this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
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Wait...you think those are intuitive? Fuck no.
Who's going to intuitively know that "long hand pointing at 2" means "10 minutes after the hour"? Also, having the long hand for minutes is super unintuitive when hours are longer than minutes.
May not be super intuitive, but getting rid of them is intellectually lazy. If you know an hour is 60 minutes, it makes enough sense.
If an hour is 60 minutes, 60/12 is 5 minutes per number on the clock. Long hand is minutes because there are more minutes in a day than hours. Or at least that's how I can rationalize it.
If you can explain an analog clock that quickly, it's just lazy for them to not learn it. It also has cross application to make people more comfortable with mental math and multiples commonly seen in trigonometry.
Minutes are the smaller time division with 60 possible values so that hand is longer to reach to the tick marks for easier reading of the exact minute.
The hour hand only needs to distinguish between 12 possible values that are more spread out around the perimeter, so it doesn't need to reach very far to tell which hour out of 12 it is.