this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
918 points (98.3% liked)

xkcd

8825 readers
109 users here now

A community for a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

https://xkcd.com/2846

Alt text:

I average out the spring and fall changes and just set my clocks 39 minutes ahead year-round.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] fuzzy_feeling@programming.dev 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But can we first make a day everywhere 24h instead of 2x 12h?

[–] Spzi@lemm.ee 3 points 1 year ago

Let's jump straight to decimal time then.

1^h^23^m^45^s^ is 1 decimal hour, 23 decimal minutes, and 45 decimal seconds, or 1.2345 decimal hours, or 123.45 decimal minutes or 12345 decimal seconds; 3 hours is 300 minutes or 30,000 seconds. This property also makes it straightforward to represent a timestamp as a fractional day, so that 2023-10-26.54321 can be interpreted as five decimal hours and 43 decimal minutes and 21 decimal seconds after the start of that day, or a fraction of 0.54321 (54.321%) through that day (which is shortly after traditional 13:00)

[–] echodot@feddit.uk 1 points 1 year ago

That's a language problem, in a lot of European languages they already work like that.

In French the way they say 9:20 a.m. is literally "the time of 9 hours 20 minutes" and 3:45 p.m. is "the time of 15 hours 45 minutes". It's written as "h1545". Which is very close to how military time works in English speaking countries.