[nonfamous]

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.

[Dylan16807]

Wednesday 01:20 doesn't really help. They weren't accidentally showing up in the afternoon. The passenger knows it's the middle of the night.

Tuesday 25:20 has a much better chance of helping.

[AStonesThrow]

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.

[Dylan16807]

That's why I said chance of helping.

But the important part is that 01:20 does not solve the problem.

[AStonesThrow]

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.

[Dylan16807]

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.

[AStonesThrow]

> 01:20 on Wednesday is on Tuesday night

But that's subjective. Even my grandmother in the early-80s said differently. Everyone's computer-time and our smartphones and our digital clocks we've plugged into the wall, all have switched over to Wednesday at 00:00:00 midnight.

If you go to a bar they will tell you, "last call is at two in the morning." If someone heard a noise they say "I woke up at three in the morning to look around." My mother called them "the wee hours".

Sure, colloquially, 01:20 is very late on Tuesday night, because the Sun hasn't returned to announce Wednesday, and the cock hasn't crowed. So that is another way of looking at it. Time is analog, the orbits of Earth and Moon are analog, and we're cramming them into digital approximations and binary categories.

But you've misidentified the problem. The problem is that different humans interpret differently. The interpretation is influenced by culture and language. My scientific culture says that 01:20 is on Wednesday morning, and that is in agreement with my dearly departed grandmother, my smartphone, my calendars on Google and Outlook, and honestly there is no outlier in my life, except you, and Crunchyroll(?) who would insist that "01:20 is actually 25:20 on Tuesday night", and that writing it in this way would "help" solve a problem, because we're just explaining how damned confusing that is to rational Americans or users of either 12- or 24-hour clocks.

So "the problem" in my book is that a hypothetical human looked at our hypothetical "01:20 Wednesday" as rendered by a hypothetical computer, and that human wasn't thinking like a computer, or an American, or that human was Japanese, and that human erred with their interpretation of time notation. Now I don't have any idea of what time notation "01:20 Wednesday" would prompt a hypothetical trip to the airport 24 hours late, so it is not like this human was applying a different but correct interpretation to this problem.

Why don't we write "very early on Wednesday morning" or "before sunrise on Wednesday" or "just after midnight" (the latter is literally what "a.m." means...) and it won't look like another typo. Because if you write "1:20am on Wednesday is Tuesday night" then I'm going to call out a contradiction.

Computers can actually help with this, because if I've made a hypothetical calendar entry for my flight and I email the .ICS file to you, then the timezone and day-of-week is baked-in to that, so if everyone's settings are correct, bypass human interpretations. Many airlines have a way to email your itinerary directly to your friends. Just use the tools.