The day should start at like… Equatorial dawn or something.
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.
Regardless of time every day should start with a little jingle.
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.
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?
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.
It’s night from sunset until dawn. And if someone said “in the morning” I would never interpret that as meaning before dawn.
It is controversial, because one definition of “morning” is dawn to noon and another is midnight to noon. And saying “night” is “sunset to midnight” is also new because you just came up with that.
Morning and predawn are typically the times immediately surrounding dawn, not the time immediately after midnight.
If you told me “were going out to take photos at predawn” I’d assume you meant blue hour photos, not moonlit photos.
The night of the 5th would be sometime after 4pm on the 5th.
What is confusing about this?
i’ve never seen someone who takes that as “before dawn”. night is after dusk, midnight’s before dawn
Right.
But 00:01 is clearly still night. Night is typically considered from dusk til dawn.
So if we say “the night of the 2nd” then that’s from dusk til 23:59:59 of the 2nd.
Which is then followed by night that isn’t the night of the 2nd nor night of the 3rd.
And I’d say “before dawn” or “early morning” of the 3rd would be problematically ambiguous.
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.
I mean, I’m having fun arguing pedantics, but this is a pretty silly post. There is no room here for real practical solutions!
Back in college, we had “Random Standard Time” where midnight was midnight, but it wasn’t “tomorrow” until 5am.
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.
It works in Animal Crossing…
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.
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.
*yes, I am aware of the actual facts. I am giving the historical view point.
You ignored the asterisk
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?
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.
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.
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 12:00:01am or 00:00:01 in military time, then you’d be born the next day.
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.
People call it early morning. I dunno what to say dude. You’re fighting against how long? of established nomenclature
People don’t typically call immedi after midnight “early morning”.
But also this is a silly post.
maybe I should have said “unsatisfying” instead of “sucks”. The way the calendar works doesn’t match how we typically intuit a day.
It’s only stupid in 12 hour time.
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?
“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.
