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A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: 0000 not 2400?
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2004 Oct 18, 12:30 -0700
From: Gary LaPook
Date: 2004 Oct 18, 12:30 -0700
And is 12:00 p.m. midnight or noon?
It is strange that 12:30 p.m. is earlier than 11:30 p.m.
Gary LaPook
George Huxtable wrote:
It is strange that 12:30 p.m. is earlier than 11:30 p.m.
Gary LaPook
George Huxtable wrote:
Jim Thompson wrote-Although we can think and write the term "2400", it has no practical meaning, is that right? As soon as the time advances past 23:59:59, then>from a navigator's perspective the date changes to the next day, at time00:00:00.To widen the argument somewhat, even more absurd is our common convention of referring to times, in the hour after noon. as 12:xx pm, and the hour after midnight, as 12:xx am, and the dials of clocks (and even chronometers) marked accordingly, when in logic they should be 00:xx, and zero-hour should be marked as zero. Time has a history that goes a long way back, as is clear by the famiiarity we have with clocks marked in Roman numbers. Without a symbol for zero, or the idea that you could count and measure things starting at zero rather than starting at one, how would you mark midday, logically, in Roman numerals? Can't be done! So we have been stuck to an illogical numbering for those two hours each day, even though, for most clocks, we have since changed to an Arabic numbering system in which zero presents no problem. To widen it further, isn't it another absudity that our date-of-the month start at one, rather than zero? As a result, calculating the interval between two events with known dates and times, becomes a real nightmare, to do longhand or to write a program to do it. I will avoid refrain from discussing years, decades, centuries, and millennia, in the interests of my blood-pressure. George. ================================================================ contact George Huxtable by email at george@huxtable.u-net.com, by phone at 01865 820222 (from outside UK, +44 1865 820222), or by mail at 1 Sandy Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK. ================================================================