If all I had to do to pay that loan was occasionally shake some apple trees and sell them to the raccoons nephews and also get paid ticket money for doing chores, sign me the fuck up

I forget which exact midnight represents, but the immediate second after midnight would be the 'morning' of the next day. If you're born at 12:00:01am or 00:00:01 in military time, then you'd be born the next day.

I feel like we could fix this problem with new terminology. We have words for many various events and stretches of the diurnal cycle: Dawn, sunrise, morning/forenoon, afternoon, sunset, and dusk, but nothing quite so definite for the night hours. I would certainly understand what it would mean if somebody said, "the evening of the 3rd into the wee hours of the 4th," but those terms lack precision. Both foremidnight and aftermidnight would convey the meaning, but sound awkward.

Historically, I think it makes sense that we base the reckoning of a day on our natural photoperiod. Until the advent of artificial lighting, the night was a liminal period of time, and hardly anybody was awake and active to make dividing it up useful. I suppose we could change the rollover time to noon, but that divides up the sunlit period across different days. At least we already have words to use, and "the morning of January 1st" would be unambiguous, as would "the night of January 1st," but counterintuitively, the morning of January 1st would occur after the afternoon. Making it some other time would just be just as arbitrary, and much more awkward. Sunrise, for instance, varies quite a bit throughout the year. (By about half an hour even at the equator, and by almost 5 1/2 hours in Oslo.) So, now does the sunrise on January 1st occur just after or just before the new day begins? What about places where the sun stays in the sky for longer than a clock-day during parts of the year?

Better to just agree on some new words, I think.

*yes, I am aware of the actual facts. I am giving the historical view point.

You ignored the asterisk

"The night of the 5th" would be 2000-2359. After that, it's the (early) morning of the 6th.

I get ya, though.

If you want a more confusing one, which months belong to which seasons? Most people seem to think winter (at least in the Northern hemisphere) is December through January. We are certainly in the winter now, and it's December. Ergo, December is a winter month, right? Christmas is a winter holiday, right? Yes, but also no. The first day of winter is the winter solstice, December 21. So 10 days of December are winter, but 21 days are autumn. (And Christmas, as it's celebrated today, just hijacked the winter solstice to bring Christianity to pagans.) So when people say the weather is changing, it's warm in December... yeah no shit! The first 3 weeks of it are autumn, and autumn is not necessarily cold!

If people thought of Winter as January through March, Spring as April through June, Summer as July through September, and Autumn as October through December, people wouldn't trip about seasons feeling longer or shorter, because they'd be attributing the correct months to the seasons. Of course, since seasons are based on solstices and not the months, it's more accurate to say Winter is the first quarter of the year following the Winter Solstice (which is a better year end/beginning), Spring is the second quarter of the year leading up to the Summer Solstice, Summer is the third quarter of the year following the Summer Solstice (which should be celebrated as well), and Autumn is the fourth quarter of the year leading up to the Winter Solstice.

Time is really only funny because the terms we made up to define them are not perfect. You would prefer the day begin with sunrise, and end when the night ends. That makes sense, to a point. I know some pagan cultures measured months by the moon cycle, so it's not unreasonable.

I get why people thought it was convenient to have it divisible by so many other numbers, but my opinion is fuck all that.

"Military time" should be standard in our system, the am/pm problem is absofuckinglutely stupid, pointless, and counterproductive.

Beginning of day should be low number. Increase until end of day and reset. There is no good argument for starting over halfway through and if you think there is think again because you're wrong.