I ordered something online and I love watching tracking** but I've never signed up for monitoring before.
**Watching tracking is like watching a horse race, except I always win.The Fedex tracking page said my package would come on Friday but the email they sent me said
Estimated delivery 8/15/2014 12:00 am
Apparenty they will deliver it at midnight. That is devotion.
Either that or a big international company doesn't know what 12 am means.
I'm not certain what 12 am means.
11:59 am or 12:01 pm would be better choices.
Most of us learned that in 5th grade or before. 12 AM is midnight. 12 PM is noon. There would be less confusion in the world with a 24 hour clock. We all know that 00:00 is 24:00
Then you learned wrong: the "M" in "AM" and "PM" is "meridiem" = "midday" = "noon"; the "A" and "P" are "ante" (= "before") and "post" (= "after"), respectively. So 12:00 (using the 12-hour clock) is either noon or midnight, and 12:00 AM is twelve hours before noon and 12:00 PM is twelve hours after noon. Using "12:00 PM" to mean "noon" is nonsense. "12 noon," or "12:00 noon," or simply "noon" or "midday" are the only proper/logical/sensible ways to designate what you are telling us is "12:00 PM."
Get with the program: 24-hour clock, metric weights and measures, and dates given as yyyy/mm/dd.
Perce
I don't see how calling 12PM noon is inconsistent with what you just posted regarding ante and post. If you start with 12:00XM being high noon, then clearly 11AM is one hour before that, 1PM is one hour after high noon. Following that, 12:01 AM is almost 12 hours before noon and
1 minute after midnight and 11:59PM is almost 12 hours after noon and one minute before midnight. The question is what then to do with the two singular points. Is noon to be either 12AM or 12PM? Or is it to be both? Obviously it needs to be settled to avoid mass confusion. Which even you recognize would result:"So 12:00 (using the 12-hour clock) is either noon or midnight, and 12:00 AM is twelve hours before noon and 12:00 PM is twelve hours after noon."
And it has bee settled, 12PM is called noon and 12AM is midnight. Ed learned it correctly. Everyone I know understands that 12PM = noon,
12AM equals midnight.
But, if I use that reasoning, wouldn't 10:00 AM mean 10 hours before noon and 11:00 AM would mean eleven hours before noon?
That's an interesting point. So 10AM is really what everyone calls 2AM. You're right, if that's the system, more than just noon and midnight are apparently wrong..... Oh my!
I took it more in the sense that we have a system where 12 is high noon,
11 is before it, 1 is after it, and the ante just means that we're talking about the 11 before 12, not the 11 after it, which would be 11PM. But if you take what he posted literally, it's as you say.My view of the whole thing is that with the ante/post thing, 12 noon and 12 midnight could be either or both. To avoid confusion, obviously the world has settled on the convention that 12AM is midnight, 12PM is noon. And it makes sense to me. As the day is progressing, it's
11AM, then noon. What would it make more logical sense to associate 12 noon with? The AM period which has just ended? Or the PM period, which is just beginning? We're usually looking ahead, not back, so my vote would be for noon to be 12PM. Seems like 99% of the world agrees.micky wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:
Or maybe you are just a moron for believing everything you read?
Wikipedia covers the issue here:
where, in part, it says: "The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a usage note on this topic: "By convention, 12 AM denotes midnight and 12 PM denotes noon. Because of the potential for confusion, it is advisable to use 12 noon and 12 midnight."
Hi, I always use military time when it has to be sure thing.
00:00 is midnight, 24:00 as well.
That is why the military and a lot of companies use 0000-2400 (with
2400 only being a stop time)In that case 1200 will be noon ... every time.
Military time does not use the colon. That eliminates the confusion of what you are looking at. If you see 0900 (always 4 digits) that is 9 AM. 1200 is noon.
Unless your work is based on GMT in which case 1200 can be anytime local. My first overseas assignment was St. Lawrence Island, Alaska, right on the date line. Total confusion as the 'work' dates changed at local noon. Cou ld have changed at 11am local or 1pm local - been some 60 years since I was there.
Harry K
Hi, Regardless, I am at home using the format. Spent number of years overseas every where working for DOD, worldwide comm. system. Long range HF radio, satellite, marine cables, short range VHF/UHF/MW networks, etc. One of them working with 8th RRFS in 'Nam during the war.
You're right, and this means clocks would have to run backwards half the day and clockwise the other half. It wouldn't be hard to build clocks like that, even mechanical ones. Electronic would probably be easier. But we'll have to recycle all the existing clocks.
I've read before that this is a convention, that is, that it could have worked either way but they arbitrarily chose this way.
But I don't think so
1:00 Post Meridiem is one hour after the middle of the day, and 12;01PM is one minute after the noon.So what about 12:00PM. Well that only occurs for an instant, a pico second later, it's no longer noon. It is after noon. The entire minute between 12:00PM and 12:01PM is after noon, afternoon, except for the moment that is noon. Less than a pico-second. A time with no length. Not a time period, not a period, just a time. That is noon. Everything after that is PM.
So not a convention, but following clearly from the rest of the AM/PM time system.
When I was a kid, there were no digital clocks or watches, so we learned correctly that there is no such thing as 12:00AM or 12:00PM, only midnight or noon. When digital timepieces came along, it was overly complicated to design them to display "noon" or "midnight" for one minute apiece each day, so now we have 12:00AM and 12:00PM. It seems obvious to me that the convention of 12:00AM being midnight and 12:00PM being noon is simply the result of how a digital clock works.
When I was setting up my web page, I had to learn a lot about times (considering that I had to make it work from anywhere in the world). There's plenty of room for simplification. 24 hour time is one way. Also, get rid of Damn Stupid Time. It really complicates things, like when some days have only 23 hours, and some have 25. DST is supposed to change at 2AM some day. How do you make the computer say 2AM, when there IS NO 2AM that day (it's 3AM, on this 23-hour day)?
BTW, the average year has 365 + 1/4 - 1/100 + 1/400 (365.2425) days in it. The average month has 30.436875 days.
BTW2, there is only one place where DST is observed, but the offset is not 1 hour. See
Also, 12PM is used for a specific time, but is also a WHOLE HOUR. That's
3600 seconds, 3599 of which are AFTER noon (and are obviously PM), so that's another reason it makes sense to call noon 12 PM.
Yes to all of those.
BTW, when I'm writing dates I prefer to use that form (big-endian), rather than the strange middle-endian one.
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