how to read only digital clocks are quite capable of answering what the time is (just read the numbers right off), but have trouble telling how many hours there are from 10am to 3pm.

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Great argument for using the 24h clock ;-)

Ever seen the 24h analog clock? :)

https://m8y.org/images/24.svg

I have the widget on my phone, it uses local sunrise/sunset to adjust the nighttime shaded area: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=info.staticfre...

I've been staying at that click for a solid ten minutes, but I can't figure out why minutes and seconds start on top, but hours on the bottom. Any idea why that particular choice was made?

From the sibling comment's link: "Noon is at the top, so that the hour hand mimics the path of the sun."

the 24 hour clocks I've seen usually are set up like this so daytime is the top half and night time the bottom - as though the tip of the hour hand was the sun

Adding additional info to my sibling comments. Since the bottom is designed to show night, it would be cool to grab a geolocation and draw the bottom based on sunrise/sunset times.

Related, I made a little toy[0] that lets you explore what analog clocks would like with an arbitrary number of hours in the day (since 12/24 is of course arbitrary too).

[0]: https://nadavrecca.com/eleventhour

12 may be an arbitrary number but with all it's numeric factors it sure is a convenient one!

This is very nice as it addresses the zero-index nature of time by going 0-23 instead of 1-24. Time would be much more comprehensible if all clock were marked that way.

Hm, I think most countries that use 24h time systems use 00:00:00 to 23:59:59

Ok, it is interesting that the top of 12h clocks in those countries is often a 12 instead of a zero [0]. Maybe the tension of a cardinal zero in an ordinal world (i.e. 1900 is the 20th century) lead the Swiss Railway to de-number the 12h clock [1].

0. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gare_de_Lyon_xCRW_13...

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_railway_clock

> Are you sure this is not just the amount of exposure to each type of clock?

I have a large analog clock in our living room that I look at every other day or so. I still find that I instantly understood the digital watch, but with the analog watch example I had to actually stop and look carefully at it for a second.

If I had a analog wrist watch I used every day I'm sure I'd be equally good with both. But I really think it takes more time to get used to the analog version. At least in modern society when we have numbers all around us all the time anyway. I'm sure someone who's not literate would feel very differently.

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