ARGH!!! Whatever happened to noon and midnight??

Okay, I log onto second life and get an announcement that second life will be down on Wednesday from 7AM to 12PM.....

Okay...you see, this is one of my huge pet peeves and it has stung me on more than one occassion, so I am on a personal crusade to stamp it out, wherever I find it.

There is NO 12 AM or 12 PM. See, AM and PM come from Latin, Ante Meridian and Post Meridian which means before and after the meridian. Back when all time was local, when the sun was not directly over the meridian you were on, it was either before the meridian, in the morning, or AM, or after the meridian, or PM in the afternoon.

But what if it is directly on the meridian? Which is it? AM or PM? It is NEITHER!!!!! It is NOON!!! And its opposite is MIDNIGHT!!! THERE IS NO 12 AM or 12 PM!!!!

On several occasions, when people have said 12 AM or PM, I forget which, I have shown up at midnight, when they meant noon, or at noon when they meant midnight.

And they then tried to make it my problem that I couldn't tell time.

Well, it's NOT my problem, okay?

Look at it another way. It is 11:59 AM. It's morning, right? In one minute, it will be 12. And since 12 is bigger than 11, it should be 12 AM. Only it isn't, they say, it is 12 PM, because in another minute, it will be 12:01, which is afternoon, and therefore PM, so, it has to be 12 PM, see?

No, I DON'T SEE!!! It's 12 noon!!!!! Everyone knows what Noon is, right?? So if it's noon, tell me that it's NOON!!! It's not 12 AM or 12 PM, it's freaking NOON!!! NOONNOONNOON!

Got it??????

Thank you.

Thank you for this wonderful rant! It made my day!

Ok, breath.....nice deep breaths....that's it.....relaaaaxxx.......it's ok..... (slips a thorazine tab in Max's coffee while he isn't looking).....brreeeeeaaathhhhh......

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock

From the above listed article:
However, it has become common practice in the United States to designate noon as 12:00 p.m and midnight as 12:00 a.m. The practical advantage of this convention becomes clear when one considers a digital clock. Noon and midnight are only infinitely short points in time, and therefore it is not practical to use any other convention than that which also applies immediately afterwards, when the clock still displays 12:00. This convention is standardized for computer usage in American National Standard ANSI INCITS 310 (which extends the international standard ISO 8601 time notation with a 12-h a.m./p.m. variant for the U.S.-market).

I was at a hotel a few months ago, and on the back of the door to my room, it said that "Checkout time is 12AM." Now, I know they meant noon, but, a) as the original poster says, 12AM doesn't exist, and b) when people say 12AM, they usually mean midnight.

It's just easier (and more logical) to say noon and midnight to get your point across.

Wow, I learned something new today.

http://tf.nist.gov/general/misc.htm

*Digital clocks the world over sighed.*

But what if it's like, 12:00:00:01?

Time confuses me!

*blinks*

*backs away slowly...*

The correct format would be 12:00:00.01

*Adds one more nitpick to the whole nitpickin thread.*

^ This is why I'm gonna switch to Swatch time... someday.

One could use a single letter abbreviation to indicate morning, noon, afternoon, and midnight.

11:20a, 12:00n, 3:34p, 12:00m

"a" for A.M., "n" for noon, "p" for P.M., "m" for midnight.

The need to squeeze many characters on a line on TV screens and the constant pressure to cram more text in an area in advertisements causes people to leave out the space between the numbers and "a.m." or "p.m.". I don't really like the absence of a space, but since that is the way things are headed, might as well make it official. The use of lower case letters in the "anpm" system makes there be a size differential between the numbers and the letters that helps to keep it from running together visually like an uppercase letter would. Eliminating the periods is good for vinyl sign making which uses computer cut adhesive lettering; in many cases the periods in text at low lettersize are hard to cut and darn near impossible to handle manually.

Using these abbreviations allows timetables to have columns of equal width for the time of day indicators.

Max, I suggest that when people use 12 am or 12 pm and it matters what they mean, that you ask them, since you are aware the terms are ambiguous.

Just correct the update announcement to say SL will be down from 0000Z to 0500Z.

i'm glad this is in the general topics or i would have missed it.

It's all irrelevant, we are supposed to be switching to the metric system soon.

Moved to the Sandbox.

Like the sands in an hourglass, these are the days of our Second Lives...

We could use Military time just like my work does.. 12:00 - 24:00!

Yessss that'll do.

Noooooooo! No Military time!!! It always confused me!! I know, it's a simple thing but for some reason I just cant get my brain to figure it out.

Airlines have long had a solution for this problem of sundial inspired clocks and the latinate abbreviations that the US is more fond of than 8 furlongs to the mile.

There is never a commercial flight that leaves at 1200 (or 0000). They leave at 1159, 1201, 2359, or 0001. No ambiguity.

It's ok, we'll all switch to UTC as soon as hegemony falls. Maybe RBD can tell us when that is.

Banish forever all temporal confusion!

use Julian Time!

Julian Time Calculator

What is Julian Time?

Posted at 2453878.83398.

Easy way to remember the convention is that 12:01 (after midnight) is obviously AM, so 12:00 (midnight) should be AM.

Military time makes it easier.

May 23 2400hrs is the same as May 24 0000hrs and there's no need for AM and PM.

Another approach is never do things that hit 12:00 am or pm. Make it 12:30 or 11:30 or something (see Introvert Petunia's post).

@Todd

Easy way of handling military time is being able to subtract 2 quickly. So when you see 1500hrs, subtract 2 from 5 to get 3 (3pm)

But like me, use it often enough and it becomes second nature. When I was in college all class schedules used the 24 hour format.

Ah, yes, but logically speaking it doesn't work out like that.

Take 12 a.m. That is ante-meridian. Before noon. Count backwards from midday, and the first 12 you come to is midnight, so 12 a.m. is midnight

P.m. means post meridian, and 12 p.m. means the first 12 after noon, so you should count forwards from midday, which would make 12 p.m. - um - midnight.

Ok. Hope that clears up the confusion.

ROTFLMAO

Even on a digital clock, there is still a fraction of a microsecond delay when the AM symbol switches over to the PM. So by the time your clock says 12:00 PM, it is no longer noon and PM is correct.

As a pilot, I like the idea of Zulu time, but unless you live in the UK it can be a little confusing. Since there is no "official" standard, I usually would list things like this:

7:00AM-11:59AM

No confusion there.

Just because lower punctuation standards are the norm doesn't mean that those of us who are smart enough to know better (or who have read "Eats, Shoots & Leaves" shouldn't combat ignorance. The digital age has also ushered in an era of punctuation bastardization, unfortunately. At this rate, eventually the only punctuation left will be the space between words, with novels printed as huge run-on sentences.

I don't think being strict about a.m./p.m punctuation is as big as it may appear.

"Antermeridian" and "postmeridian" are single words. Omitting the periods will still work if you regard "AM" and "PM" as acronyms that must be attached to a time figure, so there's no misaking am (antemeridian) with am (as in I am).

Well-used aconyms like RAM, ROM, CPU, GSM, GMT, CD, DVD, AIDS, ADHD, DNA, and PST all do not have periods.

Perhaps we're looking at another step in language evolution?