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I imagine that attaching a date to that time would make a difference. If you say the deadline is "midnight Tuesday", it's not clear if "noon Tuesday is 12 hours late, or has 12 hours to spare. If you say the deadline is "0000 hours Tuesday", then noon Tuesday is 12 hours too late, but if you say "2400 hours Tuesday", then noon Tuesday meets the deadline with 12 hours to spare.
That book I've been talking about, "Origins of the Specious" says that deadline originated at the Andersonville prison in the 1860s. There were two fences around the prison, some distance apart, and if you were discovered between the fences, the guards had orders to kill you. It later got a figurative sense in newspaper dramas. I'm reluctant to swallow that, except that she makes a lot of assertions, and I haven't found any of them to be wrong.
deaconB said: I imagine that attaching a date to that time would make a difference. If you say the deadline is “midnight Tuesday”, it’s not clear if “noon Tuesday is 12 hours late, or has 12 hours to spare. If you say the deadline is “0000 hours Tuesday”, then noon Tuesday is 12 hours too late, but if you say “2400 hours Tuesday”, then noon Tuesday meets the deadline with 12 hours to spare.
An excellent observation. I spent 3 years in the Air Force, mainly on computers. I had to learn those formats. But that was back in the 70s, and conventions may have changed. But Wikipedia says this about military time. Looks pretty much the same as I learned it. With regard to your comment about time/date, they say:
24:00 of one day is the same time as 00:00 of the following day
I believe that removes any ambiguities ... as long as everyone's on the same wavelength.
We had an extended version of the military problem when my employer routinely installed new versions of in-house software in the wee hours of the night. Because the data centers involved were in a number of different timezones, which would be in different days at that time of night, it was routine to say that the "load", as it was called, would begin "at 0100 MST Wednesday night/Thursday morning".
Saying that 2400 systematically represents the end of the day and 0000 represents the beginning of the day may make sense, but at least one example in my list seems to contraindicate.
"... are subject to curfew between the hours of 2400 and 0500 ..."
One could argue that the reference is 2400 of the previous day to 0500 of the next day. Occam's Razor might say otherwise.
This example :BETWEEN THE HOURS OF 2400 AND 0500 HOURS LOCAL ON 22 JANUARY 2008." specifically precludes that reading by adding the date, unless you claim that the date applies only to the 0500 HOURS and not to the 2400, an stretch even further.
Even military language does not appear to be that neat.
Does Occam's favor of simplicity imply that the starting point must be the one to the leftmost ? If not , Occam can't stop the time between 00:00 and 5:00 to be understood , by some cultures I am sure, to be that which starts 5:00 and runs all day.
But actually I totally miss your point just before the Occam- are you saying that somehow 3 days are involved ?
I'm unaware of any cultures that start the day at 5 AM, but the Jewish day used at sundown, on the evening before.
Had an interesting discussion a couple of weeks ago with someone over the word "Sabbath". She contended that Sunday was the Sabbath, and Jews were ignoring the commandment to remember the Sabbath by resting on Saturday (if they made an attempt to observe the Sabbath at all.)
I said it's not Saturday, but from sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, and that "Christmas Eve" technically started on sundown on the 24th, with Christmas ending at sundown on January 6.
Then she asked me if the Sabbath began and ended at sundown in Israel, or if it was sundown local time that mattered, and I didn't know. I've read since that the Shabbat uses local sundown, but if there are highly observant Jews working in Antarctica, Shabbat could last a looooooong time.
deaconB said: ...if there are highly observant Jews working in Antarctica, Shabbat could last a looooooong time.
As I understand it, most of the bases in Antarctica are on UT. Same as astronauts on the ISS. But I think there's a couple bases that use the time zone convention for their host country. And Israel does not have it's own base in Antarctica, so no worries.
Ron Draney said
deaconB said
I'm unaware of any cultures that start the day at 5 AM, but the Jewish day used at sundown, on the evening before.
When I was growing up, TV Guide started the day at 6 AM, and the week on Saturday.
Might depend where you lived. Where I was, all the stations had signed off by 2 or 3 AM, but local broadcasts for farmers started about 4:30 or 5:00 AM, to catch farmers while they were getting dressed and eating breakfast. First time any of the stations broadcast all night was 1969, and by gosh, I wasn't about to go to sleep when I could watch men walking - on the moon. I wonder if anyone was monitoring viewing.
Only other times I - and the rest of the family - were glued to the set like that was when Kennedy was killed - although I wasn't "with it" enough to realize that it could be the first step in an attack by the USSR - and the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles.
My sister sold her house, moved to town, and had the C-dish transplanted to Mom and Dad's farm. It was fun viewing the various uplinks. I once picked up folks putting makeup on Diane Sawyer. They were gossiping about a friend's upcoming wedding, and the fact that the friend was pregnant, and the groom wasn't aware that the baby wasn't his. Newscritters aren't very smart, IMO, and i ought to know, having owned more than one newspaper.
We didn't pay for any programming, and I had fun watching Jeopardy at 2 PM when they transmitted to stations, then going to town and eating supper at a bar where they had Jeopardy at 7:30, announcing the right questions before the contestants did. I finally bought the Playboy channel, which was a terrible disappointment, and a six-pack of independent T stations. One of them was KTLA 5, which would follow vandals and looters as they went down the street setting buildings on fire. It was a totally different perspective on events than national TV offered, at the time or later. I'd like to have the law changed so you could get out-of-market broadcast TV. There are a lot of people who'd like to watch (especially news and weather) where they used to live. And when something happens in the news, I often check out websites of local startions and papers, to see what *they* are reporting.
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