Why what?

Sundials were absolutely surely invented several times around the world, also in Australia etc. After all, a sundial is nothing but a stick in the ground.

If mechanical clocks were invented before colonizers arrived, then the colonizers’ clocks eventually replaced them. But, I understand they were invited only after all of the southern hemisphere had been colonized by less civilized nations, so they follow the colonizers’ standards everywhere.

Sorry, I did understand all of the words in your comment, but not what you actually meant with it. Could you paraphrase, please?

So does Finland:

(Except in internal timetables of bus companies, that typically run until 30 o’clock, as it still officially counts as the same working day)

I think Finland would have said bye bye to him for that. USA could then have sent someone else to replace him.
Iceland cannot, because it doesn’t have an army of its own.

Have you noticed how common it is for buses and trains to leave at 23:59? The idea is to make it clear what evening the train is really running.

In Finnish we call noon “12 o’clock” and midnight “0 o’clock”. Makes things a lot more clear.
And the first hour of a calendar day is indeed 0:00 until 0:59:59.99… Since there are only 24 hours in a day, there cannot be a “24:30”. (Except in internal timetables of bus companies, that typically run until 30 o’clock, as it still officially counts as the same working day)

I know it’s called that way, because I’ve seen the same movies. But was SolidShake meaning his comment sarcastically, meaning that “There was no way for me to know that most of the world uses the normal clock” or without sarcasm, meaning “I had always assumed that most of the world uses the normal clock.”

He could really mean either one. I could probably delve into his comment history and make some kind of a psychoanalysis based on those comments? But, meh.

Yeah. Which is what I said. 11:59:59.9999999 is indeed AM, jos like you said. And then comes a tiny sliver of time that is precisely at the border, but a trillionth of a picosecond after that, you’re in the PM world. After the infinitely short moment that is the actual precise noon.

Why?

In general?

Everything after midday is PM. 12:00:00.00000001 is after midday. Therefore it can only be PM.

That’s the logic I use :)

I would be interested in knowing whether this was said with sarcasm or without. Because both are plausible!

Depends on what you mean with “showing time”. They won’t be showing the correct time, that’s true. But.

in the Southern hemisphere logic flips completely.

In the southern hemisphere they think Australia is suitable for human life.

At least some North American indigenous peoples say something akin to “with the sun”. And I think in yoga terminology they have a similar phrasing, or am I mistaken?

I wouldn’t blame the Babylonians for us breaking the good standard and going 58, 59, 60, 61, 62 instead of the 58, 59, 100, 101, 102 that works just fine. They were first, we are the ones who added a new system aside the old one instead of replacing it.

If that was the case, we would now be talking about 48 h clocks vs. 24 h clocks.

18:40 pm on the 24h clock would equal 36:40 on the 48 h clock. You would still not know whether it’s night or day just looking at the time.

…and then they noticed: “Damn, we could have lit everything on fire and seen our clocks in the night time millenia ago!”

Ein, zwei, drei, fire, funf, sechs, seben, acht, neun, zein, elf, zwolf, dreizein…

One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen…

Yksi, kaksi, kolme, neljä, viisi, kuusi, seitsemän, kahdeksan, yhdeksän, kymmenen, yksitoista, kaksitoista, kolmetoista…

(though, notice that our words for “eight” and “nine” are derived from those for “two” and “one”. We used base 8 before migrating to Europe and applying the local standard. Then it was "two left until the new ten and “one left until the new ten”
With base 8 you can use your fingers to count up to 24 because you can use your thumbs for marking the “tens”. Or to 32, but that already takes a little bit of an effort because from my perspective your left thumb is on the right.)

But yeah, base 10 is the worst. 12 can be divided by 3 without problems. And base 8 allows counting far higher with just fingers.

*Being evolution of sundials located on the northern hemisphere.