there's a saying that goes something like
if everyone around you is the problem, then maybe you are the problem
for me, this rings truest whenever i bring up the concept of midnight. each time gets increasingly interesting as it is frustrating. i have always thought (and still do) that the concept of midnight is as simple as it gets. the commonest of any common sense. in fact, it's so basic that everybody unanimously agrees with its definition, but nobody seems to uphold that definition.
00:00
that's it. that's all. that is the definition of midnight.
it is a point in time a particular date begins, and not an hour nor a minute has passed yet. we can argue about how long "midnight" lasts until we inevitably conclude that midnight does not exist at all, but that's another topic. for now, we'll keep it at the hour and minute level.
the minute before this is 23:59 of the previous day. the minute after this is 00:01 of the current day. 00:00 itself, by definition, is part of the current day. and 00:00 itself is midnight.
when i say "midnight of december 24". would you take that to mean at the beginning of the day of december 24 (i.e., the minute after december 23, 23:59)? or would you take that to mean at the end of the day of december 24 (i.e., the minute after december 24, 23:59)?
if you chose the former, then we agree. strangely, the most common take of that statement is the latter. this boggles my mind because, to me, the minute after december 24, 23:59 is clearly the midnight of december 25. why would i say "midnight of december 24" to refer to "midnight of december 25"?
maybe i'm just using a naive logic where i literally substitute "midnight" with "00:00" so phrases like "midnight of december 24" literally means "00:00 of december 24", which makes complete sense to me, but apparently not to everyone else.
in the same vein, the phrase "today at midnight" makes absolutely no sense to me unless you are referring to point in time that had already passed, which is never the case. but everyone says this, and everyone else understands what it means.
is it the use of the word "night" in "midnight" that makes people associate it with the end of the day? when i am the only one who thinks otherwise, then must i be incorrect?
12am
The 12-hour is understandably confusing in many ways. 12 follows 11, so why would 12 be a different day than 11 while 12 and 1 are the same day, right?
nothing more to say about this, really. i just wanted an excuse to show how unsatisfyingly gross the following sequence is:
..., 10pm, 11pm, 12am, 1am, 2am, ...
2400
while i personally prefer 24-hour format over 12-hour format. the military's representation of midnight (i.e., 2400) is easily my most disliked one. they use 2400 and 0000 interchangeably, but more commonly use 2400. for ease, supposedly, because "twenty-four hundred" is easier to say than "zero zero zero zero". while i don't have a problem with having multiple representation for the same thing, this only adds to the confusion in context. see, 2400 implies the date hasn't changed over yet while 0000 implies that it has. so then, which day is it?
a lesser logical reason i dislike "2400" is that it breaks the pattern. hour 01, hour 02, hour 03, all the way to hour 23 all have 60 minutes. but hour 24 only has a single minute, and hour 00 has 59 minutes that start at minute 01, unlike every other hour. this is even worse than the pattern that the 12-hour format breaks.
what's next? 2401?!
who cares?
in the increasing environment of "let's push to production at midnight" and people being confused at which midnight is that midnight and project manager sets up a meeting at midnight but they chose the incorrect date because they have a different definition of midnight than the computer's more accurate definition of midnight so everyone was up at the wrong midnight, i feel that it's about time that we unite, as a society, and as a single human race, to put this matter to rest.
so while others may say
at the end of the day, none of it matters
i say
at the beginning of the day, midnight exists
