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Insane complexity of calendrically correct date and time operations

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Re: Insane complexity of calendrically correct date and time operations

#22
post #9

This could very well have been called “ Falsehoods programmers believe about date and time calculations ”. It fits very well into the pattern of other similarly titled lists which have been published in recent years.

Here's one such list for anyone interested:

https://github.com/kdeldycke/awesome-falsehood

Re: Insane complexity of calendrically correct date and time operations

#23
"False. The UNIX epoch is January 1, 1970 in UTC, but is Dec 31, 1969 in Los Angeles."

This isn't specific to Los Angeles, right? It's just referring to the fact that anyone with a negative UTC offset would see an epoch date of Dec 31, 1969 in their local time (I hope).

Re: Insane complexity of calendrically correct date and time operations

#25

Imagine we did not have names for months and days. Would you call the tenth month October or December? It does not make sense. Then, the other months at the start of the calendar, would you name them after phases of a military campaign of preparation for war, conquering, looting and pillaging? Would that be deemed politically correct? On the weekday names we are not doing any better. Tuesday - named after the god of…

>"Then, the other months at the start of the calendar, would you name them after phases of a military campaign of preparation for war, conquering, looting and pillaging?"

Do you have a reference for this? Besides Mars how are the others related? And also that would make a lot of sense to name periods of time after what you are doing during that time.

Edit:

Also, I remember reading that the one thing the pharaohs of ancient egypt had to pledge before taking power was not to change the calendar again. Since changing it according to whatever current whims caused even more chaos. At some point the "deep state" of the time just wouldn't stand for it anymore.

Edit2:

Found the ref. Actually I mentioned it here a few years ago:

"It must have been, then, that there were local attempts to retain the coincidences between the true and the calendar year — intercalation of days or even of months being introduced, now in one place, now in another ; and these attempts, of course, would make confusion worse confounded^ as the months might vary with tlie district, and not with the time of year.

That this is what really happened is, no doubt, tlie origin of the stringent oath required of the Pharaohs in after times, to which I shall subsequently refer.

[...]

When the year of 365 days was established, it was evidently imagined that finality had been reached ; and, mindful of the confusion which, as we have shown, must have resulted from the attempt to keep up a year of 360 days by intercalations, each Egyptian king, on his accession to the throne, bound himself by oath before the priest of Isis, in the temple of Ptah at Memphis, not to intercalate either days or months, but to retain the year of 365 days as established by the Antiqui.^ The text of the Latin translation preserved by Nigidius Figulus cannot be accurately restored; only thus much can be seen with certainty.

To retain this year of 365 days, then, became the first law for the king, and, indeed, the Pharaohs thenceforth throughout the Avhole course of Egyptian history adhered to it, in spite of their being subsequently convinced, as we shall see, of its inadequacy." https://archive.org/stream/dawnastronomyas00lockgoog/dawnast... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11017726#11020076

Re: Insane complexity of calendrically correct date and time operations

#27
post #17

Just learned google calendar uses the timezone your currently in by default even if you set the location back to your home. When I got back from travel, the notification was decidedly off. :)

Google’s “helpful” treatment of time zones decidely isn’t. I wish there was a way to tell google calendar to ifnore timezones altogether.

E.g. I am in Vietnam. I make a dentist appointment for when I am back in the US at 2 pm. I put the appointment on the calendar. I get to the US on the day and find the appointment is at 1 am the day before. Worse still, is in the opposite direction because I wont get the alarm until the event has passed by 11 hours.

Stop being clever google. If I put an event in my calendar for 2pm, just leave it there. Yes, yes, I could hunt down the timezone menu item every time. Better yet, I finally get around to transitioning out of that terrible company’s services.

Re: Insane complexity of calendrically correct date and time operations

#29

"False. The UNIX epoch is January 1, 1970 in UTC, but is Dec 31, 1969 in Los Angeles." This isn't specific to Los Angeles, right? It's just referring to the fact that anyone with a negative UTC offset would see an epoch date of Dec 31, 1969 in their local time (I hope).

True.

Re: Insane complexity of calendrically correct date and time operations

#30

"False. The UNIX epoch is January 1, 1970 in UTC, but is Dec 31, 1969 in Los Angeles." This isn't specific to Los Angeles, right? It's just referring to the fact that anyone with a negative UTC offset would see an epoch date of Dec 31, 1969 in their local time (I hope).

One related wrinkle that can catch out UK people (who tend to conflate local non-summer-time with UTC) is that the epoch is not midnight 1 Jan 1970 in UK time -- we were in the middle of a "UK time is GMT+1 all year round" experiment in 1970...
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