NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: 0000 not 2400?
From: Charles Seitz
Date: 2004 Oct 18, 15:02 -0400
From: Charles Seitz
Date: 2004 Oct 18, 15:02 -0400
George, I'll widen things even a bit further. Why do we have East and West longitude? Longitude should start a 0.0 and proceed up to 359.999999999.. degrees just as GHA does. There is too much culturally induced confusion. I guess that makes life more interesting. --- CHAS George Huxtable wrote: > Jim Thompson wrote- > > >>Although we can think and write the term "2400", it has no practical >>meaning, is that right? As soon as the time advances past 23:59:59, then > >>from a navigator's perspective the date changes to the next day, at time > >>00:00:00. > > > To widen the argument somewhat, even more absurd is our common convention > of referring to times, in the hour after noon. as 12:xx pm, and the hour > after midnight, as 12:xx am, and the dials of clocks (and even > chronometers) marked accordingly, when in logic they should be 00:xx, and > zero-hour should be marked as zero. > > Time has a history that goes a long way back, as is clear by the famiiarity > we have with clocks marked in Roman numbers. Without a symbol for zero, or > the idea that you could count and measure things starting at zero rather > than starting at one, how would you mark midday, logically, in Roman > numerals? Can't be done! So we have been stuck to an illogical numbering > for those two hours each day, even though, for most clocks, we have since > changed to an Arabic numbering system in which zero presents no problem. > > To widen it further, isn't it another absudity that our date-of-the month > start at one, rather than zero? > > As a result, calculating the interval between two events with known dates > and times, becomes a real nightmare, to do longhand or to write a program > to do it. > > I will avoid refrain from discussing years, decades, centuries, and > millennia, in the interests of my blood-pressure. > > George. > > ================================================================ > contact George Huxtable by email at george@huxtable.u-net.com, by phone at > 01865 820222 (from outside UK, +44 1865 820222), or by mail at 1 Sandy > Lane, Southmoor, Abingdon, Oxon OX13 5HX, UK. > ================================================================ >