The day should start at like… Equatorial dawn or something.
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.
Dawn is too variable. I don’t think it happens at the same time even at the equator. And where on the equator? There are a lot of spots on the equator. It’s best it happens in the middle of the night when no one has anything planned.
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.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.
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 accurately 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.
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.
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.
It should work like Animal Crossing.
The new day doesn’t start until 6am.
Home ownership should also work like Animal Crossing and you are just given a home by a shady raccoon who says you’re in debt to him but never asks for you to repay the loan.
Home ownership should also work like Animal Crossing
But then you’d spend your entire life doing unfulfilling mediocre jobs to pay off debt
Exactly, but except 6am should be 00:00
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.
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?
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.“early morning of the 3rd” and “before dawn of the 3rd” definitely would not become 00:00—8:00 of the 2nd, and that’s all that matters imo for the practical utility of delineating borders between days in the first place. i also like organizing things but i see absolutely no way to define “organized” for this lol
I don’t understand what you mean here, why would “before dawn of the 3rd” become 00:00-08:00 of the 2nd?
I’m saying to shift what 00:00 is, to align with dawn(ish), so that a calendar day is comprised of a contiguous day followed by a contiguous night, which is how we typically intuit about days anyways when we aren’t talking about time.
I know there are practical modern issues with this, but this is a silly post about how unsatisfying it is for the day to start at midnight
The night of the 5th would be sometime after 4pm on the 5th.
What is confusing about this?
Right, but then how do you refer to before 5am on the 5th?
That’s not morning, and it’s not the night of the 4th. It’s awkward.But more importantly, it’s ugly. It’s not how we intuit about days. It’s unsatisfying.
I’ve heard people say “the wee hours of the night” to refer to time between midnight and dawn.
I think one of the reasons that there’s not a good word for that in English is because it’s the time anyone is least likely to be awake, so there’s not much reason to talk about it. And then by the time humans built enough lights to do something worthwhile at 02:00, we also had clocks and started to describe that period in reference to clock readings.
5 am is the morning. This isn’t negotiable. You’re wrong.
00:01 isn’t the morning. This isn’t negotiable. You’re wrong.
I think you’re perhaps like… Misunderstood or poorly educated here.
A.M. doesn’t meant “morning”.
It means “ante meridian” which is Latin for “before noon”.
It’s not up for debate. You’re very thoroughly wrong.
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…
Regardless of time every day should start with a little jingle.
Every weekday starts with the Arkanoid jingle.
Every weekend starts with a full performance of Fairy Reflection.
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 didn’t. Your asterisk and clarification was ambiguous.
Your asterisk and clarification was ambiguous.
‘were’
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?
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.
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 😌
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.
I’d argue that calling the second after midnight to get “early morning” is confusing. But this is all silly to begin with.
And don’t even get me started on months and seasons.
Or time.
