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technobabbler | 3 years ago
> There are two possible cases here. (snip) I was under the impression that it was common (in places that use the 12 hour system) to instead write 12:00 noon/midnight specifically to avoid this.
IMHO the bigger takeaway ought to be that what is "common" in your area isn't necessarily common in another part of the country, or in another country. This confusion exists because the Europeans (and nowadays the Americans) exported their time measurement system across cultures, to mixed success. It's never obvious and should not be assumed to be... that confusion can exist no matter what actual UNIX time the test was scheduled at.
> Second, I don't understand people saying they use 11:59/12:01 AM/PM as a mnemonic. This makes no sense to me as 00:01 a valid time.
For this specific case, it helps clarify what is "noon" vs "midnight". For some reason people are a lot better with knowing 11:59pm is, vs 12:00AM. The cutover is what throws people off. And for most purposes, the +/- 1-3 minute difference won't matter.
The midnight/noon thing doesn't really help when you're going across oceans though. Or, like you said, if you're not familiar with AM/PM at all.
thfuran|3 years ago
(In the US) I've probably seen that done outside this thread but I'm not sure. Just "noon" or "midnight" would be more common than that and if numerals are being written, I'd say "12 noon/midnight" is far rarer than "12 AM/PM". In places where 12 hour time notation is used, people are just expected to know 12 hour time notation.
njkleiner|3 years ago
You mean, people have a mental association like "Oh look it's 12:00 AM [= midnight], better get to bed now" because they see these times in specific contexts, and then use that as a jumping off point to extrapolate the meaning of AM/PM as a whole?