Re: Do you think 12:00pm is noon or midnight?

On Jul 12, 1:31 am, "Paul J Kriha" <paul.nospam.kr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
Hey, rounding is more PC.
Unfortunately it leads to vicious wars over the methods of rounding.

Ha! That depends on what you mean by PC.

(a) If by PC you mean Politically Correct, that's up for debate.
(b) But PC may also stand for Personal Computer, a.k.a. Uncle Bill as
in Bill Gates. In that case, truncation is more "PC."

I think many people that has made a statement here has a little tiny
digital clock on their computer screens.

It suffices to look at the tiny digital clock on the computer to come
to the conclusion that the only viable solution is to call 12:00 noon
as 12:00 PM. There are many ways to phrase it. Let me try one:

(1) Your retina requires a non-zero duration to see an image,
(2) The exact instant of 12:00 noon has zero duration, meaning you can
never actually see it displayed, no matter whether it is to be
displayed as "12:00 AM" or "12:00 PM" or "12:00 Noon" or "12:00 M".
You won't see it. The computer cannot even display it. You and the
computer can do exactly zero things in a given instant, because an
instant has zero duration.
(3) You can only see something displayed over a period of time, e.g.,
the one single minute right after 12:00 noon. And in U.S. convention,
it's the truncated format that is displayed, and it is displayed as
"12:00 PM". And that totally makes sense according to the meaning of
"Post Meridiem."
(4) Therefore, as long as Uncle Bill rules, people will always be
stuck with 12:00 PM to refer to 12:00 noon. And that's the way how
children are growing up in the information era.

This battle has long been over.

-- Ekki

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