ilinamorato @ ilinamorato @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

Noon or midnight aren't arbitrary.

I didn't say they were. I said that the numbers we've attached to them are.

(roughly, days aren't actually exactly a day long but that's too advanced for you lol).

Strong words from someone who only reads three out of every five words.

The exact middle of the day, recognisable to most people simply by looking up, is the exact opposite of arbitrary.

Calling it the "middle of the day" is. It could very easily be the beginning of the day, or three-quarters of the way through the day. If you had lived with that your whole life, you would think it was normal.

There's literally an inherent meaning in [numbers].

Not as they're used in timekeeping. I'm sorry, I didn't realize I needed to explain something so simple to you as "the words I use are meant to be interpreted in the context in which I'm using them."

There's also actual reason as to why the day is divided the way it is, but seeing how proud you are of your overbearing ignorance, I'm not gonna educate you on what it is.

That's a lot of words to say "I don't know but there's probably a reason."

The real reason is "because the ancient Egyptians arbitrarily decided to divide it into twelve hours." As for indexing solar noon as 12:00, well, it actually didn't always; in fact, the word "noon" comes from the Latin word for "nine." The first hour of the day (when people woke up) was 1:00, roughly analogous to our 6am, and nine hours later (our 3pm) was "noon." The reason it became solar noon was that they observed a sort of coordinated universal time! Noon drifted earlier in the day as the center of culture drifted.

Hours weren't always the same length, it'd depend on the length of the time of day. Do you know what doesn't change? Noon being in the middle of the day.

Sure it does. Other cultures make noon the beginning of the day, or make sunset the beginning of the day. Yes it changes the lengths of time periods. You only think it's weird because you've always known a world where noon was the middle of the day.

Because we're on a revolving piece of rock in space and no matter how much you stomp your foot and cry foul, noon will still always be non-arbitrary

True. But noon as equal to 1200 will always be arbitrary, because we're on a rock in space and it didn't come with any numbers on it.

Ah, some deeply meaningful willfull ignorance, because you can't admit you backed a moronic idea.

Once again, I beg you to actually use some reading comprehension. I haven't backed any ideas. But it's easier to sling insults than to read carefully and come up with a cogent response.

You're assuming an awful lot about me based on complete ignorance and using those assumptions to justify a really bizarre level of abuse.

You don't understand time zones or geopolitical history either it seems, and you're imaging people from thousands of years ago to have a concept of universality.

I'm not. That's literally the premise of the idea proposed here. The fact that you don't get that is really making me question your reading comprehension abilities.

You're not proposing a single improvement,

Correct. I'm not. As I've noted several times now, I'm not proposing anything. I'm just pointing out that we have a significant bias toward the system we already know.

Except it is, because that's how hours work. You probably don't know where they come from either

Yeah, they were chosen more or less arbitrarily by the ancient Egyptians because there were twelve significant constellations they followed, which led to a sort of base-12 number system they used for stuff related to the sky (months and hours in particular).

Again, units and numbers have no inherent meaning. We made it all up. A day could just as easily have had ten hours of 144 minutes each, or 40 hours of 36 minutes each.

I know it seems to you like you're making sense, but you're not...

The fact that you don't understand what I'm saying doesn't mean that I'm not making sense. And I think there's ample evidence here that you're just not reading carefully.

...because you're ignorant of so many assumptions you've made, which if changed, would be like giving ancient Romans the GPS instead of them using sundials and that said Romans would've magically been able to consider that theyre noon is two hours after "the real" noon, which is based on.........?

Ok. Deciphering your word salad here, I think you're trying to suggest that our current 24-hour day and time zones were somehow inevitable? Which...I mean, obviously they aren't, since there are many cultures that independently came up with different time systems.

There's a Hindi clock that divides the day into thirty hours. Roman timekeeping was divided into 12 hours, but that time was measured from sunrise to sunset. Byzantine time uses the same division of days into 24 hours, but starts a day at sunset, meaning that the start of a day changes within the same city throughout the year. France even tried decimal time for a while, where each day has ten hours, each hour has 100 minutes, and each minute has 100 seconds. All of these systems arose from different starting conditions, none of which were "giving Romans GPS" (they already knew the Earth was round) and none of which caused any problems with users going to sleep at different times of day.

The thought experiment here isn't "how could this have happened given existing conditions?" or even "what conditions could have brought this about?" but rather "assuming a world where some set of conditions brought about a true worldwide UTC without offsets, what would it look like to the users of that system?"

And this is what you've decided merits abusive behavior. Can't imagine what you're like about stuff that actually matters.

I wonder if it's got something to do with some sort of old, out-of-date software that only runs on 2000.

Yeah, there's a name for it. But I forget what it is.

"Schlock and aaaauuuuughhhhhhh"?

