UKH

oh the joys and nonsense of primary maths. ( i ve avoided several rants so far but this is amusing me ) . i know what i think , not necessarily this, its been avoided in the year 3 presentation but my 8 year old asked straight away and applied some pretty good logic to come up with his own answer  based on what we ve been working through so .......

quick poll please :

lunch time (mid day ) 12.00pm ...... LIKE

lunch time (mid day ) 12.00am........DISLIKE

In reply to mike123:

12 Noon.

In reply to mike123:

12 a.m. and 12 p.m. are ambiguous and should not be used.

Better yet, be a rational human being and use a 24h clock instead.

In reply to mike123:

Keith is right.  It is neither ante merīdiem (before midday) nor post merīdiem (after midday). It is midday, aka noon.  Similarly midnight is neither a.m. nor p.m. 

But alas we have to put up with clocks which always display one or the other. So convention has lead to using p.m. for noon and a.m. for midnight. Probably because 11:59:59.99 is clearly a.m., and 12:00:00.1 is clearly p.m., and we usually truncate rather than round times.  So a clock could display the latter as 12:00p.m. and be technically correct I suppose, but an agenda should use 12 noon.

Another approach (which might be good for teaching) is to say the aim of writing down a time is to communicate it to someone. Since 12a.m. or 12p.m. are open to misinterpretation, they don't do a good job of communicating it and shouldn't be used at all.

In reply to mike123:

One old style guide I have gives midnight as 12am and midday as 12pm but every other one I have had to use tell me to avoid am and pm in relation to the two liminal times. Midday or noon is preferable to 12pm and therefore midnight  or "in the morning" for 12am. Since the day used to start at sundown, 12 midnight was technically the morning of the next day.

In reply to mike123:

I answered pm, but it's not really. It is the meridian. So it should be 12:00:00 m

The logic for pm is that the day starts at midnight, which is 12:00:00. Any time before that is the previous day. Hence it must be before the meridian at midnight.

If you are limited to am and pm, then the only other option is pm at midday. 

In reply to mike123:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight

To me, one second after* 23:59:59 is 00:00:00 (midnight) and the instant that the day starts. Twelve hours after 00:00:00 is 12:00:00, and so by symmetry that is the instant that the second half of the day starts. So:

23:59:59 = PM

00:00:00 = AM

11:59:59 = AM

12:00:00 = PM

23:59:59 = PM

etc

I write software for a living. A lot of the stuff I work on involves keeping tracking of the time that things happened, accounting for transitions to/from daylight savings time, etc. For computers, 00:00:00 is the first instant of the day and will be rendered as 00:00am in twelve-hour format.

* ignoring leap seconds and pedants

In reply to mike123:

For a bonus point: has midnight on Monday already happened, or is it twelve hours in the future?

In reply to tlouth7:

imco - In the future. 

00.00.00 Monday is the middle of the night which started on Sunday dusk and ended at dawn on Monday. We call that "Sunday night". 

In reply to mike123:

I’m having lunch at Schrodinger’s.

In reply to mike123:

It's a matter of infinitessimal approach: the actual point of 'noon' and 'midnight' are of zero duration (a bit like a stopped clock being precisely correct twice a day).

So go with convention: 12am is midnight, 12pm is noon. Or use a 24hr notation.

In reply to colinakmc:

or are you...?

In reply to captain paranoia:

probably

In reply to elsewhere:

You can have lunch but not at Schrodinger’s, or you can be at Schrodinger’s but not have lunch. You can't have both.

In reply to mike123:

Neither. 12 o'clock when the sun is up is noon, the meridian.  Before that time it is am, ante meridian.  After that time, it is pm, post meridian.  12 am makes no sense, nor does 12 pm.  The 24 hour clock dispenses with this, but to avoid any possibly confusion over which day, the military has a convention in which midnight is 23:59.

Simply, lunchtime is 12 noon.

In reply to nniff:

You're all wrong.

12:00 is 12 noon (neither am or pm)

but

lunch time is 12:30pm

In reply to mike123:

It is definitely noon or 12 pm. If you think about it 12.00 doesn't exist, it is actually 12 plus some time ie you are 1 second (or whatever into the pm) 12 dead on is the completion of the previous twelve hours and is infinitely small.

In reply to duchessofmalfi:

That's all very well but your clock will say 12.00 pm (see my answer above)

In reply to Blue Straggler:

I got caught out by this (as I'm sure plenty of other must have done too) with a UN job I was trying to apply for. It stated the deadline for applications was midnight on the 15th, and wouldn't let me submit an application an any time during the day on the 15th. They've since amended their deadline descriptions such that they expire at 11:59pm instead of midnight!

