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
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
Exactly, but except 6am should be 00:00
Then it wouldn't be 6am
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?
If you say night of the 5th, that will mean the time from sunset to midnight on the fifth.
After that it's morning/pre-dawn of the 6th.
This isn't new or controversial.
It's night from sunset until dawn. And if someone said "in the morning" I would never interpret that as meaning before dawn.
It is controversial, because one definition of "morning" is dawn to noon and another is midnight to noon. And saying "night" is "sunset to midnight" is also new because you just came up with that.
i've never seen someone who takes that as "before dawn". night is after dusk, midnight's before dawn
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.
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.
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…
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.
It’s only stupid in 12 hour time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.