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You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

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Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#81

Post by Y_Y »

progval wrote: post #74
efitz wrote: post #47

I advocate a solution similar to proposals floated years ago on alt.pave.the.earth on UseNet. 1. Disintegrate the moon, anyone who has ever advocated for lunar calendars, and anyone who fails to convincingly support this Plan(tm), converting their mass to energy that we can use for productive purposes such as orbital adjustments. 2. Adjust the rotational period of the earth to an aesthetically pleasing multiple of th…

> ( ) planetary-scale engineering is impractical

Well that's just a matter of time. I posit that given sufficient time for technology to develop, anything can be practically engineered.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#83

Post by helsinkiandrew »

swsieber wrote: post #69
helsinkiandrew wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Adjust the axial tilt and orbital eccentricity of the earth to eliminate "seasons". So you’re the guy who wants to kill summer?

No, summer will be alive and well in Phoenix, AZ.

But not in Helsinki, Finland if the planet is tilted :-)

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#84

Post by ketzu »

msla wrote: post #77
isidor3 wrote: post #3

> having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid > having one or two days per year with no day of the week is asinine These don't sound like real reasons to me. If it costs having a 13th month with just a few days in it or a NO_DAY_OF_WEEK constant in my DAYS_OF_WEEK enum, I'd take it if it meant all of the weirdness was limited to a few days always located at the end of the year. Sounds like a…

> These don't sound like real reasons to me. They are if you have to write date-handling code or, worse, use the date-handling code of others. Date-handling code is hard enough without NULLs.

This does not only concern code, but regulation, tradition, contracts etc. The mutual understanding of weeks, days, months of roughly equal lengths is baked into a lot of our things and it's not enough to change it in some header file/law to clean up the rest.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#85

Post by tom_mellior »

> ( ) by that logic, 2000 was the final year of the Nineties

I'm annoyed by this argument, which came up again at the start of this year in dumb Twitter discussions about whether 2020 marks the beginning of a new decade.

2000 was not the final year of the Nineties. 2000 was the final year of the second millennium, and of the 20th century, and of the tenth decade of the 20th century. The Nineties were the years 1990-1999, the tenth decade of the 20th century were the years 1991-2000. These are different ranges, but we also use different terms to refer to them. There is no logical problem. There is only a problem with the assumption that these different terms "should" refer to the same concept.

So did 2020 mark the beginning of a new decade? Yes, it marked the beginning of the decade we might call the Twenty-Twenties. It did not mark the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century; that will be 2021.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#86

Post by simias »

dragonwriter wrote: post #75
hinkley wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to scapegoat, but there are a bunch of odd things the US does because boomers like things the way they've always been. Why were a bunch of new Christmas songs written 60 years ago and barely a song a decade has been added to the repertoire since? George Michael is dead, and Mariah Carey seemed touch and go for a while, and those are pretty much the last two people to create a successful Christmas song (and the…

> Why were a bunch of new Christmas songs written 60 years ago and barely a song a decade has been added to the repertoire since? You are factually incorrect, and i suspect biased against country music, which is disproportionately (but not exclusively) where new original-and-popular Christmas music has come from.

If hinkley is not American he might not so much be biased against country music as wholly ignorant about it. That's one of the few cultural aspects of American culture you haven't managed to successfully export abroad (alongside American Football and the Ambrosia "salad").

As a foreigner I'm definitely familiar with the songs hinkley talks about, while I have no idea what a country Christmas song even sounds like.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#87

Post by kang »

Y_Y wrote: post #81
progval wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ( ) planetary-scale engineering is impractical

Well that's just a matter of time. I posit that given sufficient time for technology to develop, anything can be practically engineered.

If one combines theory of evolution and biological rhythms, then planetary scale engineering would be a drastic health effect.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#88

Post by bhaak »

earthboundkid wrote: post #45
patrickthebold wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big proponent of continuous time zones, so that noon drifts ever so slightly as position changes. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Time zones were a premature optimization. Now we all have GPS, so we can return to location based times.

Timezones were introduced as a generalization of country wide time references. And those were introduced because trains became so fast that calculating train tables with local time was very confusing.

That issue wouldn’t be solved with GPS.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#89

Post by bhaak »

> ( ) planetary-scale engineering is impractical

I find your lack of vision disturbing.

Given that we likely need planetary-scale engineering anyway in the next 50-100 years, getting a few asteroids to nudge the earth’s orbit a bit over a long period of time isn’t that much of a stretch.

With asteroid mining it might even pay for itself.

Note: I didn’t do any calculations but over millions of years we’ll need to stabilize earth’s orbit anyway, otherwise our calendars will get out of sync even more.

Of course we’ll have to deal with the inaccuracies of the Gregorian calendar rather soon, in 7000 to 8000 years.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#90

Post by kstenerud »

airstrike wrote: post #54
kibwen wrote: post #2

> your name for the thirteenth month is questionable In my plan for twelve 30-day months, I intended to call the leftover 5/6 days "Etcember", for et cetera. :P (This submission appears to be a riff on the classic "Programming Language Checklist": https://www.famicol.in/language_checklist.html )

> [ ] The most significant program written in your language is its own compiler > [ ] The most significant program written in your language isn't even its own compiler This bit always cracks me up

> [ ] You have reinvented PHP but worse

> [ ] You have reinvented PHP better, but that's still no justification

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