Google account birthday request

[ian]

'Military time' would be 24-hour clock? US military form would suggest they probably use a 'decimal 12-hour clock' or some such oxymoronic abomination.

Yes, it's the 24-hour system. You can't even explain it to them, they have some kind of mental teflon against the concept. Put 1400 in an email and they'll be 'is that military time? I can't do that.' You can try telling them it's just a case of counting to twelve – noon – and then keep going. Nothing.

I wouldn't mind so much, but they also often can't get 12 am/pm correct.

[Cudzoziemiec]

I wouldn't mind so much, but they also often can't get 12 am/pm correct.

Nobody can. Neither of them can be correct. As Wikipedia says:

It is not always clear what times "12:00 a.m." and "12:00 p.m." denote. From the Latin words meridies (midday), ante (before) and post (after), the term ante meridiem (a.m.) means before midday and post meridiem (p.m.) means after midday. Since "noon" (midday, meridies (m.)) is neither before nor after itself, the terms a.m. and p.m. do not apply.[2] Although "12 m." was suggested as a way to indicate noon, this is seldom done[20] and also does not resolve the question of how to indicate midnight.

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language states "By convention, 12 AM denotes midnight and 12 PM denotes noon. Because of the potential for confusion, it is advisable to use 12 noon and 12 midnight."[24]

E. G. Richards in his book Mapping Time provided a diagram in which 12 a.m. means noon and 12 p.m. means midnight.[25]

The style manual of the United States Government Printing Office used 12 a.m. for noon and 12 p.m. for midnight until its 2008 edition, when it reversed these designations[17][18] and then retained that change in its 2016 revision.[26]

Many U.S. style guides, and NIST's "Frequently asked questions (FAQ)" web page,[2] recommend that it is clearest if one refers to "noon" or "12:00 noon" and "midnight" or "12:00 midnight" (rather than to "12:00 p.m." and "12:00 a.m."). The NIST website states that "12 a.m. and 12 p.m. are ambiguous and should not be used."

The Associated Press Stylebook specifies that midnight "is part of the day that is ending, not the one that is beginning."[23]

The Canadian Press Stylebook[21] says, "write noon or midnight, not 12 noon or 12 midnight." Phrases such as "12 a.m." and "12 p.m." are not mentioned at all. Britain's National Physical Laboratory "FAQ-Time" web page[22] states "In cases where the context cannot be relied upon to place a particular event, the pair of days straddling midnight can be quoted"; also "the terms 12 a.m. and 12 p.m. should be avoided."

Likewise, some U.S. style guides recommend either clarifying "midnight" with other context clues, such as specifying the two dates between which it falls, or not referring to the term at all. For an example of the latter method, "midnight" is replaced with "11:59 p.m." for the end of a day or "12:01 a.m." for the start of a day. That has become common in the United States in legal contracts and for airplane, bus, or train schedules, though some schedules use other conventions. Occasionally, when trains run at regular intervals, the pattern may be broken at midnight by displacing the midnight departure one or more minutes, such as to 11:59 p.m. or 12:01 a.m.[27]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12-hour_clock#:~:text=The%20American%20Heritage%20Dictionary%20of,12%20noon%20and%2012%20midnight."

Similarly, is midnight 00:00 or 24:00? It's a different case, because both are correct rather than neither, and more importantly because whichever you use, it's not confusing (except to Americans).

[Kim]

Similarly, is midnight 00:00 or 24:00? It's a different case, because both are correct rather than neither, and more importantly because whichever you use, it's not confusing (except to Americans).

Indeed, you occasionally see people counting to 24 and keeping going, when it makes more sense to associate the post-midnight time with the previous day in timetables or similar.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Yeah, whatever system you use, at some point you've got to stop and start again from whatever your starting point is. I suppose times like 24:30 make sense by analogy with 12:30 though. And in any case there are times which don't need naming unless you're 1) doing a critical 24/7 job, 2) wandering home pissed, 3) an audaxer, and even then it's only option 1 that really needs to know them.

[Kim]

I think I first encountered it in an old Japanese TV guide in some film or other, where they kept counting until the end of the night's programming.  Having previously fallen foul of bus timetables rolling over from Friday to Saturday, it struck me as an eminently sensible idea.

[Cudzoziemiec]

This reminds me of something I saw in a Victorian travel guide type thingy (not to a particular place), where there was a section on 'When the day begin in different parts of the word?' The possibilities included midnight, midday, sunrise, sunset and a couple of others I can't remember right now. All pretty obvious really though and just as relevant today. 'When you wake up' would be my suggestion.

[drossall]

I wouldn't mind so much, but they also often can't get 12 am/pm correct.

Can you get those correct? am is ante meridian (before midday) and pm is post meridian (after midday), so 12 hours before and after midday both mean midnight. Or, more reasonably, neither time exists, and we go from 11.59am to 12 noon to 12.01pm, and similarly 11.59pm, 12 midnight, 12.01 am. Certainly 12am is not a term I would ever use, because it's not clear what it means.