In reply to Andy Johnson:

That's lunch at the other fella's; at Schrodinger's you're served either your favouritest food or your least favourite, but won't know which until you get there

In reply to mike123:

teach her 24 hour clock - avoid confusion

In reply to Blue Straggler:

Unless we have to get up before dawn, at which point we call it "oh god, why did I agree to  this on Sunday night"

In reply to Andy Johnson:

Maybes aye, maybes naw

In reply to duchessofmalfi:

Depends if work work night shifts or not...

In reply to nufkin:

Or poison...

In reply to mike123:

Next question: Is zero an even or an odd number? My local council defines it as an even number for the purpose of deciding on the basis of your car number plate who is allowed to use the now-partially reopening recycling centres on which dates. Perhaps they have been thinking of the pickle that the Paris police/authorities got into on this issue over air-quality driven permissions to use a car on particular days.

In reply to EdS:

Not always. Believe it or not I was once issued a flight ticket timed e.g. "00.00 Tuesday 10 May" - which could've been midnight between Monday and Tuesday, or midnight between Tuesday and Wednesday - I had to ask the airline which it was - confusing and they shouldn't do that IMO, it should've been either 23.59 or 00.01

In reply to nniff:

Exactly right. Took the words out of my mouth (or off the end of my finger). Nothing more to be said.

In reply to nniff:

Should it be 00:00 or 24:00 at midnight - it is called a 24 hour clock 😁 - couldn't resist

In reply to duchessofmalfi:

Only if you get up at a decent hour. Otherwise it's more like 1.30.

In reply to mike123:

By convention, midday is called pm and midnight is called am.

On a similar time-related note, if your insurance expires at 00:00 and the new policy starts at 00:01 the same day, how long are you uninsured for?

In reply to Rog Wilko:

yes mine's been slipping till about 15:00 lately. Nearly tea-time!

In reply to colinakmc:

What time? Are you sure he'll be in?

In reply to mike123:

To reply to your actual thread title... neither, its at 1 PM

In reply to mike123:

Ultimately, it is an arbitrary choice. Nothing actually occurs bang on the division between yesterday and today, but given the finite precision of recording instruments or of the digital media in which those recordings are stored, things do so they have to be allocated to one day or half day or the other.

You get this issue whenever you are making measurements with finite precision of something that is continuous and then want to allocate these to bins of finite width. Should a measurement of 7.0 be put in the 6-7 or the 7-8 bin? It has to be in one, and can't be in both or in neither. For non-negative things it kind of depends on whether 0.0 has meaning and needs to be included in the 0-1 bin or excluded altogether.

In reply to john arran:

I turned up for a "midnight" screening of a film, listed as being 00:00 on date X. 

The cinema was all locked up. 
They meant 00:00 on date (X+1)

I am not sure who was in the wrong. 

It was only Suicide Squad anyway so I wasn't too upset. 

 

In reply to Blue Straggler:

To avoid that issue with my students when asking them to submit work electronically, and trying to be as generous as I can to them,  I always set deadlines to be 23:59 on the due date.

In reply to mbh:

> Should a measurement of 7.0 be put in the 6-7 or the 7-8 bin? 

Entirely subjective but I'd put it in the 6-7 bin, and I am always consistent with this sort of thing so at least I know !

In reply to Michael Hood:

Nice bit of lateral thinking, there.  This would also. I think, cope with the ambiguity of which day the midnight plane is actually leaving or of which day the midnight film is being shown. Personally, I think it's best to always go to bed well before midnight and then you can sleep through the problem period.

In reply to Michael Hood:

My mate Kev described a clock on a microwave oven which would go from 23:59 to 24:00 then to 00:01 

In reply to Blue Straggler:

What I want to know is who adjusts all the sundials when the clocks go back or forwards 1 hour A-HAH 

In reply to john arran:

I only made the mistake of using midnight as a deadline for a student assignment once.

In reply to mbh:

Lunchtime topic of discussion at Schrodinger's: is zero a number?

In reply to mike123:

thanks all.

8 year old decided 12.00 pm because he thought that as the clocked turned from 11.59.59 to 12.00,00 that was when the afternoon started (because the morning  had started at 00.00.00) .   it led us in to discussing the idea of  and need for a "convention" and has been said that  12 noon,12 midnight were better and that the 24 hour clock was  better still .  i also said that if we asked  a lot of people a small number would either not know or not agree with the convention and how this would cause confusion. i guessed that up to 20% of people  might disagree with convention. of course , i always think of ukc ers as smarter than the average cat.

edit : i meant not to use the phrase mid day in the original  post as we had already decided 12 mid day  was better and just say 12  lunch to be intentionally ambiguous. lunch time is of course 13.00.

