Midnight is a stupid time for the clock to roll over to the next day

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Submitted ⁨⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca⁩ to ⁨showerthoughts@lemmy.world⁩

The day should start at like… Equatorial dawn or something.

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Kolanaki@pawb.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It should work like Animal Crossing.

The new day doesn’t start until 6am.

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- PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Exactly, but except 6am should be 00:00
  
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    Then it wouldn’t be 6am
    
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- Witchfire@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Home ownership should also work like Animal Crossing
  
  But then you’d spend your entire life doing unfulfilling mediocre jobs to pay off debt
  
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  - RebekahWSD@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    If all I had to do to pay that loan was occasionally shake some apple trees and sell them to the raccoons nephews and also get paid ticket money for doing chores, sign me the fuck up
    
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FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I would say it isn’t that stupid. The old humans picked one of the extremes, in this case the most complete absence of the sun (which includes the lowest point in the sky for some of the Vikings etc.) to mark this change. I think if they had picked midday we would have the same argument just about the daytime. And if they had picked any other time there would have to have been a “good” reason, like a religious one. It’s the time of day Mohammed went to Medina or the Buddha looked at nirvana. Otherwise the old humans wouldn’t have been onboard with that decision for centuries.

Time keeping is like the imperial system of measurements. It works but it doesn’t make a lot of fucking sense.

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- PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  I hate it, because each calendar day has two half-nights.
  
  Like… So if you say “the night of the 5th” is that before dawn or after dusk?
  
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    If you say night of the 5th, that will mean the time from sunset to midnight on the fifth.
    
    After that it’s morning/pre-dawn of the 6th.
    
    This isn’t new or controversial.
    
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  - Aatube@kbin.melroy.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    i've never seen someone who takes that as "before dawn"
    
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  - FriendOfDeSoto@startrek.website ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    You have a choice in life. You can accept certain things you cannot change. This one, you won’t change. Even if you spearheaded a popular movement I doubt you’ll get it changed. Everybody hates DLST and we still can’t get rid of it.
    
    So I suggest you adapt your language. You don’t talk about the night of the fifth but the night from the fifth to the sixth. Three additional syllables in this case and the confusion evaporates quickly. You’re focusing on the perceived problem and not on the solution. If you do resolutions for the new year, maybe add that point to your list.
    
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  - foggy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    The night of the 5th would be sometime after 4pm on the 5th.
    
    What is confusing about this?
    
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ch00f@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Back in college, we had “Random Standard Time” where midnight was midnight, but it won’t “tomorrow” until 5am.

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- jqubed@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  The TV broadcast day typically starts at 5 AM in the US. On the schedule, times between midnight and 5 AM might have XM listed instead of AM if it continued to carry the previous day’s name. For example, at a CBS station the Monday schedule would list The Late Show as starting at Monday 11:35:00 PM and The Late Late Show as starting at Monday 12:35:00 XM instead of Tuesday 12:35:00 AM.
  
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- cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It works in Animal Crossing…
  
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DagwoodIII@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.

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- PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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?
  
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  - paper_moon@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
    
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  - Onomatopoeia@lemmy.cafe ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    feels like a day should be one daylight period and one night period, but it’s currently a daylight period and two half nights.
    
    Only to you.
    
    In day to day conversation, when someone says “I slept like shit last night”, we all know what that means.
    
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  - SwingingTheLamp@piefed.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
    
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- hedgehog@ttrpg.network ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  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.
  
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  - DagwoodIII@piefed.social ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    *yes, I am aware of the actual facts. I am giving the historical view point.
    
    You ignored the asterisk
    
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tiredofsametab@fedia.io ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Some cultures considered sunset to be the end of the day and beginning of the next one. That seems good to me in a sense but very unwieldy for modern 24-hour time. The year also started when life began to return and planting could start.

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- MrFinnbean@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  That would mean summer for me is just one 2,5 month long day. Same with winter.
  
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realitista@lemmus.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Dawn is too variable. I don’t think it happens at the same time even at the equator. It’s best it happens in the middle of the night when no one has anything planned.

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- PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Naw, 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.
  
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  - realitista@lemmus.org ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ 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.
    
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  - oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    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.
    
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1D10@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Regardless of time every day should start with a little jingle.

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- Cevilia@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  Every weekday starts with the Arkanoid jingle.
  
  Every weekend starts with a full performance of Fairy Reflection.
  
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thatradomguy@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
9 oclock is always a stupid time for legit everybody to be at the same place at same time.

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cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
It’s only stupid in 12 hour time.

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- PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  It’s stupid in 24 hour time too.
  
  Because what do you mean a day has 2 nights?
  00:00-06:00 is night, and 20:00-23:59 is night.
  
  So the “night of the 5th” refers to which one, and how do you refer to the other one?
  
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  - cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    “The night of the 5th” would be 2000-2359. After that, it’s the (early) morning of the 6th.
    
    I get ya, though.
    
    If you want a more confusing one, which months belong to which seasons? Most people seem to think winter (at least in the Northern hemisphere) is December through January. We are certainly in the winter now, and it’s December. Ergo, December is a winter month, right? Christmas is a winter holiday, right? Yes, but also no. The first day of winter is the winter solstice, December 21. So 10 days of December are winter, but 21 days are autumn. (And Christmas, as it’s celebrated today, just hijacked the winter solstice to bring Christianity to pagans.) So when people say the weather is changing, it’s warm in December… yeah no shit! The first 3 weeks of it are autumn, and autumn is not necessarily cold!
    
    If people thought of Winter as January through March, Spring as April through June, Summer as July through September, and Autumn as October through December, people wouldn’t trip about seasons feeling longer or shorter, because they’d be attributing the correct months to the seasons. Of course, since seasons are based on solstices and not the months, it’s more accurate to say Winter is the first quarter of the year following the Winter Solstice (which is a better year end/beginning), Spring is the second quarter of the year leading up to the Summer Solstice, Summer is the third quarter of the year following the Summer Solstice (which should be celebrated as well), and Autumn is the fourth quarter of the year leading up to the Winter Solstice.
    
    Time is really only funny because the terms we made up to define them are not perfect. You would prefer the day begin with sunrise, and end when the night ends. That makes sense, to a point. I know some pagan cultures measured months by the moon cycle, so it’s not unreasonable.
    
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FreshParsnip@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I have an unpredictable sleep cycle. If I’m up really late, my time to arbitrarily start doing things I plan to do the next day is 3am

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oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
I think metric time would be best, honestly.

This system is fine, but metric makes more sense intrinsically to me, being somewhat of a percentage of day kind of thing.

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- PeriodicallyPedantic@lemmy.ca ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  You can still have that, but base the start of the day on dawn(ish).
  
  I do like metric time in principle, but also base 12 is better than base 10 so I’m torn
  
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  - oopsgodisdeadmybad@lemmy.zip ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    I get why people thought it was convenient to have it divisible by so many other numbers, but my opinion is fuck all that.
    
    “Military time” should be standard in our system, the am/pm problem is absofuckinglutely stupid, pointless, and counterproductive.
    
    Beginning of day should be low number. Increase until end of day and reset. There is no good argument for starting over halfway through and if you think there is think again because you’re wrong.
    
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