Noon is when the sun is highest in the sky.
Solar noon is, yes. But in most places, solar noon and 12 PM are at different times.
Comment on Midnight is a stupid time for the clock to roll over to the next day
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 3 days ago
Noon is when the sun is highest in the sky. That’s the midpoint of the day. Midnight would be when the sun is on the other side of the world* and is now coming closer.
*yes, I am aware of the actual facts. I am giving the historical view point.
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 2 days ago
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 2 days ago
*yes, I am aware of the actual facts. I am giving the historical view point.
You ignored the asterisk
hedgehog@ttrpg.network 2 days ago
I didn’t. Your asterisk and clarification was ambiguous.
DagwoodIII@piefed.social 2 days ago
Your asterisk and clarification was ambiguous.
‘were’
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I know what they are, I just think they’re stupid, because what day does the night belong to?
It feels like a day should be one daylight period and one night period, but it’s currently a daylight period and two half nights.
Like… If you say “night of January 1st” is that from midnight to dawn or from dusk to midnight? And then what day owns the other part, and why isn’t it in that calendar day?
paper_moon@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I forget which exact midnight represents, but the immediate second after midnight would be the ‘morning’ of the next day. If you’re born at 12:00:01 am or 00:0:01 in military time, then you’d be born the next day.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Right, but midnight is the mid of the night, so it’s still night 1 second after midnight, it’s not morning of the following day.
paper_moon@lemmy.world 2 days ago
People call it early morning. I dunno what to say dude. You’re fighting against how long? of established nomenclature
Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe 2 days ago
Only to you.
In day to day conversation, when someone says “I slept like shit last night”, we all know what that means.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
I mean, look at my name.
And also this is a silly post where I complain about how it feels bad that a calendar day doesn’t consist of a single contiguous day and single contiguous night, even though that’s kind of how we intuit about it.
SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip 3 days ago
I feel like we could fix this problem with new terminology. We have words for many various events and stretches of the diurnal cycle: Dawn, sunrise, morning/forenoon, afternoon, sunset, and dusk, but nothing quite so definite for the night hours. I would certainly understand what it would mean if somebody said, “the evening of the 3rd into the wee hours of the 4th,” but those terms lack precision. Both foremidnight and aftermidnight would convey the meaning, but sound awkward.
Historically, I think it makes sense that we base the reckoning of a day on our natural photoperiod. Until the advent of artificial lighting, the night was a liminal period of time, and hardly anybody was awake and active to make dividing it up useful. I suppose we could change the rollover time to noon, but that divides up the sunlit period across different days. At least we already have words to use, and “the morning of January 1st” would be unambiguous, as would “the night of January 1st,” but counterintuitively, the morning of January 1st would occur after the afternoon. Making it some other time would just be just as arbitrary, and much more awkward. Sunrise, for instance, varies quite a bit throughout the year. (By about half an hour even at the equator, and by almost 5 1/2 hours in Oslo.) So, now does the sunrise on January 1st occur just after or just before the new day begins? What about places where the sun stays in the sky for longer than a clock-day during parts of the year?
Better to just agree on some new words, I think.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 2 days ago
Maybe new words would fix it.
But even from the historical perspective it doesn’t make sense. Why wouldn’t they pick dawn as the natural starting point of the photoperiod? As you said, nobody was awake at night, so why did they choose a time when nobody was awake to make the differentiation on the date?
When you say “sunrise varies quite a bit”, that’s only from the perspective of a midnight-centric time measurement; sunrise wouldn’t vary, it’d be the start of the day by definition.
There are some issues with using dawn, but they wouldn’t be a concern historically and we have modern solutions;
Like days wouldn’t be exactly 24 hours, and dawn is affected not just by latitude but also geography.
But fundamentally it’s more satisfying if a calendar day is compromised of one single contiguous day and one contiguous night 😌