When you frequently slip out of the commonly accepted norm for sleeping patterns you become acutely aware of exactly when a day begins and ends. Say for example you’ve stayed up late on Monday night. When does Monday stop and Tuesday begin? The brute logical answer is at midnight but this just doesn’t play. A better answer would be the day ends when you go to sleep and starts when you get up, but this is too subjective. Dawn is probably the best indicator, though it is subject to seasonal variations.
Of course since most people are asleep between midnight and six it doesn’t really matter. Those who are awake and alone make their own time and those who are with others will usually be on their own structured time frame, such as a factory shift. All that really matters is that by seven or so the day has started no matter how long you’ve been awake for.
However it matters to me in one small area. Blog date stamps. I mentioned this a few years back and it still hasn’t been resolved. If I post something at 1am it’s labled as being posted on Tuesday, but psychologically I’m posting on Monday.
However, if I could somehow tweak the system so Tuesday started at 6am this would lead to confusion as everyone else would assume that when my blog says Monday at 4am it means a time 24 hours previous to the actuality. Maybe we need a more granular system of week division, a day/night division that’s not based on am and pm. I never liked pm anyway since it can mean anything from early afternoon to late night.
Here then is my solution:
Monday: 6:00h – 20:00h
Monigh: 20:00h – 6:00h
Tuesday: 6:00h – 20:00h
Tuesnigh: 20:00h – 6:00h
Wednesday: 6:00h – 20:00h
Wednesnigh: 20:00h – 6:00h
Thursday: 6:00h – 20:00h
Thursnigh: 20:00h – 6:00h
and so on.
A date stamp for Wednesday 6th July at 3am would now read “Tuesnigh 5th July 03:00″.
I think it makes sense. Though I’m not holding my breath.
This sounds like the kind of idea you could only come up with at about 3 o’ clock on a Wednesnigh.
Can’t fault your logic, but I think I’d find the whole concept much more palatable if those new… entities had a ‘t’ on the end of them.
‘Nigh’ implies ‘nearly’ and to me – rightly or wrongly – that suggests something approaching rather than receding. Thus ‘Monigh’ would be “Monday almost here” rather than “Monday almost over”.
There have been many cultures which have a fixed number of “hours” in the day, and simply lengthened or shortened them with the seasons. You could perhaps use a bendy, flexy day concept, because you might be tired and go to bed early one night (compressing that day), then be up for 20 hours the next (and so extending it).
What if you’re mentally still in Wednesday, but you don’t post up until Wednesnight? Or you start typing in Frinight but don’t hit submit until Saturday. Edge cases are a bastard, they’ll get you everytime.
I suggest you define your own epoch, and date everything in seconds since you were born. Alternatively, write a bit of software that, once you’re dead, retrospectively redates everything as a fraction of a your lifespan?
On Jupiter, a day lasts about 10 hours. You could use that. On the other hand, a day on Mercury lasts about 4200 hours (which, bizarrely, is over twice as long as the Mercury year).
Dates? Cobblers.
Hg. Ummed annd erred over the T. Decided against it to shorten the sound. Could be wrong.
Jez. Yes, I could and probably do define my own epoch, but the trouble is making it comprehendable to others. And sometimes to myself.
Or you could take the approach (plugin) that I use??
I like the arbritary nature of online time classification — in blogtime things occur out-of-order, repeated, revisited, edited and often long after the fact. What’s a little division between wednesnight and Tuesnigh when faced with such anarchy?
(Have to say, I agree about the “nigh”. In my mind, Tuesnigh would probably by in the small hours of tuesday morning.)
I can also, of course, lie about when I posted things as frequenty and thoroughly as I wish. And do.
You know about the “backdate” function on livejournal, I take it? It’s a funny one. You swop visibility for temporal accuracy, as backdated posts do not show up in your friends’ view. Because they’re old news, see?
As another stopper-upper I heartily endorse this system, with the suggested revision to add the ‘t’. How many of us does it take to start doing it to set a trend, or begin to create a norm, even if only a minority one? Is actually altering the timestamp function a mere technicality? What happens to the datestamps?
And I agree with Jeremy. Revisions, revisions, drafts, bumps. Yes.
Ever considered an side-line as a timetabler for Britsh Rail/Network Rail (or whatever “rip off the confused commuter” it is this week)
and don’t have the “t” Monigh sounds like the sort of yawny noise you get when you have been up all Sunnigh/Monday & still can’t sleep by monigh…