this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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If your brain works in digital time, this is true.
Us olds have to translate the other direction.
It’s like hearing someone say “why doesn’t everyone just speak English? Why go through the extra effort of speaking Spanish?” because you assume everyone’s internal monologue is in English.
What do you mean if your brain works in digital time. This doesn’t translate for me and I grew up with regular clocks and wrist watches. All time is the same. A clock with both hands facing 12 is and always has been twelve o’clock. Clock face or digital clock. They give the same time. Comparing two devices that give the same information in different ways to language is absurd.
Your comparison could work if the subject being discussed was 12 vs 24 hour time keeping. Then there is a translation between the two.
Analog clocks lend themselves better to thinking in fractions of an hour or day, like this post is talking about, as an hour and a half day are both represented as a circle
Digital clocks lend themselves better to thinking in terms of number of minutes and hours directly. When working numerically, fractions of 60 are generally less intuitive, and fractions of 12 often so as well. Most people who don't work with angles often think of fractions in terms of percent, or powers of two.
"Quarter past" kind of tweaks the brain wrong when a quarter is intuitively 25.
Really? I've always found them very pleasing.
They chose 12 precisely because it's easy to divide!
I wish our numeric system was base 12 instead of base 10!
You're on Lemmy, of course you like fractions of 12. It is a very convenient base, having so many factors, but most people don't think like that
That might be the most obscure stereotype I've ever read. 😆
It’s also precision. I think this is the biggest thing we’ve lost is some expression of precision.
Actually a digital clock with both hands pointing at twelve is not a digital clock.
oh i think this may be a cultural thing, here in europe when we say "digital time" we specifically mean 24-hour time because "AM/PM" isn't used here.
It's the difference between saying "dinner's at seven" and "lunch ends at 13:30"
Ahhh!!! That totally makes sense. I took the comment to be about digital clocks specifically vs analog clocks. Not about the type of time keeping. Then the translation analogy totally makes sense and works! Gotta love learning new things from people. Thanks Swedneck!
It's inefficient is what I'm suggesting.
It is a one syllable difference, at most. Fif-teen versus Quar-ter-Past. Or Thir-ty versus Half-past. And for-ty-five versus quar-ter-till.
But it is also about precision. If I say "Let's meet up at 4:45" that implies a lot more specificity than "let's meet at quarter to five". The firmer is an exact time people should meet at and the latter is "around that time".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag goes into the difference between analog and digital time and what that means with thought processes. But a lot of it boils down to thinking in terms of "parts of a whole" versus "specific times".
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=NeopkvAP-ag
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
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I'm curious why it got the name digital time.
Because it is expressed as digits (numbers)
it's not like people generally pronounce it fully anyways, it'll come out as "qua'tr" or "quartah" depending on dialect
All of which is still two syllables?
The most inefficient part of human brain is having to consciously process things. So going with whatever patterns you're used to is always going to be faster
When people report the time they aren’t reporting their internal dialogue they’re reading what it says on the display. What it says on the display is “four twenty three” not “halfway between quarter and half past four”.
OP didn’t say anything about reading time off a digital clock.
What about the opposite scenario of reporting the time you read off an analog clock? Would you translate to digital first?
In your specific scenario, sure, it would require extra work to convert it, so I’d just read it as is.
But when making plans, and especially spans between two different times, my brain thinks of time as portions of a pie chart, and I’d have to translate 3/4 to 45 minutes.