You have it backwards. Analogue clocks are the way they are because of the 12-hour convention.

In ancient times, people did not have the concept of a “civil day”; they viewed day and night as separate things which alternated.

The Assyrians divided the day into six equal parts, and the night into six equal parts, called ush. But because sunrise and sunset move around over the course of the year, the lengths of day and night vary, and thus one ush during the day would not be the same length as an ush at night except around the equinoxes.

The Babylonians divided ushes in two to make hours, because it was easier to do astronomy in 12s than 6es. This resulted in 12 hours in a day and 12 hours at night, but daytime hours were still different lengths to nighttime hours, and the lengths of hours still varied over the course of the year.

The Greeks partially adopted the Babylonian system; they divided the day into 12 hours but the night was divided into four watches. The Romans copied the Greek system, but later went full Babylonian with 12 hours at night as well. (I feel like this coïncided with the rise of Christianity, but I have no evidence). The Romans introduced the concept of the civil day beginning at midnight (which the Chinese independently came up with), and over time, this led to the idea of 12 hours from midnight to noon, and 12 hours from noon to midnight. That idea postdates Rome, however; Roman hours were reckoned from sunrise to sunset and sunset to sunrise.

Assyrian astronomical knowledge seems to have reached China via India, as traditional Chinese timekeeping divides the civil day into 12 shi. Ancient shi were like Assyrian ushes; they were either 1/6 of a day or 1/6 of a night. Originally, midnight and noon fell in the middle of a shi, but this was changed to shi starting at midnight to make administration and astronomy easier. This system of variable-length shi continued to be used in Japan until about the Meiji Restoration.

Fixed-length hours are the result of analogue clocks, which are impractical to design to change the lengths of hours with the seasons (but not impossible; the wskusei clock is an ingenious Japanese clock from the 17th century that does exactly that). China had reliable, accurate water clocks by the Tang dynasty, while Europeans developed circular mechsnical clocks in the late Middle Ages. In neither case was it practical to make something as clever as the wakusei clock, so analogue clocks were marked the mean length of a shi or an hour as a reasonable approximation. Since there are 12 hours from midnight to noon and 12 from noon to midnight, that led to the 12-hour time system we know today.

Oh it gets better.

The statue — which rises 15 feet atop a 7-foot base — was commissioned and bankrolled by a collective of crypto investors seeking to boost visibility for their memecoin, $PATRIOT, according to The Daily Beast.

Sculptor Alan Cottrill told The Times in February that he agreed to create the bronze figure for $300,000 but complained that the investors were slow in paying. In November he proposed coating it in gold leaf.

His suggestion went down like an offering of water “to a person dying of thirst,” he said. “Immediately everybody jumped on board.”

There is a British comic strip called Buster Gonad and his Unfeasibly Large Testicles. It is an absurd, immature joke about a man with ridiculously enormous spasmojesticles whose titanic sperm factories keep causing him trouble. It’s fun when Star Trek predicts the future; when Viz does so, it makes me want to start liking alcohol.

Here you go

I’m reading The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars, and Caliphs by Marc David Baer. One of the numerous things he talks about is attitudes to wine in the Ottoman court, which set the time for all of contemporary Türkiye. Baer compares Turkish attitudes toward wine with similarly positive attitudes in Iran and the Arab nations, also noting that the Ottomans and Safavids both condemned each other as being drunk as good Muslims must never be. (The Ottomans and Safabids were constantly calling each other blasphemous for indulging in the very things they themselves loved doing).

It’s well-known that TS Eliot is an anagram of toilets.

More fun s that his full name, Thomas Stearns Eliot, is an anagram of I am a lesson to the arts (and also loathsome train sets)

The idea that all alcohol is haram is actually pretty recent. Muslims in the medieval and early modern eras interpreted the Qu’ran as forbidding specific types of fermented beverages rather than banning alcohol altogether, let alone all intoxicants as is generally the case today. Arab, Iranic, and Turkish poets wrote epic paeans to the greatness of wine and waxed lyrical about how it brought one closer to God and so all Muslims should drink it. Christian European diplomats complained that Muslim Turkish dignitaries outdrank them hard, and nobody could put away wine as well as the sultan.

