I was trying to fall asleep last night, looking at the red numbers on my clock. I quickly asked myself, is midnight AM or PM. For some reason, I didn’t know the answer as well as I should. I have always confused when AM begins, and it usually takes me a few seconds to sort it all out. For my whole life until this point I would think; 10PM is followed by… 11PM, which is followed by…, logically 12PM. Only it isn’t. It’s the other way around. That is until this special night when I looked at this problem from a different logical construct. If you think of the clock as in its circular, analog form, you must imagine 12:05 not as 12:05 but rather as 00:05. I realize this probably comes natural to people who grew up among military time, but for some reason I had never looked at time in this way.
Then I wondered what led to this elucidation. If course it’s from the programming methodology class that I have been watching for the last several weeks. In programming, counting generally begins at zero rather than at one. Because this is somewhat of a paradigm shift for most people, the professor had made a point of mentioning the fact on multiple occasions.
I think this is a great example of a thought that has been consuming a lot of my thought time for the past few weeks. Proust says it best, “The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes.”
