A Question of Time

I wish the US would desist from using the 12 hour clock, it is so confusing.

Anyway, I have three questions:

What time is it, 1 min after 11:59am? Is it 12:00am or 12:00pm? (How is noon denoted?)

Same question for 1 min after 11:59pm. (How is midnight denoted?)

I understand PST (Pacific Standard Time) but SL uses PDT. What does the 'D' stand for?

Rock

Noon is 12PM, midnight is 12AM.

PDT is Pacific Daylight Time, or GMT-0700, rather than GMT-0800, which is PST.

Daylight being Daylight Savings time, when we change our clocks to try to trick time, or something.

D for Daylight

Edit: See above ^^

There appears to be utter confusion in the US as to what to call 1200. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noon, while
I really wish Linden Labs would adopt a consistent house style (preferably the 24 hour clock) and tell us what it is. Live Chat and I recently wasted ages of each other's time trying to sort out a billing issue caused by this very point; matters were complicated by the fact neither of us were too sure whether by "midnight on the 1st," the other party meant 00:00 on the 1st or the 2nd.

I'm with you. 24 hour clock please LL. 2359hours then 0001hours, nice and simple.

Noon is 12:00 PM. If the manual of style wrote otherwise it was mistaken. The reason that 1200 is 12:00 PM and 0000 is 12:00 AM is because 1201 has to be 12:01 PM and 0001 has to be 12:01 AM. If the clock is showing 12:00, that means that 12:00 has *passed*, it's still displaying it 12:00:00.01, 12:00:00.02... all of which are *after* noon or midnight.

LOL. Next you will talking some nonsense about the metric system.

But I do realize that alot of the Euros cannot get that 'AM' and 'PM' 12 hour thing straight.

Here is a free SL Time Converter HUD

https://www.xstreetsl.com/modules.php?name=Marketplace&file=item&ItemID=1469739
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I think that a time converter widget should be added to all of our SL screens.

I understand that the US Army recognises the potential for ambiguity and does not schedule any of its wars to start on the hour for precisely this reason - despite its standard use of Zulu time in 24 hour format.

Pep (Apparently Jimmy Carter's Operation Evening Light was an exception.)

PS Most notices in sl do not seem to mention even the date, much less whether the time is am or pm - or even SLT/PDT/UTC/ . . .

I wish Alaska would go back to four separate time zones. We only have one now, a sorry downgrading from a few years ago in our glory days.

I also wish for cake, not pie.

You probably said something bad about America in that post but you used 'Fancy Speak' to disguise it.

Usually when a notice is sent out it means that event is happening at at that moment or within a hour of the announcement.

I agree with your logic on looking at the time on a clock, but the confusion arose not because of a clock, but to a statement that the servers will be restarted at 12:00pm on Sep 2nd.

The core of the problem is due to the fact that noon and midnight are not periods of time, they are points in time. So in the case of noon (meridies in Latin) you can call the period before it morning, or ante meridien, and the time after it afternoon, or post meridien, but noon itself is neither.

Midnight could logically be called either "12 p.m." (12 post meridiem, 12 hours after the previous noon) or "12 a.m." (12 ante meridiem, 12 hours before the following noon); "x a.m." no longer means "x hours before noon", but "x hours into the day but before noon" or "x th hour before noon". (12 hour clock wiki)

The National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, states:

To avoid confusion, the correct designation for twelve o'clock is 12 noon or 12 midnight. At 12 noon the Sun is at its highest point in the sky and directly over the meridian. It is therefore neither "ante-" nor "post-".

As for which Style Guide is right or wrong, many U.S. style guides, including the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) website, recommend that it is clearest if one refers to "noon" or "12:00 noon" and "midnight" or "12:00 midnight" (rather than to "12:00 p.m." and "12:00 a.m.", respectively).

The 24-hour clock notation avoids all of those ambiguities by using 00:00 for midnight at the start of the day and 12:00 for noon. From 23:59:59 the time shifts (one second later) to 00:00:00, the beginning of the next day.

Rock

Don't worry; smart people will be amused and dumb people won't realise that they have been insulted.

"Usually" cars don't crash into one another.

Pep (But feel free to perpetuate your ignorance. )

12:00PM means noon. What I was explaining is *why* 12:00PM means noon, and 12:00 AM means midnight. It is possibly confusing if you don't know the convention, and certainly best avoided, but it is not ambiguous. The alternate reading, that 12AM is noon or 12PM is midnight, is simply incorrect.

If 12 at mid-day is noon, how can it be either Ante or Post noon??
It is noon exactly.

We should have a meeting to discuss this inworld.
Let's meet at 12AM on 9/10/09
.. or alternatively, at 12PM on 10/9/09

I'm sorry, but your explanation fails. 12PM does not 'mean' noon, for precisely the same reason that 12AM does not mean 'noon' either.

Greenwich explains it precisely: At 12 noon the Sun is at its highest point in the sky and directly over the meridian. It is therefore neither "ante-" nor "post-".

Rock

One side can throw copies of The 30th edition of the U.S. Government Style Manual (200 sections 9.54 and 12.9b while the other throws copies of The 29th edition of the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual. If they all turn up at the right time (or day), that is.

I repeat, I am not arguing for this usage, I am simply explaining where it comes from and why it is not ambiguous. You don't need to explain to me why it's undesirable, or why it's a sign that people who use it are stupid, or whatever else you've got up your nose, because I'm not defending this usage, or people who use it, nor am I interested in arguing about whether it's correct or not.

Ah yes, date notation also conlficts like heck, logic would dictate dd/mm/yy but somehow history made it mm/dd/yy in the usa, offcourse for many usa residents may the 20th [day] is more logical then the 20th [day] of may.

We British live with both systems - 24 hour clock for timetables and 12 hour in informal chat. But then we're metric for designing things but still use miles to measure distance despite all our official Ordnance Survey maps being metric. It would be a whole lot easier if we went all metric, I think.

Will 12 midnight tonight be the last instant of today or the first instant of tomorrow?

If the US simply followed International Standards, such as ISO 8601 on dates and times, instead of ignoring them, there would be no confusion.

Fortunately, there is some light, while The 30th edition of the U.S. Government Style Manual (200 sections 9.54 and 12.9b and The 29th edition of the U.S. Government Printing Office Style Manual contradict each other on the am/pm notation for noon and midnight, the widely respected Chicago Manual of Style now recommends using the international standard time notation (ISO 8601) in publications.

Rock

The days of the month should be numbered from 13 up.
That would resolve the ambiguity of the numeric date formats.

that's crazy talk.

Can't you guys argue about Blue Mars or Banlines or something, geez.

I get the sentiments but "High 1200" or "0000 in the Garden of Evil" just doesn't cut it.

High Noon is fine.. it's just I'd rather avoid confusion between "High 12 am" and "High 12 pm."

And it is a real issue, Brenda, at least when you're trying to understand Live Chat's advice on how best to schedule some land transactions in order to minimize the amount of land you hold throughout the process -- thus minimizing your tier -- and keep on getting told to do things before or after "12 am" on a particular day. Eventually, when I asked, specifically, "do you mean I should do this around 11pm on Monday or around 1 am on Tuesday, or do you mean sometime before or after noon, and, if so, on what day?" they had to go and check.