Ever since Muhammad, at least some Muslims have interpreted the Qu’ran as banning any consumption of alcohol, but it’s unclear when this position became the dominant one. I know that wine flowed freely in the Ottoman court into the 17th century, so it was probably only some time in the Modern era.

And if everybody did that, society would utterly collapse as almost no necessary work got done.

I remember back in secondary school in the early 2000s, this was the literal textbook example of how the media frames things. The teachers’ union was up to some industrial action at the time, which made it all the more relevant.

“The union firmly insisted on their original position” “The union stubbornly insisted on their original position”

Consider also confidence vs arrogance.

“The minister confidently stated the dispute will be over soon” “The minister arrogantly stated the dispute will be over soon”

A bunch of Protestants think the Pope is the Antichrist, but apparently Vance identifies as Catholic, so yeah, he’s defying God. Catholic doctrine also holds that the Pope is infallible when ruling on theology.

On at least two occasions, a woman gave birth to twins right at the end/start of the year, resulting in twins born in different years.

Basically:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZiCl7j9mowk

Tom’s incongruity is entirely deliberate. Tolkien worked out Middle Earth in meticulous detail, but thought that a truly believable mythology needed to have a few mysteries, hence Tom.

My cousin, who has given birth twice, says a more accurate phrase is “I slept like a dad” (Her husband is super attentive and at least as involved in raising the children as she is). She told me this when we took the younger child, about eight months old, for a walk. Lots of heavy, loud traffic; cousin and I had to raise our voices to speak, yet the baby calmly slept the entire time.

I bet the Eurasians are the ones spreading the lies. There’s a reason we have always been at war with them.

That sounds like something a not would say.

They’re both based on water, but Fahrenheit has a backstory.

The first iteration was designed by Ole Rømer. Rømer, an astronomer, liked working in 60s, so he defined a temperature scale where 0° was the coldest day in winter and 60° was the boiling point of water*. Due to historical accident of when Rømer made his minimum temperature measurement, the freezing point of water was defined as 7.5°.

Daniel Fahrenheit didn’t like this; he though the freezing point of water should be an integer. So he slightly modified Rømer’s scale, making the degrees a hair smaller. 0° remained the same, but in the Fahrenheit temperature scale, water freezes at 8° and boils at 64°*.

(Side note: Rømer and Fahrenheit used ice-ammonia mixtures to calibrate their thermometers, but those were not used to define 0°, contrary to popular belief).

Fahrenheit’s early thermometers used alcohol, but he later started using mercury for more accurate instruments. Because mercury expands more than alcohol with the same temperature change, he invented a new scale in which the degrees were 1/4 the magnitude of his previous effort. In Fahrenheit’s mercury scale, water freezes at 32° and boils at 256°*.

…but some time after that, it turned out that Rømer’s original measurement of the boiling point of water was off by a lot (hence the asterisks in the above paragraphs). The actual difference between the freezing and boiling points if water was not 224°, but 180° (no doubt this would have pleased Rømer). The magnitude of a degree remained the same, but the actual boiling point of water turned out to be 212°.

And now you know.

The living space features three bedrooms and 3 1/2 baths and a detached guest house.

Price sounds about normal for San Francisco Bay. The more interesting question is why it has half a bath.

“Biblically accurate” angels refers to the Four Living Creatures who surround the throne of God in Ezekiel and Revelation. One is a lion, one us an oz, one is a human, and one is an eagle. They all have multiple wings, four faces, and eyes everywhere.

Contrary to popular belief, the Four Living Creatures are four specific cherubs and are not representative of angels as a whole. Most angels just look like humans; indeed, in Revelation, they are accompanied by 24 angels who are indistinguishable from humans.

It should also be noted that Ezekiel and Revelation are trippy as fuck, quite unlike the rest of the Biblical canon.