Damian Brady's Blog

We had a rather long argument at work yesterday regarding the meaning of “midnight”.  I took the argument onto english.stackexchange.com and then Facebook after work, and 35 comments and some research later, I think I’ve decided on an answer.

First, some context.

Like many IT companies, we have a moratorium that runs over Christmas.  That means no changes to any production systems over the break.  It’s a sensible step given the large number of people on holiday.  The communication (at least internally) was that the moratorium began at “midnight on the 9th of December”. Here’s where the problem starts.

Different Interpretations

It turned out that there were two different ideas about what “midnight on the 9th” meant.  The different interpretations, for the most part, were split between technical staff and less technical staff.  The technical staff – programmers and sysadmins – tended to interpret “midnight on the 9th” as 12am on the morning of the 9th of December.  The less technical staff – managers and level 1 support – tended to interpret “midnight on the 9th” as midnight at the end of the 9th of December.

If you’re still reading, I’m sure you’re very strongly on one side of the fence and can’t understand how anyone could have a different interpretation.  That was what happened to us.  Some people got quite fired up about it.

It’s totally first thing in the morning, idiot!

The argument here is that midnight is written as 12:00am or, in 24 hour time, 00:00.  If it’s AM or zero, then surely it’s first thing in the morning.  How could it be anything else?!

No you moron, it’s in the middle of the night at the end of the day!

The alternative argument is that nobody would think “midnight tonight” was actually tomorrow, or that there is no “midnight tonight”.  It’s in the middle of the night, and the night belongs to the day before. Geez!

My original position

Originally, I was very much in camp first-thing-in-the-morning.  That’s probably because nobody in my experience has ever referred to midnight as 24:00.  Indeed, no programming language I’ve ever encountered has defined midnight as anything other than the first moment of time available for a day.  Having said that, I could appreciate that phrases like “midnight tonight” were fairly unambiguous even if they didn’t agree with my technical definition.

So I decided to read more.

Most dictionaries I referenced very unhelpfully referred to midnight as, “the middle of the night”, or “12 o’clock at night”.  That really didn’t help me prove that I was right and everyone who disagreed with me were wrong.

Everybody’s wrong!

It seemed that no organisation really wanted to decide which day midnight belonged to.  NIST even recommended avoiding using 12am or 12pm because it’s ambiguous.  They actually have a good explanation of why on that site.

And that seems to be the answer.  Midnight does not belong to either of the days it splits.  Midnight really acts as a separator.  It’s infinitely small, and it doesn’t actually exist in either day.  Technically, it’s not a time of the day at all, but the point at which the day changes.

It helps to compare it to “midday”.  Nobody vehemently claims that midday belongs to the morning or the afternoon.  It’s generally agreed that it’s the point between them.  Of course you don’t get the same problems with midday because “midday on the 9th” is unambiguous; there’s only one time it can be.

Ok, so not everybody is wrong

Ultimately it comes down to convention, and the convention seems to be that midnight is at the end of a day.  It’s not technically correct, but more people understand it that way than the alternatives.

Of course that would mean that I was wrong.

It’s a stupid argument anyway.

You’d probably be aware that I’m a fan of Stack Overflow. I mean, I have my SO profile over there on the right of the page.

This is just a quick post to provide a link to the best response I’ve seen on Stack Overflow. And just to clarify, I mean best in terms of amusement. It gets a point across I guess, but wow is it creative.

So here you go: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags/1732454#1732454

A few things I found thanks to Simon…

Coding Horror: Separating Programming Sheep from Programming Goats: Talks about an article about some research done into why some people just can’t write code. I remember when I was doing IT at uni, there were people who would not have been able to write a strip of code to save their lives. It seems that you either get it or you don’t. My subconscious is telling me, “I knew that”…

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments: This research basically gives legitimacy to the idea that stupid people think they’re smart, and smart people lack confidence. I love this article. My subconscious is now banging on the side of my head and asking why I never listen to it.

The Baby Name Wizard: NameVoyager: This is really interesting. Basically it just shows you the change in popularity of baby names. It’s a nice flash interface, and you can see some definite trends in names. Interesting ones to search for are Prince, Hillary, and Brandon. See if you can pick the reasons for the shape of those graphs…

Damo

Haha,

Stumbled across this Top 10 Coolest DIY Gadgets on TechEBlog. Some people have way too much time, but as long as it’s amusing me, how could I complain?!

My personal favourite is the PainStation 2. Closely followed by the lego robot that plays Connect 4.

Damo “Visa” Brady

I’ve read about 5 articles in the past couple of days about the “Mosquito” ringtone that has been going around in the US and UK.

Here’s a few links: BBC, Washington Post, CBS News.

Anyway, the story goes like this:

A short time ago, a Welsh security company decided that a good way to stop teenagers congregating in certain areas would be to broadcast a really annoying sound that could only be heard by youngsters and not adults. The idea relies on the general premise that your hearing degrades as you age. The other articles have better descriptions and I’m too lazy to put my own up… There’s an image on this post that gives you the idea anyway.

Anyway, some enterprising young teenager decided to turn the technology against the adults, and recorded the sound to use as a ringtone for his phone. That way, he could use it in class, and the teachers wouldn’t be able to hear it. One of the posts I read suggested that maybe he could have just put the phone on silent, but I’ve never been a fan of occam’s razor (boring), and this solution is much more crafty.

It’s worth looking at the blog post by a guy named Ochen Kaylan – he gives samples of a whole lot of frequencies so you can see when yours cuts out (the last one I can hear is 15,000Hz – I’m going deaf…)

Oh yeah, and this guy has a download of the mp3 if you want it for your ringtone.

Damo “Visa” Brady

This is a amusing little video of some kid getting ‘packed in a game of volleyball. I’m mainly putting it up to test a video plugin I just installed.

Cool

Damo “Visa” Brady