Why is it that Americans refer to 24 hour time as military time? I understand that the military uses the 24hr format but I don’t understand why the general public would refer to it like that?
It makes it seem like it’s a foreign concept where as in a lot of countries it’s the norm.
There is a cultural phenomenon called schismogenesis - the tendency for one culture to define itself by how it differs from other cultures around it. Even in cases where the culture Y approach is “better” by whatever metric, culture X people will reject it because it’s a Y thing and not an X thing. I see the US rejection of the metric system under Reagan being the most glaringly obvious example of this, but the time thing is probably part of it, too.
I just really wish we hadn’t gone with the whole base 60 system in the first place.
Base 60 is so handy though. Very divisible.
I think I once read that when the metric system was first defined during the French Revolution, they also tried to use a decimal system for time, but that was quickly abandoned.
Why the hate for base 60? It has its roots in Babylon and also forms the basis for angles in geometry.
I am not a baseist. Some of my favorite algorithms are base-2.
I kind of wish we had gone all the way with base 60