[ian]

12 pm is noon. Law. 12 am is midnight. Law. You fight the law. The law wins.

You can’t have a time that doesn’t exist or you’d fall into it.

[Kim]

On our cooker's display noon is 12:00 and midnight is 0:00.

Programmer had a brainfart remembering how 12 hour clocks are supposed to work?  I'm assuming it's not a 24 hour one, or it wouldn't be worthy of mention...

(Actually, I may have made that mistake in some code I wrote a while back, will have to check...)

[Kim]

Actually, I may have made that mistake in some code I wrote a while back, will have to check...

   Easily done.  Only barbarians and dyslexics use 12 hour clocks.

(click to show/hide)

Code: [Select]

if (!twentyfour_hour) {
  if (h > 12) {
    h -= 12;
    if (s < 0) {
      drawDigit(DIGIT_0, CHARACTER_P, c);
    }
  } else if (s < 0) {
    drawDigit(DIGIT_0, CHARACTER_A, c);
  }
}

Le sigh.

Code: [Select]

if (!twentyfour_hour) {
  if (h > 12) {
    h -= 12;
    if (s < 0) {
      drawDigit(DIGIT_0, CHARACTER_P, c);
    }
  } else {
    if (h == 0) {
      h = 12;
    }
    if (s < 0) {
      drawDigit(DIGIT_0, CHARACTER_A, c);
    }
  }
}

That's better.

[hellymedic]

Medical research dates will always put the month in letters rather than numbers to remove ambiguity

I moved between England & Scotland and back, eventually registering with a GP after each move. My medical records failed to materialise, which I couldn't quite understand.

Eventually it transpired that my DoB of ** Jun **** had been misread as ** Jan ****.

[JonBuoy]

This reminds me of something I saw in a Victorian travel guide type thingy (not to a particular place), where there was a section on 'When the day begin in different parts of the word?' The possibilities included midnight, midday, sunrise, sunset and a couple of others I can't remember right now. All pretty obvious really though and just as relevant today. 'When you wake up' would be my suggestion.

The Met Office website has an offset for their 'Maximum daytime temperature' and 'Minimum nighttime temperature' headline figures.  The figures for here for today are 14 degrees max and 2 degrees min.  The maximum is fair enough but it is currently zero and has been for some time - the minimum quoted is actually for 0600 tomorrow morning.

I am not sure what they do on one of those occasions where it warms up overnight rather than cooling down.

[perpetual dan]

...

AND they don’t have fortnights.  Even just saying the word sends them into paroxysms of helpless mirth.  “He said 'fortnight' snk snk splort lolz0rz &, moreover, roffle!”

I work with USAnians and describing a meeting as “bi weekly” feels designed to confuse. Our project resolved this issue by finding that once a fortnight was too infrequent.

[Cudzoziemiec]

This reminds me of something I saw in a Victorian travel guide type thingy (not to a particular place), where there was a section on 'When the day begin in different parts of the word?' The possibilities included midnight, midday, sunrise, sunset and a couple of others I can't remember right now. All pretty obvious really though and just as relevant today. 'When you wake up' would be my suggestion.

The Met Office website has an offset for their 'Maximum daytime temperature' and 'Minimum nighttime temperature' headline figures.  The figures for here for today are 14 degrees max and 2 degrees min.  The maximum is fair enough but it is currently zero and has been for some time - the minimum quoted is actually for 0600 tomorrow morning.

I am not sure what they do on one of those occasions where it warms up overnight rather than cooling down.

But that makes sense because when you check a weather forecast you're interested in the predicted temperatures for the future, not what it recently has been or is now.

[JonBuoy]

This reminds me of something I saw in a Victorian travel guide type thingy (not to a particular place), where there was a section on 'When the day begin in different parts of the word?' The possibilities included midnight, midday, sunrise, sunset and a couple of others I can't remember right now. All pretty obvious really though and just as relevant today. 'When you wake up' would be my suggestion.

The Met Office website has an offset for their 'Maximum daytime temperature' and 'Minimum nighttime temperature' headline figures.  The figures for here for today are 14 degrees max and 2 degrees min.  The maximum is fair enough but it is currently zero and has been for some time - the minimum quoted is actually for 0600 tomorrow morning.

I am not sure what they do on one of those occasions where it warms up overnight rather than cooling down.

But that makes sense because when you check a weather forecast you're interested in the predicted temperatures for the future, not what it recently has been or is now.

When I check the forecast for Saturday to see whether there will be any ice about first thing in the morning I don't want to be shown Sunday morning's temperatures under the Saturday tab.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Just looked at the Met office website to see how they display it. I see a minimum of 4 degrees under "Today" which they're actually forecasting for 05:00 tomorrow. Current temp here is 7 degrees (they say, it feels warmer to me). So yes it's misleading, particularly in your situation where you're checking early in the morning and this morning is colder than tomorrow morning, but I guess they've decided this best reflects most people's usage patterns. Perhaps their "today" means "a rolling 24 hours starting now"? It's possible to think of all sorts of situations where any definition of "today" could go wrong – whatever their "today" is, it might help if they explained it somewhere!

