12:01 AM
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@Xyro said:
Also things making not sense (possibly with an American cultural assumption; I have no idea):
Well at least one correction to solving the problem would be to use the word 'Autumn' in the problem....- Fall semester starts in the fall and ends in the winter
- Spring semester starts in the winter and ends in the springI feel like at least one of these ought to be called winter semester.
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@PJH said:
@Xyro said:
Also things making not sense (possibly with an American cultural assumption; I have no idea):
Well at least one correction to solving the problem would be to use the word 'Autumn' in the problem....- Fall semester starts in the fall and ends in the winter
- Spring semester starts in the winter and ends in the springI feel like at least one of these ought to be called winter semester.
It helps solve the problem as much as using the word 'Vernal' does, which is to say, not at all.
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@da Doctah said:
Now, if someone will be so kind as to explain why Oktoberfest is in September....
Is it? I'm attending it this year and I'm going 05-oct to 08-oct.
(guess it's that "identify it by the last part" bit again...)
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The ambiguity is not over when the day starts; everybody knows that the day starts at 12:00am. The problem is that the day also ends at 12:00am, so ambiguity arises if you use 12:00am in a legal context.
e.g. If you say 12:00am Monday, do you mean the instant between Sunday and Monday (the "start" of Monday), or the instant between Monday and Tuesday (the "end" of Monday)?
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@Anonymouse said:
Lunch.@PJH said:
Well since 12pm and 12am are exactly the same time (i.e. midnight,)
Wait... what?! If that's true, the american AM/PM time system is even more retarded than I thought. What comes after 11:59 AM?
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@pauly said:
Regarding trying to avoid the legal ambiguity of whether 00:00 is the start or the end of the day: It seems to me that the day ends at 23:59:59.99999999 repeating to infinity and the next day begins at 00:00. There should be no ambiguity. But I was also told by my math teacher that 0.9999999 repeating is equal to 1 (because there is no number between the two, they must be equal), so maybe we still have the ambiguity.
Why they choose 1 minute to resolve the ambiguity rather than 1 second or 1 millisecond? Because it avoids having to write/speak seconds, milliseconds, etc. when litigating.
Even then, the point they choosed is wrong. The day starts at midnight, that means that everything greater than 12AM is the next day, everything smaller than 12AM is the previous day... If you want to just use your clock digits, the day starts when it turns from 11:59PM to 12:00AM, thus everything that happens while the clock marks 12:00AM is the next day.
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@Cassidy said:
@FrostCat said:
When do you get credited for your hours worked? After you worked them, of course
Yessss... but I don't get a pay packet marked "Pay for Sept" for hours worked in August. Although I do receive it then.
Yes, and that's because payroll is a complicated enough process that most companies take between a few days and a week after the period closes to actually do the processing. I've worked at a payroll processing company. The rules are ridiculously arcane even before you get into taxing. I can't say I know WHY they do things the way they do, just that someone had what they thought was a good reason for doing it that way and nobody's changed it. Me, I'd consider eliminating the issue by changing the shifts from 7 am/3 pm/11 pm to 8 am/4 pm/midnight, if I thought it mattered.
Those of you who are boggling at the idea of using 12:01 AM to get rid of ambiguity in legal matters and aren't trolling, must not have had sufficient demonstration of how sleazy people can be yet. Rules lawyering is a well-known, if not respectable, pastime, and there's plenty of scumbags out there who will abuse the rules for minor gain (even, amusingly, when it actually hurts them: http://notalwaysworking.com/so-much-ado-about-nothing/25654 !)
I probably screwed up the URL because I am too lazy to figure out what kind of bbcode is used here for that, heh. Please save me from myself, stealth mods.
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@Anketam said:
Your dawn is at 00:00?Dawn of The Final Day
- 24 Hours Remain -
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@FrostCat said:
Those of you who are boggling at the idea of using 12:01 AM to get rid of ambiguity in legal matters and aren't trolling, must not have had sufficient demonstration of how sleazy people can be yet. Rules lawyering is a well-known, if not respectable, pastime, and there's plenty of scumbags out there who will abuse the rules for minor gain
After one too many instances of a "morning person" boss asking for something "first thing in the morning", which to me is when I get in, not at the godforsaken even-the-sun-has-more-sense-than-to-show-up-this-early hour he seems to think it means, I waited.
