Thread: Time - What crazy person decided on this?

I've had a problem with our assignment of times to the 24-hour clock for a while, and am having trouble sleeping tonight because I keep thinking about it.

Perhaps you've never thought about it before. Perhaps you have. Look at this:
9am, 10am, 11am, 12pm, 1pm, 2pm

See the problem? If not, it's probably because you're used to it. But you would surely see the problem if you weren't. There is a scale of times from 1-12, which is iterated through twice daily, once in am, and again in pm. The obvious way to do this should be to iterate through times 1-12 in the am, then do it again but in the pm. But, for some strange reason, only 1-11 is in the am. Then the 12 is in the pm with the next 1-11. Why the hell is it like this?

Also, has anyone else been seriously disconcerted by the fact that the new day technically starts at 12am on the previous night? It confuses things. It makes me unsure which date to write down if I'm writing a date past 12am at night. I hear people referring to 'today' at 1am to describe things they're going to do the next day, and there has been serious confusion because I mistakenly think they're talking about something they did today.

I think the day should start at about 5am. Here is what would make sense to me, with our current times on the left and the times I think they should be labeled on the right:

...
2am 10pm
3am 11pm
4am 12pm
5am 1am
6am 2am
7am 3am
...
4pm 12am
5pm 1pm
6pm 2pm
...

If it were like this, daylight hours would almost always be in the am, and dark hours would almost always be in the pm, something that is currently falsely implied anyway. It would make a lot more sense. I can't imagine what the people who made up the way we do it were thinking.