Interesting factode - bank DD's

[Harry Bloomfield]

I have just noticed that DD's in and out, are paid at 00.01, just after midnight on the due date.

[CB]

And if you don't have the cash available then, they try again at 15:30 (well LLoyds do anyway)

We make payments from your account shortly after midnight at the start of the due date. If your payment date falls on a non-working day, then we will try to collect your payment the next working day. If you don?t have enough funds in your account at this point to make a payment, we will try to make a payment again after 3.30pm the same day. This gives you the chance to put extra funds into your account so that we can make the payment. The money needs to be available to use straight away, so you could transfer money from another personal account you have with us via Internet, Mobile or Telephone Banking or pay in cash over the counter in branch.

[zaax]

because the is no such time at 00.00

[Adrian]

So what is the minute between 23:59 and 00:01?

[Tim Watts]

Yes there is:

[Tim+]

I think the problem with 00:00 is the ambiguity associated with ascribing a date to it.

Tim

[Tim Watts]

As a computing person I find no ambiguity.

00:00 is the first minute at the start of a new day.

24:00 is a slightly special case as being just past the last minute at the end of a day (see railway example in Wiki above, vis a vis Arr vs Dep)

[Mike Barnes]

I see no ambiguity. This coming midnight is 0:00 tomorrow (AKA 24:00 today).

[Bob Eager]

Surely there is no ambiguity. It starts the next day.

And that's why 24:00 is not a valid time.

[Robin]

I thought zaax's objection was to the use of a decimal point (00.00) instead of a colon (00:00) ;)

That's a common reason for not using it in eg rail and bus timetables. But it's perfectly useable where readers won't get confused - eg in Excel when calculating differences. There and elsewhere it is the start of the day. As opposed to "midnight" which is the end of the day - as eg in licenses which tell pubs etc they can stay open to 2 a.m. except midnight on Sundays.

[fred]

My bank freezes the funds a day early. (i.e.) Payment due on a Monday and the appropriate amount is frozen from the previous Friday.

Of course it works the other way on a transfer of funds into the account. Do it today and it will be tomorrow before you see it.

[Robin]

I don't see a difference between eg 31 December 2014 00:00:00 and 1 January 2015 00:00:00. The railway example is, I suggest, more a matter of timetables rounding down departure times and rounding up arrival times. And in many cases simply avoiding use of 00:00 altogether: notes to last year's national rail timetable had

"Do not worry about the ambiguity as to which day Midnight itself belongs, for, to avoid this problem, all times skip from 2359 to 0001 and neither 0000 nor 2400 is ever used!"

[whisky-dave]

For me 24:00 is today and 00:00 is tomorrow.

[Another John]

That Wikipedia article is very good. I had occasion to look at it a few weeks ago, and a lot of things that had been hazy for the last couple of decades became clear.

I was converted to using 24-hour time many years ago, when I was part of a University computing service, and our Operations Manager explained to me simply, and swiftly, why using the 12-hour clock was a dead duck, for us anyway. Although in our organisation "intellectual argument" was a part of most interactions, I was instantly converted :)

J.

[philipuk]

Interesting Factoid, on the 30th June we will get a time of 23:59:60....

[Scion]

Robin put finger to keyboard:

Eh? They're a day apart!

A sensible compromise.

[Tim Streater]

Indeed. And for the avoidance of doubt, time goes like this:

23:59:58 23:59:59 00:00:00 00:00:01 etc

There is no 24:anything.

[Andrew Gabriel]

It is when a leap second is added in, although it's sometimes shown as 23:59:60.

[Adrian]

Indeed. One of them is immediately after 30/12/14 23:59:59, the other is immediately after 31/12/14 23:59:59

Simple answer is to roll forward or backward one second and see if it makes sense - so one second before 31/12/14 00:00:00 cannot possibly be

31/12/14 23:59:59, but has to be 30/12/14 23:59:59, and one second after is not 1/1/15 00:00:01, but 31/12/14 00:00:01.

Similarly, it can't be 24:00:00, since it's not followed by 24:00:01, but by 00:00:01.

[Adrian]

Not 23:59:59-echo-echo-echo?