On 30/10/13 16:32, Bjoern Hoehrmann wrote:
* Risker wrote:
Just to clarify, since 0000 UTC is a confusing
time for most of us...is
that the minute after 2359 UTC on November 2 (i.e., 7 hours after the first
session), or is it the minute after 2359 UTC on November 3?
I've seen it used both ways so I just want to be clear.
Could you elaborate on
this confusion and where you think it is common?
The 24 hour clock divides a day into 24 hours from 0 to 23 starting at
midnight. 23:59 is 23 hours and 59 minutes after 00:00 on the same day.
2013-11-03T00:00Z --+
2013-11-03T00:01Z |
... |
2013-11-03T00:59Z |-- November 3rd
2013-11-03T01:00Z |
... |
2013-11-03T23:59Z --+
2013-11-04T00:00Z
...
The minute after 2013-11-03T23:59Z is on November 4th. I do understand
that when setting a deadline you are better off giving the end of a day
as deadline so the time is up when the day is over, otherwise people see
a contradiction and get confused, but beyond that I've not encountered
this particular confusion.
It's probably more common in places where people use
12-hour time for
more things. Because many 12-hour conventions make absolutely no sense,
folks can learn to expect time standards to make no sense and then don't
know whether or not to expect 24-hour time to make sense because the
precedent they're used to says it may not either.
So while 24-hour time does follow fairly logical conventions, if we're
less used to using it we won't necessarily know to expect that, which
might explain some of the confusion.