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Comment by smallerfish | Hacker News Reader

Minor pedantry, but this copy is mixing two different time schemes:

> [peaking at 0AM] while during the day colors are lighter [peaking at 12AM]

0(0:00) is a 24 hour clock concept, and isn't used with a 12 hour clock. Further, 12AM typically refers to midnight. So you either want {peaking at 00:00; peaking at 12:00} or {peaking at 12AM; peaking at 12PM}.

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See this brilliant thread by Foone:

https://mobile.twitter.com/foone/status/1572260363764400129

"Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine right up until we try to explain our calendar to them..."

I've seen this one before, but I highly recommend anyone in the lucky 10,000 to read this.

Hm, I wonder if that guy realizes that there are other languages than English in the world, and that there are different calendars in use.

That's addressed in the thread.

That'll be $50, sir

Relevant HN thread (989 comments, posted by, ahem, myself!) -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975173`|

New link, now more correct! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32975173

Someday aliens are going to land their saucers in a field somewhere in New Jersey and everything is going to go just fine, especially when they too admit they haven't figured out how to keep track of time consistently.

He makes the assumption that aliens wouldn't have their own seemingly-arbitrary date and time system. Honestly it's biased for a "everyone but humans are entirely logical and never deviated" viewpoint that cheap (bad) sci-fi goes for.

This clearly humorous twitter thread has really nothing to do with aliens, it’s shorthand for a viewpoint we can all understand enough to get the premise.

Eh, if I tweaked the story, it'd probably drive the point home more if the aliens did have a difficult-to-learn-from-scratch system to work with too.

Our scientific communities already have the homogenized forms that his hypothetical aliens would actually like.

Lazy sci-fi. Every civilization except humans is unified and monolithic, or has at most maybe 2 subgroups, because it’s hard to invent thousands of years of history.

And not just fiction, but science also: “Why haven’t aliens done X by now?”

Someday people are going to finally learn that Foone doesn't like when people link to their Twitter from HN.

Even more pedantic:

> In Japanese usage, midnight is written as 午前0時 (0:00 a.m.) and noon is written as 午後0時 (0:00 p.m.), making the hours numbered sequentially from 0 to 11 in both halves of the day.

(As per Wikipedia) Can be found in the Intl.DateFormat API as well.

The fact that it's 13 hours from 11AM to 12AM is probably the strangest thing in our already bizarre system of timekeeping

Like December is the twelfth month because decus is Latin for ten...

> Like December is the twelfth month because decus is Latin for ten

There also was a couple of dudes who wanted a month in their name that messed things up, IIRC..

If you mean Caesar and Augustus, they are actually the reason we don't have even more badly named months, like Quintilis (July) and Sextilis (August). December was the tenth month simply because each new year started in March. This likely changed long before Caesar was even born. They also, allegedly, had only ten months, but the second king of Rome changed that, but it could also be just a legend.

There is no 12 am. There’s 12 noon and 12 midnight. But no 12 am or pm.

Not true. They exist, but can be confusing to some people. Because 12:01 AM is just past midnight (and 12:01 PM just past noon), 12:00 AM is midnight and 12:00 PM is noon.

Yes true. Midnight is not AM nor PM because it's neither ante meridiem nor post meridiem. Noon has the same issue.

You're technically correct. Strictly speaking, yes, noon and midnight are not afternoon or after-midnight. However, that's what your digital clock will show. At 12:00:00 noon, it will say PM.

Digital clocks update at a frequency and are not continuous. The chance that an update happens at exactly noon or midnight is 0%. This is why AM and PM are always shown on a digital clock.

And that's how real life works too. The instant that is nether AM nor PM never physically exists. As the clock hits 12, it's already past.

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