I have been referred to a sleep clinic to try to deal with what the VA hospital says is a sleep disorder (I'm not prepared to classify it thusly, but they do). Part of the treatment is to maintain a sleep diary. I downloaded something from a link they gave me -- I'm not sure if it's an "app," a "program," or merely a front end to a database. Whatever it is ... it doesn't work. It doesn't work because it blows up if I attempt to enter data saying that I went to bed after midnight. But that's not the point of this rant. A few nights ago, I went to bed at midnight. The program (as I think of it) doesn't have an entry for "midnight." It has an entry for the hour, then an entry for the minute, and then a toggle for a.m. or p.m. Which to choose? According to several sources I found on-line, 12:00 noon is colloquially spoken of as 12:00 p.m. and midnight is colloquially spoken of as 12:00 a.m. Properly speaking, however, both are incorrect. The reason is that a.m. and p.m. are abbreviations of Latin. "a.m." stands for "ante meridiem," which is "before the middle of the day." "p.m." is short for "post meridiem," or "after the middle of the day." But noon IS the middle of the day, so if the time IS the middle of the day, it can't also be either before or after itself. On the midnight end, it's 12 hours away from the middle of the day -- exactly. So is it 12 hours after the preceding noon, or 12 hours before the following noon? As one of the sources I found expressed it:
What Earp said. A 24 hour clock would clear any confusion or confusing instructions. And who in the world speaks properly?
I just use 11:59 p.m. or 23:59 in such situations or 12:01 a.m. or 00:01. I know this may make things even more complicated, but noon is also an archaic word for 'midnight' which has died out for good reason.
I would just use 00:01. That way all your sleep hours will be on the same day. It does seem strange that you can't use 00:00 though.
Yeah. Especially since it was developed under contract to the Veterans Administration. But ... no 24-hour clock option.
Well, it gets worse. My purpose in posting this was just to discuss the word mechanics (since that's where we are) of "12:00 a.m." and "12:00 p.m." so I didn't give you the full sorry saga. I did try advancing my sleep time to 12:05 a.m. ... and the system woudn't allow me to save my data. Apparently, whoever wrote the [bleep]in' thing isn't a night owl. What I finally figured out is that it WILL NOT ACCEPT an entry with a go-to-bed time after midnight. Which makes it useless to me, because it's extremely rare for me to go to bed before midnight.
So it MUST be between noon and midnight? You can't go to sleep outside those hours? I'm wondering if the program was written by a lazy programmer that didn't want to account for all possible use cases or scenarios (not sure of the right terminology).
That's how my alarm clock is, with a toggle for am and pm. I think it's fairly standard to do it that way, but it is confusing.
It doesn't. The data are entered manually by the user. It's up to me to know if I'm on daylight time or not. But I see your point -- if I travel from one time zone to another, if I'm on a sleeper train or sleep in an airplane, that will mess up the calculated number of hours of sleep for that night. Ditto for the two days per year when we switch from standard time to daylight time, and back.
Worse. It was obviously written by a (shudder) morning person who leaps out of bed at 5:15 a.m. and has her day's chores finished by 7:00 a.m. at which point she has time to harangue the poor night owl she's married to who is staring glumly into a cup of coffee and wishing she'd shut the firetruck up.
I can only offer you sympathy and extra coffee. I'm sure the lady has other sterling characteristics.