We're already predisposed toward a bit of iconoclasm just being here instead of Reddit. The "normies" are still elsewhere, so we get it into our heads that the echo chamber around us is the norm, rather than a self-selected group of people for whom Greta Thunberg is a centrist. On those rare occasions that a normie gets here, we find ourselves shocked at how they live their lives.

Are you suggesting that this is a world without the internet or international television programs? He's going to know that hours are different everywhere, especially if he has friends in other regions.

That why this "make everyones time the same" is about as smart as an idea as shoving Lego up your nose.

Only because the current way is the one you know. In this alternate universe where the whole world has always been on UTC and someone posted a question on Lemmy asking why the whole planet isn't divided up into 1-hour offsets with their own times, that universe's version of you would be just as irrationally angry with that universe's version of me for daring to suggest that the time zone idea is no less irrational than the UTC idea.

Having "our local noon is 0550pm" is dumb as rocks and nowhere comparable to time zones.

How is "our local noon is at 1200" any more objectively logical? Midnight is an objectively arbitrary time to start the new date. The best you can say is that it's twelve hours before local noon, but even if you index off of local noon it doesn't make any more logical sense to put the 0 while most people are asleep. Someone who hasn't grown up with our clock might well say, "why would we choose a clock that puts the beginning of the usable part of the day at 6 or 7 for most people?" Calling the hour when people wake up 0000 or 0100 would make a lot of logical sense.

Unlike some people have prolly told you, not every idea is equal.

Numbers have no inherent meaning. We could make noon happen at 0000, 1200, 2200, whatever--and people would find it completely intuitive if they grew up in it all their lives.

I'm not saying that "every idea is equal." That's patently nonsense. What I'm saying is that, if you're going to have a 24-hour clock indexed to noon, putting noon at 1200 makes just as much sense as putting it at any other time on that 24-hour clock.

Now go ahead and read what it's doing in China and see our glorious idea at work

Sounds like the answer is "fine." People in Xinjiang wake up a couple of hours late, start work at 1100, have lunch at 1400, and often watch the sun set at midnight. They continue to live there and continue to have a pretty normal life. The only weirdness comes from talking to people in other time zones, which again would not be a problem if everyone in the world had started with this from their youth.

Again, I'm not trying to suggest that it's better. I'm just saying that this arbitrary choice about how to handle time around the world is not any better or worse than any other arbitrary choice we could have made; it's only because we know our current method so well that we think any other method is weird.

His real first name is "Emory," so make sure you put that in there too.

(Last I heard, his fans hate it)

No, in this hypothetical scenario, he wouldn't complain about it being 0945 because he's grown up in a world where that's ambiguous. He's going to say, "Don't you know it's the middle of the night here?!"

That's not too different from how it is now. In fact it might be worse, because once you know a time you have to remember not only a time but the offset that you know the time in.

Yep. I can tell you that dinner would be around 0930, but you're right that the other calculations are tougher.

I'm not saying this would be better. Either system has trade-offs. I'm saying that each of them would be equally weird from the other side.

It's not more convenient. I'm just saying we'd have been used to that and just as weirded out by the idea of time zones if that was all we'd ever known.

Only because we're already familiar with the current way of doing things, though. If we had all been on UTC for our entire lives, it would be a simple matter of getting to a new place, asking when local noon is, and going about our business.

"Hey, when is local noon here?"

"'bout 0330."

"Cool, thanks. Want to get together for drinks tomorrow night? Say, around 1045?"

They're all just numbers. They have no inherent meaning, only what we imbue then with.

It would get a little bit tricky with the date switching over in the middle of the day, of course. In my mind, that's the biggest reason.

This is basically what J. Edgar Hoover did. I didn't think he ever used a polygraph specifically, but he did ideological purges all the time.

The FBI has always been like this.

(I would say hi to my agent, but let's be honest, he's probably been laid off already)

I know it's a joke, but: a really small sail.

It has definitely plateaued.

Just because not everyone goes through each one doesn't mean they aren't stages. Not everyone goes to high school, or doesn't sleep through the night, or catches a ball thrown from a meter away, or has trouble with adolescent relationships; that doesn't mean those aren't stages.

"Stages" are entirely theoretical and hotly debated, and you shouldn't think of them like video game levels where you have to go through all (or even any) of them. Think of them more like theatrical stages: it's where the action happens for a time, the set upon which the action of your life occurs. You're almost always going to be on multiple stages at a time, and the people around you are probably going to be on a different set of them.

This is portrait mode on a smartphone. Pretty common photo manipulation, potentially done automatically without their knowledge even.

Creepy? No, probably not, but it does present some potential problems: You probably don't have a whole lot of things in common at this point. You might not be particularly compatible with regard to your friend groups or your desires for your future. You are in a situation where it's going to be difficult to get on the same level. These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they are potential obstacles.

That said, if you and she are both okay with it—and your daughter, who is clearly someone whose opinion you care about—then have a great time! Don't have high expectations, but enjoy yourself and see what happens.