And finally, it happened. I got instructions to "call me at home first thing in the morning to go over your report for the 8am meeting".
I called him at 12:01am.
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@MarkJ said:
You misspelled 'dinner'@Anonymouse said:
Lunch.@PJH said:
Well since 12pm and 12am are exactly the same time (i.e. midnight,)
Wait... what?! If that's true, the american AM/PM time system is even more retarded than I thought. What comes after 11:59 AM?
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I'm inclined to lock this thread just to force you all to move on and work on becoming better human beings.
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@PJH said:
@MarkJ said:
@Anonymouse said:
What comes after 11:59 AM?
Lunch.
You misspelled 'dinner'Agreed. I usually have lunch around 11:30am.
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@FrostCat said:
Please save me from myself, stealth mods.
Okay, I had difficulty parsing your textwall but I'll presume you know your stuff. You can rest assured you've convinced me something confusing for us mere mortals makes perfect sense to the financial sector and as long as I receive the correct amount by the required date, I don't need to concern myself with the foibles of their system.
@dhromed said:
I'm inclined to lock this thread just to force you all to move on and work on becoming better human beings.
That will never happen.
Not the thread locking, I meant your intended effect.
We may all move on...
We may all work on becoming....
.. erm.. 2 out of 3 ain't bad, is it?
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@blakeyrat said:
When I was a kid and I watched Gremlins and they were all like, "don't feed him after midnight" I was annoyed and I was going, "after midnight but BEFORE WHEN!?" it's always after midnight you idiots, I'm like 8 years old and I know that.
I always thought the "before dawn" was implied. But my bigger problem was with time zones. It's midnight somewhere in the world dozens of times a day, and what about daylight savings etc? Does the magic respect that or would it always go on standard time? Does it go on local time or some other time?
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@PJH said:
@MarkJ said:
You misspelled 'dinner'@Anonymouse said:
Lunch.@PJH said:
Well since 12pm and 12am are exactly the same time (i.e. midnight,)
Wait... what?! If that's true, the american AM/PM time system is even more retarded than I thought. What comes after 11:59 AM?Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
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@Mcoder said:
@pauly said:
Regarding trying to avoid the legal ambiguity of whether 00:00 is the start or the end of the day: It seems to me that the day ends at 23:59:59.99999999 repeating to infinity and the next day begins at 00:00. There should be no ambiguity. But I was also told by my math teacher that 0.9999999 repeating is equal to 1 (because there is no number between the two, they must be equal), so maybe we still have the ambiguity.
Why they choose 1 minute to resolve the ambiguity rather than 1 second or 1 millisecond? Because it avoids having to write/speak seconds, milliseconds, etc. when litigating.
Even then, the point they choosed is wrong. The day starts at midnight, that means that everything greater than 12AM is the next day, everything smaller than 12AM is the previous day... If you want to just use your clock digits, the day starts when it turns from 11:59PM to 12:00AM, thus everything that happens while the clock marks 12:00AM is the next day.
Thank you for posting a response that cannot be summarized as "oh no... lawyers... let's do a bunch of irrational crap!"
Under the original example I posted (NBA free agency), Steve Nash et al. presumably sat around waiting for the clock to read 12:01 AM. They could just as easily have sat around waiting for the clock to read 12:00 AM, or 3:14 PM, or whatever. You don't have to try and teach anyone the concept of open / closed intervals to make this work, and there is a way to phrase this contractually that removes any ambiguity, e.g.
"The free agency period shall begin at 12:00 AM Eastern Time on July 14th, 2012 (which is the same date / time as July 14th 2012, 5:00AM Coordinated Universal Time)"
See how I removed all ambiguity there with about 15 seconds of thinking and about 15 words?
And I would really like to see someone try and cite an example of where someone won a court case by claiming that, say, 12:00:30 AM belonged to the same day as the 11:59 PM that preceded it. Being wary of lawyers is one thing... being so deathly afraid of them that one's genitalia and brain retract into one's torso like turtle heads at the mere thought of them is another thing altogether. You don't have to be a Fight Club-style macho man to stand on the principle that the day starts at 12:00 AM, you just need a modicum of good sense and a grammar school education. And living like invertebrate pussies is worthless even if it does keep the lawyers away.
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@bridget99 said:
and about 15 words?
You're increasing the verbosity in the part of a legal document the proles usually read.
This is a Bad Thing[tm] apparently.
