Comment on Midnight is a stupid time for the clock to roll over to the next day
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 week agoNaw, the start of the day should be at the start of the day. within a margin of error.
When you say “I don’t think it happens at the same time” that’s only because you’re counting arbitrarily from midnight. If you counted from dawn, then midnight wouldn’t happen at the same time every day.
There are reasons why actually using dawn is bad.
But the thrust I’m making is that it’s unsatisfying because we intuit that a “day” is a contiguous day followed by a contiguous night, but that’s not what it really is.
Not sure how this is any more or less arbitrary, or more helpful.
And at least you can plan “I need to be up in 6 hours” when you lay down instead of "I might have 6 and a half or 7 hours, but better plan on 6 just in case.
It’s just as arbitrary, just based on a different, variable, irregular, and unpredictable (unless everyone gets degrees in astronomy). It may be predictable by the math, but no one wants to do any of that math every day.
It’s nice because people intuit and talk about days as a contiguous daylight period followed by a contiguous nighttime period, when they aren’t having discussions about timekeeping. It’d be nice if we picked an arbitrary delineation that aligned to that.
Wrt doing math, realistically you could just pick an arbitrary day of the year as your reference and every day begins at a multiple of 24 hours from that. No math is needed.
I’m not looking for perfect alignment with local dawn in every location on the planet, I’m aiming for a calendar day that aligns with our intuition of the day/night cycle.
But more than that, I’m having a silly discussion about timekeeping.
Exactly.
realitista@lemmus.org 1 week ago
Then we have to have a system for days that are no longer a perfect 24 hours, but rather a few seconds off every day. That means you can no longer plan much of anything that runs for longer than a day without doing a bunch of offset math, it would be a disaster for anything that required accurate measurement of time.
PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
I’m aware, but that is a modern problem only. And for that, we could have modern solutions that approximate dawn.
The goal isn’t for it to be perfect day start at sunrise, it’s for it to be conceptually satisfying and more closely match how we talk and intuit about days.
realitista@lemmus.org 1 week ago
I think it would be even less satifying as for most people who don’t live on the equator it would be off by hours anyway.