Quick rant on 24 hour time and car paints

Hello,

Wanna make a quick rant to see who else feels like me...

What the bloody mess is up with 12 hour time? AM/PM...after I understood 24 hour time and how it makes sense I hate 12 hour time. It makes no logical sense. "Yeah let's meet at 7" 7 what? AM or PM? Too much dependance on context. But if they said "Yeah let's meet at 1900" I would know exactly what time it was...7 PM on 12 hour time.

12 hour time makes no sense. Why divide the day into two sections? What for? And why does the military use it, as far as I understood? The euro setting on my E30 on-board-computer displays 24 hour time. The way I see it is 24 hour time is the natural way time is to be displayed anyway. Using 12 hour time is like counting with half your hand...ugh...

24 hour time uses less digits, is quicker to understand and is more natural. "I'm not in the military, I don't need to know that" "I don't want to know that" are common excuses when I ask people. It's like nobody uses it here. It's so simple to understand, it just takes a little getting used to...it's the same as 12 hour time until 1 o'clock, when 24 hour time continues to 13. 1400 is 2pm, 1500 is 3pm, and so on. And speaking of time calculation, how do you figure the time span from 6 AM to 3PM? 5 AM to 11 PM? Huh?

Ughhhh....enter 24 hour time. 1500-600 (3PM - 6 AM) is 9 hours. 2300 - 500 (You could also use colons if you wanted to, I'm not) is 18 hours.

Easy. Done.


Now I feel better on that part. Also, I work at a dealer. People, if you buy any car, NEVER GET BLACK. Ever. Ever. When it scratches, you can see it clear as the moon at night. Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, black, and so on...all those colors, all the shades...Don't get those colors. Red, black, blue, dark green, etc are nice colors—I like them—but they're showroom colors, garage or trailer queen colors. They're very high maintence and it's very difficult to get them perfect.

The best overall color you can get is white. Pure white. Water spots, light scratches, lint/light dust...you can't even see it a cubit (about 18 inches, or about an arm's length) away. On black when it scratches you see it like nothing else. Water spots are akin to rocks in the desert.

Light silver and light beige are other decent colors, but white is the best overall. "But what about rock chips and cracking of the paint?" Yes you can see those on white too, as you can see dirt, but you can also see those on literally every other color except...maybe a entirely surface-rusted car.

Get white folks. Nothing like (I work at a Honda dealer) hopping in a new Ridgeline (those things aren't all that great BTW, they only have 3.5L VTEC V6 engines, and they're over-hyped. About the same performance as a small pickup with the same engine) with black color and one key scratch and it's ruined. With white I could probably make an average key scratch and you wouldn't even see it 10ft away.



Now I feel better. Chime in folks.

I'm with you on the clock issue. Especially since I once booked a return flight, thinking it left midday, only to realize (fortunately days before I even left for the trip) that it was a red-eye leaving after midnight.

Fortunately, I grew up in Germany, where 24hr time is used for all 'official' purposes. Another thing Germans do is switching the date at midnight, as it should be. I always have to stop and think here in the US, since some companies tend to continue to use the same date after midnight since they tend to think of it belonging to the same business day.

Icecube - Thanks for posting this! I thought I was the only one left of my generation who liked and used the 24 hr time format. My uncle taught me just after he returned from a little island in the south pacific. I remember having a great time talking to the solders on a DC-3 on a flight to Ohio. I still use 24 hr time and get the same reactions as you likely do. My Mom has no problem with this, but then she will be 93 next month. What could she know?

I've been using 24-hour time on any watches and clocks which have that option. It just seems more natural.

I also like the idea of white cars. Besides the advantages you mentioned, white cars have greater visibility in all conditions except a blinding blizzard.

I would also like to see the real phonetic alaphabet become more widely used, you know "alpha, bravo, charlie,....." instead of someone trying to think of something on the spot, " a as in, uh, alabaster, b as in, uh, borat, c as in, uh, caledonia...."

I prefer any light colored vehicle because of the heat. How do you tell a Texans truck in a parking lot? It's the one parked under the tree even if it's 200 yards from the door. (except mesquite - the sap will pop the paint right off in a very short time)

The thing I don't like about white cars is how hard they are to photograph. Ya, small complaint I have a white car now. It really does hide the dirt good, so good in fact, I forget how white it is until I wash it again. Silver/grey is perfect IMO.

As to 24 hour time I like it too, I tend not to use it as much tho, makes me sounds like a nerd. Which yes I am, but I try not to play one on TV.