Feel free to add a sub-clause somewhere, which no non-lawyer will bother reading, to disambigulate the meaning of 0000hrs, but don't put it in the main part of the document.
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I will state all timestamps as pi times the number of nanoseconds since January 2nd 1970 00:00 UTC with no explanation from now on.
This will be much easier to read and understand than calling the hour before 1 "12"
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@PJH said:
Well since 12pm and 12am are exactly the same time (i.e. midnight,)
@PJH said:The fact that 12am is the start of the day and 12pm the end of the day doesn't seem to figure in most peoples' reasoning; i..e 12pm Thursday is the same time as 12am Friday.
[link]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#Confusion_at_noon_and_midnight[/link]
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@grkvlt said:
@PJH said:
Indeed:Well since 12pm and 12am are exactly the same time (i.e. midnight,)
@PJH said:The fact that 12am is the start of the day and 12pm the end of the day doesn't seem to figure in most peoples' reasoning; i..e 12pm Thursday is the same time as 12am Friday.
It is not always clear what times "12:00 a.m." and "12:00 p.m." denote. From the Latin words meridies (midday), ante (before) and post (after), the term ante meridiem (a.m.) means before midday and post meridiem (p.m.) means after midday. Since strictly speaking "noon" (midday) is neither before nor after itself, the terms a.m. and p.m. do not apply.
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@bridget99 said:
Hell, it's even simpler than that. All we need to do is just use 24-hour time. The day goes from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59. 24:00:00, will, by definition, be undefined so as to eliminate all ambiguity. So the contract language becomes:Under the original example I posted (NBA free agency), Steve Nash et al. presumably sat around waiting for the clock to read 12:01 AM. They could just as easily have sat around waiting for the clock to read 12:00 AM, or 3:14 PM, or whatever. You don't have to try and teach anyone the concept of open / closed intervals to make this work, and there is a way to phrase this contractually that removes any ambiguity, e.g.
"The free agency period shall begin at 12:00 AM Eastern Time on July 14th, 2012 (which is the same date / time as July 14th 2012, 5:00AM Coordinated Universal Time)"
"The free agency period shall begin at 00:00 Eastern Time on July 14th, 2012."
Problem solved.
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@nonpartisan said:
Until someone who's spent some time in Australia asks you whether "Eastern Time" means UTC-5 or UTC+10.All we need to do is just use 24-hour time. The day goes from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59. 24:00:00, will, by definition, be undefined so as to eliminate all ambiguity. So the contract language becomes:
"The free agency period shall begin at 00:00 Eastern Time on July 14th, 2012."
Problem solved.
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@da Doctah said:
Until someone who's spent some time in Australia asks you whether "Eastern Time" means UTC-5 or UTC+10.
LOL. Even Adobe doesn't believe that there's timezones east of +9.
@da Doctah said:
The day goes from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59. 24:00:00, will, by definition, be undefined so as to eliminate all ambiguity
What about leap seconds?
What about the entire second between 23:59:59.000 and 24:00:00.000 (or 00:00:00.000 tomorrow) It shouldend at 23:59:59.9: the recurring nines would make it 23:59:60 (hmm).
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@Zemm said:
@da Doctah said:
Simple: All time is represented as a fraction in [0, 1). Noon is .5, the day ends just before 1.Until someone who's spent some time in Australia asks you whether "Eastern Time" means UTC-5 or UTC+10.
LOL. Even Adobe doesn't believe that there's timezones east of +9.
@da Doctah said:
The day goes from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59. 24:00:00, will, by definition, be undefined so as to eliminate all ambiguity
What about leap seconds?
What about the entire second between 23:59:59.000 and 24:00:00.000 (or 00:00:00.000 tomorrow) It shouldend at 23:59:59.9: the recurring nines would make it 23:59:60 (hmm).
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@Zemm said:
For future reference, I never made the claim you stuck my name on. That was someone else, and I can't be bothered at this point to look up who it was.@da Doctah said:
The day goes from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59. 24:00:00, will, by definition, be undefined so as to eliminate all ambiguity
What about leap seconds?
What about the entire second between 23:59:59.000 and 24:00:00.000 (or 00:00:00.000 tomorrow) It shouldend at 23:59:59.9: the recurring nines would make it 23:59:60 (hmm).
