4 ms·
Imagine if 12AM meant 12 noon. What would one second past 12 noon be? It'd have to be 12:00:01 PM. Even one millisecond past 12 noon would be PM. So "12AM" coul
by rogual 5y ago
Imagine if 12AM meant 12 noon. What would one second past 12 noon be? It'd have to be 12:00:01 PM. Even one millisecond past 12 noon would be PM. So "12AM" could only exist for an infinitesimal length of time, in contrast to 11AM, 10AM etc. which each last for an hour.
- kangalioo 5y ago1-based indexing biting us again
- captainmuon 5y agoI would have thought it's AM for the whole of the 12th hour. So 12:00 AM, 12:01 AM, 12:59 AM, 1:00 PM (hour one, past the hour of noon). An hour being a time span of 60 minutes, not an instant! In the "correct" usage, you have an illogical jump between 11:59 AM and 12:00 PM.
- softwarebeware 5y agoYes this is correct. It can be 12:28am, 12:43am, 12:55am, etc. And it rolls over from 11:59am to 12:00pm.
- paskozdilar 5y agoWhy not just call it 00:00:01 PM? And similarly, 00:00:01 AM?
- c-cube 5y agoThat is not obvious at all if you're used to the 24h system. If you don't remember which one is 12am, then you don't know if 12h01am is at night or mid day.
- nilstycho 5y agoThere's a misalignment between the sequential numbers (begin at 1:00; end at 12:59) and AM/PM (begin at 12:00; end at 11:59). A 24-hour clock fixes this, but if we insist on a 12-hour clock we could still align these two spans by renumbering the "12" hours as "0" hours. Then we would see 11:59 AM -> 0:00 PM -> 0:01 PM.
- hnbad 5y agoGood luck. Americans will insist that 12 is more intutive because zeros look weird or something. If you tried to standardize on 0-based 12 hour clocks in the US it'd probably result in something weird like Texas seceding or some Christian sect claiming it's anti-Christian and trying to assassinate you.
- softwarebeware 5y agoI think most Americans would be fine with it. Hospitals, the military, and most public services like fire fighters use it already.
- hnbad 5y agoContrary to popular narratives, there very rarely is a "silent majority" behind the kind of outrage I was poking fun at. E.g. despite abortion clinics having a history of being violently attacked and often "regulated" out of existence, only roughly 20% of Americans think abortion should be flatly illegal outright and the labels "pro-life" and "pro-choice" seem to be self-applied in roughly equal proportions: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1576/abortion.aspx Granted, abortion is a complex and sensitive topic even before you bring religious doctrines into it, but it only takes one snowflake with a gun to think changing the clocks is Satanism for someone to get hurt. I'm frankly amazed the DST change seems to have passed so easily given the kind of conspiracy theories that would lend itself to.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago12 AM should be replaced by 0 AM, same with 12 PM
- yread 5y ago0 is unnatural /s
- LinAGKar 5y agoNo, 12:00:01 AM being a second after noon (i.e. 12:00:01 after the start of the before-noon) is the only one that makes sense. You can't just swap out the reference point and keep counting, that's just as moronic as claiming 1/500 of a dollar is 0.002 cents, because it's in the cents territory. If you want to switch the reference point, you also have to reset the counting to the correct value: 00:00:01 PM = 12:00:01 AM.
- Markoff 5y ago12 AM and 12 PM makes no sense, because none of them really means noon, while both of them are 12 before noon and 12 after noon just because you got used to meaning of this nonsense, it doesn't mean it's right