ZULU time

Phonetic Alphabet

Yes folks...

Phoentic alphabet...yes. Agreed. After getting my feet wet in radio (MURS, I have two NT-10s, but there's nobody in town, I find the radios fun however) I needed to read up on the phonetic alphabet...but it's fallen by the wayside.

Any nut who uses 12 hour time needs fixing. No normal person ought to use it.

White cars...yeah they're blinding. But worth it. Unless you're a detailer with plenty of experience under your belt (and I just started out) and you know how to buff without burning or unevenness, forget about other colors. Grey is just as bad as the other colors, BTW.

Oh, and crack your windows open and use a sunshade. Park your car with the shade facing the most sun. Nothing really ruins an interior more than dedicated sunbaking. And it can get dangerous trying to hold a scorching steering wheel...when you have to hold it but you can't because it's too hot.

Maintain your cars too. Give them a weekend's worth of attention every so often.

Sounds like some of you guys need one of these WWII era 24-hour Chelsea ship's clocks...



A few are almost always for sale on ebay, do a search for "Chelsea 24 clock".

Heh....

Seen similar 24 hour analog clocks.

Analog gauges are good for comparing the current figure in relation to the rest of the figures. Very much a visual display...

However, digital is quicker to read...at-a-glance stuff. Also you can cram more in there.

I am totally a digital guy. The 8th gen Civic readouts appeal to me as a consequence..

24 hour time here as well. Set all my clocks to it except the analog wall clock I use as a quick reference.

while were on the topic of stuff making sense..

Use the bloody metric system...:laughing:

Twellmann said:

Use the bloody metric system...:laughing:

Click to expand...

Yeah, really.

At my job, we use 24-hours time (which I love, and makes perfect sense)... but everything we do is measured in feet, tenths of a foot, and hundredths of a foot. Not an inch in sight! This makes no sense to me... if we're going through all this trouble, why not just use metric? I mean, it's EASY to break a meter down into tenths and hundredths (and thousandths), and people understand it.

icecube said:

Hello,
What the bloody mess is up with 12 hour time? AM/PM...after I understood 24 hour time and how it makes sense I hate 12 hour time.

Click to expand...

I'll bet you have a digital watch. Those are recent inventions. Time was invented much earlier in history. When I was a kid, almost all watches and clocks had dials with hands. 24 hours on a dial is too much clutter. You need high resolution eyeballs to read them.

At one time towns had a bell tower that would bang out the time. It would take a lot of patience and mental acuity to count 24 dongs.

Actually I kinda like analog clocks, but all mine are now digital.

Why are days divided into 24 hours anyway. Why not 12 hour days with each hour twice as long. Or maybe divide the day into 10 hours as the metric fanatics once tried to do. Who invented the hour anyway, and what did he use to measure the passage of time?

I guess everyone around the world uses 24 hour days, and seven day weeks. How did that happen, and when?

By the way, if you want to hate things, I can think of lots of other things to hate that might be more productive.

jtr1962 said:

I also like the idea of white cars. Besides the advantages you mentioned, white cars have greater visibility in all conditions except a blinding blizzard.

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You are an observant fellow. I live where there are roads that are subject to drifting snow. It causes very poor visibility and white vehicles completely disappear.

My father once taught driver's training. The school was on a road that often had drifting snow. The school was forced to use a white car for driver's training.

If you're going to keep it a long time, brown cars are best.

That way when they get all rusty they still look brand new

Rust colored paint sounds like a winner to me

I agree about 24 hour time, and also about the metric system, but I think it just comes down to what you were raised on, and what you are used to. Change is hard. Even though I understand the practicality of 24 hour time and the metric system, there's just no way I feel I will ever fully adopt them. Remember the U.S. government trying to get everyone to start using the metric system by posting some distances between cities in kilometers? It never worked. I don't feel we here in the U.S. will ever fully adopt the metric system. The most rediculous attempt to get us kids to use the metric system that I remember was in 7th grade math class. There was a word problem that began with "Juan and his friends are playing metric football. How many meters......." Come on, really. Some things will never change. And that's not neccessarily a bad thing. If people are used to it, and it works, there's no reason to change it in my opinion.

What drives me crazy is how under the hood of some cars, half of the bolts are standard, and half are metric.

I kept my 94 Chevy pickup with "Quasar blue" paint looking near new up until last month when a teenage driver totalled it for me.
My new Silverado is "Victory red" (think Ferrari) and I plan to do the same with it. Yes, I take care of my cars.

You hate 12-hour clocks, yet you measure in cubits?