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@da Doctah said:
The original quote was in the context of the (US) NBA, so in that case there is no ambiguity. For all other cases, use UTC+/-x. Again, problem solved. (Except for those lazy asses that don't want to understand the concept of UTC offsets. Screw 'em.)@nonpartisan said:
Until someone who's spent some time in Australia asks you whether "Eastern Time" means UTC-5 or UTC+10.All we need to do is just use 24-hour time. The day goes from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59. 24:00:00, will, by definition, be undefined so as to eliminate all ambiguity. So the contract language becomes:
"The free agency period shall begin at 00:00 Eastern Time on July 14th, 2012."
Problem solved.
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@Zemm said:
Cut me some slack Jack. The run-of-the-mill individual, if asked to think about it, would say that the last second in a day is 11:59:59 PM. I'm just suggesting we change that to 23:59:59. [23:59:59.0,23:59:59.9) is unstated but understood by an average individual. We can throw in a :60 second as needed, just like we do now. Still no ambiguity because 23:59:60 ≠ 24:00:00 since 24:00:00 was defined to be undefined.@
da Doctahnonpartisan said:The day goes from 00:00:00 to 23:59:59. 24:00:00, will, by definition, be undefined so as to eliminate all ambiguity
What about leap seconds?
What about the entire second between 23:59:59.000 and 24:00:00.000 (or 00:00:00.000 tomorrow) It shouldend at 23:59:59.9: the recurring nines would make it 23:59:60 (hmm).
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@FrostCat said:
Me, I'd consider eliminating the issue by changing the shifts from 7 am/3 pm/11 pm to 8 am/4 pm/midnight, if I thought it mattered.
My particular huge enterprise does exactly that. Hilariously, this causes HUGE problems interoperating with partners, particularly across timezones.
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@Someone said:
For future reference, I never made the claim you stuck my name on
Sorry, forgot to parse the bastardised bbcode markup in the reply screen.
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@Helix said:
Dates and Times are indeed a big issue with law cases, and there is a call to standardise 'law time/date'. Apart from 12:00am is new/last day issue they have big fights in contracts such as 'one year from from' '3 months from' etc, asshat lawyers would use the ambiguity to their advantage. Uk government recently got pulled over on this doozy
Correction: lawyers use it to their clients' advantage. Everybody is always complaining about lawyers, but the reason that lawyers exist is because people are such assholes.Being married to a lawyer, I can tell you that the job sucks, because you only get clients that have some sort of problem: either they're getting divorced, or they got run over, or they ran over somebody, or they were daeling drugs... the list goes on.
A doctor also deals with people who have problems, but contrary to lawyers' clients, usually not of their own making.
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@Severity One said:
Everybody is always complaining about lawyers, but the reason that lawyers exist is because people are such assholes.
So lawyers are like embodiements, representations, avatars, if you will, of assholes.
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@dhromed said:
@Severity One said:
More like a replacement for a club with spikes in it.Everybody is always complaining about lawyers, but the reason that lawyers exist is because people are such assholes.
So lawyers are like embodiements, representations, avatars, if you will, of assholes.
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@Cassidy said:
@minkey said:
at least thats how I thought about it when I was on night shift some time ago
So when you worked thursday night into friday morning, did you come home and tell people you'd just done the "friday night shift"?
That's what doesn't make sense to me.
no I would go home and go to sleep. but if asked I would say I just finished my friday shift.
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@PJH said:
Indeed:
It is not always clear what times "12:00 a.m." and "12:00 p.m." denote. From the Latin words meridies (midday), ante (before) and post (after), the term ante meridiem (a.m.) means before midday and post meridiem (p.m.) means after midday. Since strictly speaking "noon" (midday) is neither before nor after itself, the terms a.m. and p.m. do not apply.
Pedantic wikipedery at its finest. 12 p.m. is noon, Latin be damned. Don't they teach this in, like, first grade?
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@minkey said:
if asked I would say I just finished my friday shift.
Now you're just changing the terminology to be less vague and unconfusing.
Kindly stop that. We'll have none of that here.
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@cconroy said:
Pedantic wikipedery at its finest. 12 p.m. is noon, Latin be damned. Don't they teach this in, like, first grade?
"12pm" is noon, because only the first instant of that hour/minute/second/millisecond/etc is "noon". From 12:00:00.000001 it is "after noon" (that's to the nearest microsecond; how far do you want to go?)
12-hour clock - Wikipedia
