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Midnight is a stupid time for the clock to roll over to the next day (lemmy.ca)
submitted 9 months ago by to c/showerthoughts@lemmy.world
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The day should start at like... Equatorial dawn or something.

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[–] 63 points 9 months ago* (6 children)

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.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 9 months ago (3 children)

    Exactly, but except 6am should be 00:00

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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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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    • [–] 19 points 9 months ago (20 children)

    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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    [–] 15 points 9 months ago* (2 children)

    Back in college, we had "Random Standard Time" where midnight was midnight, but it wasn't "tomorrow" until 5am.

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  • [–] 5 points 9 months 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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    • [–] 11 points 9 months ago (13 children)

    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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  • [–] [S] 3 points 9 months ago (8 children)

    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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  • [–] 3 points 9 months ago* (3 children)

    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.

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 months ago (2 children)

    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.

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 months 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 😌

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  • [–] 2 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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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  • [–] [S] 1 point 9 months 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.

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    • [–] 9 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    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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    [–] 7 points 9 months ago (1 child)

    Regardless of time every day should start with a little jingle.

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    • [–] 7 points 9 months ago* (7 children)

    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.

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    [–] 6 points 9 months ago

    9 oclock is always a stupid time for legit everybody to be at the same place at same time.

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    [–] 2 points 9 months ago (4 children)

    It’s only stupid in 12 hour time.

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    [–] 1 point 9 months 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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