The day should start at like… Equatorial dawn or something.
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.
Exactly, but except 6am should be 00:00
Then it wouldn’t be 6am
Never age with this one weird trick!
Can’t argue with that!
Home ownership should also work like Animal Crossing
But then you’d spend your entire life doing unfulfilling mediocre jobs to pay off debt
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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 😌
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.
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’
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.
That would mean summer for me is just one 2,5 month long day. Same with winter.
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.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.
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.
It’s nice because people intuit and talk about days as a contiguous daylight period followed by a contiguous nighttime period, when they aren’t having discussions about timekeeping. It’d be nice if we picked an arbitrary delineation that aligned to that.
Wrt doing math, realistically you could just pick an arbitrary day of the year as your reference and every day begins at a multiple of 24 hours from that. No math is needed.
I’m not looking for perfect alignment with local dawn in every location on the planet, I’m aiming for a calendar day that aligns with our intuition of the day/night cycle.
But more than that, I’m having a silly discussion about timekeeping.Exactly.
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.
9 oclock is always a stupid time for legit everybody to be at the same place at same time.
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
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.
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
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.