In reply to Ian65:

That sounds hard. I'm off to the other fella's where if you pin me down to a risible answer you can't find me.

In reply to Ian65:

I didn't mean to bring Monty Python into this, honest.

In reply to mbh:

Zero is regarded as even because it is a multiple of two.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parity_of_zero

In reply to Andy Johnson:

PM starts after any light has travelled far enough to complete a whole wavelength.  Or not as the case may be depending on the foam.

In your own frame of reference of course.

In reply to mike123:

When I worked in Switzerland, it sometimes started as early as 11:30. That was at a university where even the lectures could start at 8. Before that, when I worked on a farm also in Switzerland, 11ses seemed to happen around 9, the day having started way before that. Since it involved something like brownies and something else that definitely was schnapps, I was OK with it.

I find it really fascinating that a simple question can rest on convention, practicality of measurement and on mathematical concepts - we haven't yet got to modular arithmetic.

In reply to profitofdoom:

I believe its the Special Activities Division of the International Earth Rotation Service.

https://www.iers.org/IERS/EN/Service/IERSComponents/components.html

Its not a particularly well know organisation and - given how important it is that the earth keeps rotating -  I think they try to keep it that way. People who come into contact with their paramilitary branch tend to either lose their short term memory or just "disappear".

In reply to wercat:

My frame of reference is a sphere less than a planck length in diameter, which has the useful property that lunchtime can be anytime I like.

In reply to Andy Johnson:

it could therefore be lunchtime again as soon as lunch is over!   do you take bookings for your sphere?

In reply to wercat:

Trouble is, it's a tad small.

In reply to keith-ratcliffe:

12 Noon does not work well, especially in the summer - noon is when the sun is at its zenith as measured locally, so approximately 13:00 in the summer if close to the meridian, later in the west and earlier in the east. How do we define mid-day? Not much better, most people would say 12:00 but 13:00 would be closer. When does morning end? Lunchtime solves all these problems! Good Lunchtime all...

In reply to petemeads:

Hi Pete, keeping well I hope.

Here's another complexity for all: Halachic ("ch" as in loch) midday (or 12:00 - take your pick). In religiously observant Judaism certain things have to be done before, at or after certain times (for example the afternoon service has to be in the afternoon - doh!). For this, daytime is divided into 12 equal parts and midday is half-way along those 12 parts ("hours"). Night-time is divided similarly.

Of course one of the complexities is that each day, the length of the day changes, so midday moves around between approx 12:00 and 13:00 throughout the year!!! A lot of the rabbinic discourse/arguments about this over the centuries has been to do with when does the day start? when does it end? how do you define nightfall? etc. which of course adds a further layer of possibilities.

Luckily, there aren't many halachic times in the day that need to be known, and there are 2 or 3 accepted definitions for start and end of a day (and the various religious groupings will follow one or other of those), and all the times have been worked out so you can just look them up, although of course you need to know your location because all of this is affected by your longitude (offset to local time) and latitude (length of day).

And some of you think "is midday 12am or 12pm" is complicated!!!

  

In reply to Michael Hood:

Hi Mike - yes, still keeping well. I had all my symptoms in the middle of December, before Covid-19 - maybe I got a sneak preview?

Anyway, Halachic calculation looks like something that could be done on a modern IQ capable Garmin - my Fenix6 knows sunrise/sunset times wherever it is in the world - but searching with Google has found no results. Maybe a chance to get back into programming?

In reply to petemeads:

Several religious websites do it, you just put your location in and done.

Gosh, literally just seen about John Allen, tragic. Were you still in touch with him?

In reply to Andy Johnson:

For you, it's much easier then: everything should be seconds since 1970.  

In reply to StefanB:

Yes. Although that just leaves the problem of what to do with events happening before 1970-01-01 00:00:00.

Oh and leap seconds.

And what time zone are the north and south poles at?

In reply to Andy Johnson:

in your world presumably you can lunch at both poles at once?

In reply to Andy Johnson:

Joking aside, managing date and time, together with localization, is probably where most time is lost in software development. Bloody nightmare. I wish everyone would just stick to UTC and English

In reply to mike123:

"Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so." The Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy

In reply to StefanB:

reminds me of a computer science graduate I worked with once who in doing date calculations (which were an intrinsic part of the language involved (Artemis) since it was aimed at the project/critical path market) his own way without using the language's own features and then boasted that his routines would not work beyond 1999!

Apart from that, in an interpreted language, all of his own code in extra statements crippled the processing speed on calculations involving large numbers of records when it could all have been handled by internal logic at speed.