Personally, I wish everyone used the 24:00 clock. Maybe the military has messed me up, but I really prefer seeing something like 18:22 over 6:22pm. It just seems simplier.
The real beauty of the 24:00 clock is that it never actually shows that; at most 23:59. Then it goes to 0:00.
The 12:00 clock would be more respectable if it went from 0:00 (midnight/a.m.) to 11:59 a.m. then to 0:00 (noon/p.m.) and to 11:59 p.m. and never showed 12:00. (Let alone continuously flash such a thing as a demand that the time be set.)
That's what 12:00 clocks display in Japan, fwiw, and it's much less confusing (because, really, jumping from 11:59am to 12:00pm is nonsensical for people not familiar with that quirk)
Yet, in America, people say things like "do you have plans for the weekend?" Or, "What did you do last weekend?"
Nobody ever says, "Do you have plans for the upcoming two days which, respectively, constitute the end of this week and the start of the next one?"
So, Americans and Brits are inconsistent. They have "the weekend" which is a block of two days when salaried people with regular working hours don't work; and they have Sunday as not the week end, but rather the beginning; or the "front end" of the next week. Which means that the two days cannot be the weekend; they are two different ends of two different weeks.
> that's changing (by convention)
It's changing because people have to confront the above reasoning and realize that a week beginning in the middle of something that they have been calling "the weekend" for decades is silly.
I believe in my entire life I've encountered exactly one situation in which the day that is defined as the first day of the week actually made a difference to anything: my kids' swim school schedule, where Week N of the term runs from Sunday through to the following Saturday inclusive.
Since the working week (and the school week) here starts on Monday regardless of whether Sunday or Monday is regarded as the first day of the week, it seems to have always been a distinction without a difference to me.
Yes. Putting the year first and with 4 digits is the only safe way because, afaik, nobody anywhere uses yyyy/dd/mm. It's nice that it's also in order of significance but the main advantage is unambiguousness.
You'd think people would have learnt from Y2K but somehow we still see 2-digit years which make dates like 03/04/05 impossible to even guess at. It's slightly better since 2012 where a 2-digit year can't also be a month, but we'll have to wait till 2032 for 2-digit years to unambiguously mean year.
This is an area where I believe localization makes things worse, not better. If every website showed dates with the year first, people would easily understand, regardless of whatever silly local convention they have. As it is, whenever I see a ##/##/## date, I have to think about what the website might be trying to do (do they know what country I'm from? What country I'm in now? Are they using their own local convention?) and what possible dates it might mean. "I think that happened around August, so 08/10/14 is probably not the 8th of October." Localized dates just make no sense at all on the internet.
I cannot tell you the number of times in my life that a 12 hour clock has lead to a _major_ fuckup. I run all my personal clocks on 24hr to prevent said fuckups, but somehow I still feel weird telling people a meeting is at 15:00 in an email.
>but somehow I still feel weird telling people a meeting is at 15:00 in an email.
It feels weird because you think people will think it's weird. You're probably right.
Personally I use a 24-hour representation and convert it to 12 when communicating with others.
11:59AM -> 12:00PM, 11:59PM -> 12:00AM caused me mental discomfort for a long time. A 24-hour clock made a lot more sense, but it doesn't seem like most other people have a problem with 12.
They'd rather you used "normal" time. If you want to fight that battle go for it. I believe you're right.
I have not served in the military (we still had the draft in Germany when I finished school, but I was a conscientious objector), but I greatly prefer the 24-hour time format as well.
Maybe digital clocks/watches have influenced this preference, but I still think it is a good idea, because it is unambiguous.
There is something to be said for the french style 18h00. So when you see the "h" you know its 24-hour time. With the colon you aren't sure if its 12 or 24 hour time.
