civilization as we know it began in the northern hemisphere. The gnomon when illuminated by the sun cast a shadow on these numbers and you calibrate this depending on what latitude you're in on earth's surface. Each sundial only works for one latitude. So so sundials are completely useless at night like Spider-Man in the middle of a meadow. And then we invented digital timekeeping where there's just numbers. We've lost the power to think about time geometrically.
Is your compass actually wrong? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice explore magnetic fields, why clocks go clockwise, and how phone numbers got their area codes.
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Photo Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center from Greenbelt, MD, USA, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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