[Polar Bear]

Rated to the am / pm confusion,  when a legal document such as home or car insurance states that the policy commences at midnight on nth of month, is that actually possible? 

I always assume it means at the start of the 24 hours of that day but it isn't really cast iron clear in it's meaning to me and it's rarely clarified in any meanings and definitions section of the document.

[rower40]

A few thoughts about time (further drift from why we need to tell Google our date-of-birth!)

Trains (in Network-Rail land anyway) are never timetabled to arrive or depart at 00:00 hrs, due to the potential confusion as to which day it applies to.  If the running time between A and B is such that the arrival at B would be on the dot of midnight, then an extra minute is added so that it arrives at 00:01.  (So we don't have a midnight train to Georgia, or anywhere else for that matter.)

My first ever trip on a Voyager was a FridayNight-SaturdayMorning service from Mordor Central to the Southwest.  The onboard software for the Passenger Information Display couldn't cope with midnight, so it showed the Cheltenham arrival time as 25:30, Bristol Parkway at 26:20 and similar all the way to Plymouth.

The software suite I mostly work with stores times in 5-second units since midnight, so that they fit in a 16-bit word.  (Memory was expensive when this was written in the 1980s.)  Times between midnight and 3am are treated as belonging to the previous day, so we have a concept of a "27-hour clock".  At 3am, any remaining trains in the system have 24-hours-worth of time taken off all their timing points, so as to jump to the current day.   There are far fewer trains active at 3am than at midnight.

[phantasmagoriana]

Rated to the am / pm confusion,  when a legal document such as home or car insurance states that the policy commences at midnight on nth of month, is that actually possible? 

I always assume it means at the start of the 24 hours of that day but it isn't really cast iron clear in it's meaning to me and it's rarely clarified in any meanings and definitions section of the document.

I'm never quite sure on this, either. At work I set up lots of online assessments for students, and always go for 11.59pm as the deadline (rather than midnight) to avoid any confusion!

[Kim]

Rated to the am / pm confusion,  when a legal document such as home or car insurance states that the policy commences at midnight on nth of month, is that actually possible? 

I always assume it means at the start of the 24 hours of that day but it isn't really cast iron clear in it's meaning to me and it's rarely clarified in any meanings and definitions section of the document.

I'm never quite sure on this, either. At work I set up lots of online assessments for students, and always go for 11.59pm as the deadline (rather than midnight) to avoid any confusion!

To me midnight is unambiguously the start of the new day, but some people have other ideas, so it's generally best to avoid it.

It's rounding that breaks my BRANES.  For some reason we round upwards away from zero.  (So your stopwatch goes -3, -2, -1, 0 ,1, 2, 3 rather than -2, -1, -0, 0, 1, 2, 3.  Fine.) 

But doesn't that mean a four-digit clock is supposed to flip its least significant digit at the 30seconds-past-the-minute point, rather than on the minute?  Most of them don't.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Contextual, I'd say. If I was given a deadline of midnight on the 5th, then at 23:59 on the 5th I'd be panicking and at 00:01 on the 6th I'd either be relaxed or given up. (Nah, I'm pretty good at meeting deadlines!) But if an insurance policy started at midnight on the 5th and my house burnt down at 00:01 on the 6th, well I'd have to hope but I'm not sure.

[yorkie]

A few thoughts about time (further drift from why we need to tell Google our date-of-birth!)

Trains (in Network-Rail land anyway) are never timetabled to arrive or depart at 00:00 hrs, due to the potential confusion as to which day it applies to.  If the running time between A and B is such that the arrival at B would be on the dot of midnight, then an extra minute is added so that it arrives at 00:01.  (So we don't have a midnight train to Georgia, or anywhere else for that matter.)

The old British Rail Great Britain Passenger Timetable used to show midnight arrivals as 23:59 and departures as 00:01, the current National Rail one could well be somewhat different.


Back in the day, Thomas Cook's European timetable used to show a midnight arrival as 24:00 and a midnight departure as 00:00, just to muddy the water somewhat.

[drossall]

I moved between England & Scotland and back, eventually registering with a GP after each move. My medical records failed to materialise, which I couldn't quite understand.

Eventually it transpired that my DoB of ** Jun **** had been misread as ** Jan ****.

This is not as bad as the story that did the rounds recently of someone who was called in to the GP as an emergency obesity case. After some investigation, it emerged that the patient's height had been measured in metres, but recorded in centimetres, or some-such, resulting in a BMI in the 28,000 region.

[hellymedic]

It is MUCH more believable that I have a birthdate 5 months ahead of my arrival.

A BMI of umpteen thousand is obvious rubbish. No way could anybody guess an adult's month of birth correctly.

[Cudzoziemiec]

Sounds like a classic case of doctor's handwriting!