Wednesday 1:20 AM (12 hr notation) = Wednesday 1:20 (24 hr notation), or is there another convention I’ve never heard of? Either way, this seems to further validate the original confusion.
> book a flight on Wednesday 1:20am, head to the airport on Wednesday evening because they think “well the flight is on Wednesday right”, and find out that it is actually Thursday after midnight.
This bit here, I don't understand what Thursday is supposed to do here. If my flight leaves Wednesday at 1:20 AM, I'm leaving for the airport Tuesday evening.
But if I'm interpreting OP correctly, people are booking flights for Wednesday 1:20 AM but leaving for the airport Wednesday evening? Why would you be confused about that?
People read 1am and then they think and remember "middle of the night"
So if you happen to think of it as "middle of the night, specifically 1am", and you fall into mental shortcuts a little bit too hard, oops you might end up there on the wrong day.
The correct 24h notation would be: Wednesday 01:20.
By the way, if you’re used to 12h time, you can get a similar experience to that described in the article simply by setting your watch/phone to 24h time. After a while your brain just starts to recognize 15:00 and 3pm as the same thing, and there’s no explicit conversion required for you.
If we’re not accustomed to this “overflow” notation, it only looks like a typo and an error. In my world, the day-of-week begins/cycles at 00:00, so don’t tell me that is happening on a Tuesday!
It also does not help for entry into a programmatic form or database field. That sort of notation is only good for output to a human who knows this custom.
Well, I'm interested to know how you define "the problem" then, and what "solving" it would look like, and why that "solution" can be approached by unfamiliar notation.
The problem is that 01:20 on Wednesday is on Tuesday night, which trips people up.
There is no perfect solution, so I can't tell you what solving it would look like. But I'd say that putting "(Tuesday night)" next to where it says "01:20 Wednesday" would be helpful to many of the people making this mistake.
How would you define the problem? It's not people mixing up 1:20am and 1:20pm.
This bit here, I don't understand what Thursday is supposed to do here. If my flight leaves Wednesday at 1:20 AM, I'm leaving for the airport Tuesday evening.
But if I'm interpreting OP correctly, people are booking flights for Wednesday 1:20 AM but leaving for the airport Wednesday evening? Why would you be confused about that?