This is the “figurative” v “literal” debate but with time!
Isn’t context the determiner of the literal or figurative relative to “midnight” being a unit or a concept? Just like “kill” can be literal (I killed the frog when i ran over it will the car) or figurative (I killed the novel with my superman skilled writing!). When Piggy used it as “sent at midnight” didn’t it become the literal unit 00:00:00.0000? He even went so far as to qualify the unit to a specific location.
The only way I can really see midnight not being a unit is when used to refer to something “not a time”. EX midnight black, midnight silence, midnight slumber. As an adjective midnight would only be a figuration for the purposes of description.
That sounds very sensible. The only problem being that having checked a couple of dictionaries, they all define midnight as 12 o’clock at night, and not the boundary between one day and the next.
But I think that is not incompatible with what I said. The sources you consulted are (apparently) relying on a customary clock representation which is adequate no doubt for the practical purpose of helping someone who did not have the use of the word ‘midnight’, but which does not in any way resolve the matter.
I used to love a good philosophical debate, but these days I’m far more pragmatic: 12:00am Friday come before 12:01am Friday.
Note that the argument “there is no 12am because once a clock displays 12 the moment has passed” is specious as it applies to every single moment in time, no matter how small a unit of time one uses (1 trillionth of a second just passed? Darn! Missed it again!!).
For all pragmatic and practical purposes, 12am midnight marks the beginning of day.
But if you do it in counting terms it goes 58, 59, 60 with 60 being Midnight (Friday). The next unit (Saturday) starts at 1 then 2 etc. (regardless of whether you are counting in minutes or seconds or micro seconds or nano seconds.
ie. Friday doesn’t stop at 59 and Saturday doesn’t start at 60.
This is like any other “measurement” in a circular system (loop). The origin point is both at the same time. It is the schroadinger’s* cat of points; it exists in both states simultaneously. But relative to language, isn’t context really the driver here? Piggy clearly meant “when all the hands point straight up”. As such the point was clear and the unit measurable no matter what our political views on when the day exactly transitions from former to latter.
Yes?
*[size=60] I don’t spell my know name right, you are asking too much if you think I can even get close to his[/size]
Well, I did not use the word ‘unit’ and it is unclear to me what you meant by it in what you said.
Here is me: Midnight is not an interval of time. An interval of time has some duration. It goes on for awhile. Midnight is not like that. This is what you need to see to see my point.
All of these countings are counting intervals of time. Midnight is not actually any of them. No matter whether you count in minutes or seconds of nano seconds, midnight will fall between two of the things you are counting! (And hence will not even be assigned a number in your counting-off.)
Can someone remind me why we are talking about this? I forgot.
From a data perspective it is a null interval, an interval of 0. I may be looking at it from the very lopsided view of my experience though… Most folks are smarter than me so I’m willing to think about being wrong.
Hugh has it right. We can talk either way. My point is the same good one no matter what language or terminology we decide to use to express it. I was using ‘interval of time’ to cover intervals of non-zero duration. (But you already understand that.)
If we want to use ‘interval’ in the way that also counts times of zero duration, then what we would need to observe is that “midnight is not an interval of non-zero duration.”
The underlying point is the same and can be expressed with any terminology adequate to the subject.
But as far as I can see there is no cash value in this discussion to using ’ interval’ in that slightly wider sense. It would just make making the same point a little wordier.
A tad background on my rational and why I was asking…
A large portion of my job is managing a systems data tool. We consider “point in time” (PIT) an entity of 0 duration/interval but with attributes. Think of a photo (we actually call them PIT snapshots). We also have “aggregate view” which is more like an average. Think a long exposure but replay-able like a video since it is made up of many PIT. It isn’t the easiest thing to explain.
In my maths days I would have said that a point is a null entity with only 4D location attributes (time, X, Y, Z) and since time is an attribute of a point, time can not be a point itself. As my brain has softened (as well as my middle) I’m more confused by the absolutism of that idea than ever. Time was a point when I kissed my wife this morning. Yet time was the attribute of the kiss. And the wife was an attibu…
Kiss…
Wife…
Mmmm…
But let us not muddy the temporal waters with metaphysical worries about the nature of time.
And what are we here for anyway? To settle Foxtrot’s hash, that’s what.
-gr
p.s. I am so unhappy with the title given to this shunted thread. First, because the issue is not only solvable but resolved! (Pat, pat.) But more importantly, it ought to be called ‘In Which Foxtrot & Company Try Pigfender’s Patience’. Another in a fast-growing series!
I think Socrates hit the nail on the head, with 
