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Common Calendrical Fallacies

yourcalendricalfallacyis.com

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Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#11

Post by contravariant »

dahfizz wrote: post #3

This comes off as very "well akchtually"; more snarky than helpful. A great example: >It is normal that the Sept-, Oct-, Nov-, and Dec- months are numbered 9, 10, 11, and 12 >False. This is very weird. They used to be months 7, 8, 9, and 10, but some reform to the Roman calendar back in the day resulted in the creation of January and February, which messed everything up. No software project cares what the calendar lo…

It would sound decidedly less snarky if they didn't start all sentences with "False.", but listing pathological examples is not by itself snarky.

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#12

Post by BitwiseFool »

dahfizz wrote: post #3

This comes off as very "well akchtually"; more snarky than helpful. A great example: >It is normal that the Sept-, Oct-, Nov-, and Dec- months are numbered 9, 10, 11, and 12 >False. This is very weird. They used to be months 7, 8, 9, and 10, but some reform to the Roman calendar back in the day resulted in the creation of January and February, which messed everything up. No software project cares what the calendar lo…

>This is very weird. They used to be months 7, 8, 9, and 10, but some reform to the Roman calendar back in the day resulted in the creation of January and February, which messed everything up.

I agree in that I don't like the snark but this one fact bugs me more than people can possibly empathize with. Once I realized October should be the eighth month, switch was permanently flipped in my brain and now I type 8 for October and it trips me up constantly.

Look, I get that calendar reform isn't easy. But the old months were all clearly named after numerical sequences. Why would the Romans intentionally break the numbering?!?!

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#13

Post by thinkharderdev »

Back in the dark ages, my first project as a professional software engineer was working on a web app for something or other. I had to write a JS function to figure out whether the current year was a leap year. It didn't go well....

It was a painful experience but it aught me a valuable lesson. To this day I would sooner write my own bootloader than roll my own date/time library.

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#14

Post by shazar »

> So if you’re writing code and are trying to use the time 00:00:00 to represent “no time”, you will be wrong in these countries.

Well, obviously using `00:00:00` as no-time is a terrible idea, but isn't that statement just wrong? If it's used to represent no-time, it would actually have a very low chance of doing what it's supposed to do in those countries, but fail all the time at all other time zones.

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#15

Post by BitwiseFool »

contravariant wrote: post #11
dahfizz wrote: post #3

This comes off as very "well akchtually"; more snarky than helpful. A great example: >It is normal that the Sept-, Oct-, Nov-, and Dec- months are numbered 9, 10, 11, and 12 >False. This is very weird. They used to be months 7, 8, 9, and 10, but some reform to the Roman calendar back in the day resulted in the creation of January and February, which messed everything up. No software project cares what the calendar lo…

It would sound decidedly less snarky if they didn't start all sentences with "False.", but listing pathological examples is not by itself snarky.

>Months always have 30 or 31 days in them >False. February. Duh.

This one in particular rubbed me the wrong way. But if it were rewritten as something like

"Don't forget about February, which is normally 28 days, unless it is a leap year in which it case it is 29 days long. But did you know that if the year is divisible by 100, we skip the leap day? Unless the year is also divisible by 400, in which case, we DO include the leap day. So even the exception has exceptions."

Or something like that. Adds a little more detail on top of what is fairly obvious.

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#16

Post by modeless »

How about "the sun is approximately overhead at noon", "the sun is at its highest point in the sky at noon", "the sun rises each day", "noon is approximately the time that people eat a midday meal", or "midnight is a good time to switch which day 'tomorrow' refers to".

I've made many mistakes attributable to "tomorrow" switching at midnight according to computers when in common human usage "tomorrow" really switches closer to sunrise, and certainly not before one goes to bed unless one is staying up all night.

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#17

Post by clusterfish »

TehShrike wrote: post #10

I wish there was a version of this that only contained examples relevant to e.g. the Gregorian calendar, or even within the subset of the Gregorian calendar specified within POSIX. I get whiplash going back and forth between "relevant thing I need to care about" and "obviously irrelevant" in this list

I'm not sure if this is the original, but here: https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#18

Post by yorwba »

dahfizz wrote: post #3

This comes off as very "well akchtually"; more snarky than helpful. A great example: >It is normal that the Sept-, Oct-, Nov-, and Dec- months are numbered 9, 10, 11, and 12 >False. This is very weird. They used to be months 7, 8, 9, and 10, but some reform to the Roman calendar back in the day resulted in the creation of January and February, which messed everything up. No software project cares what the calendar lo…

> anyone who says "the current year is 2020" is talking about the Gregorian calendar

Maybe. Maybe they're using a different calendar where the current year is actually 2020. The current year is 2565 in the Thai calendar. Putting "๒๕๖๕ กิโล, 2565 กิโล" into Google Translate to translate Thai into English results in "2022 kilometers, 2022 kilometers", because it treats the numbers as years and tries to helpfully convert them to Gregorian. Fun!

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#20

Post by GenZRiseUp »

allemagne wrote: post #6
dahfizz wrote: post #3

This comes off as very "well akchtually"; more snarky than helpful. A great example: >It is normal that the Sept-, Oct-, Nov-, and Dec- months are numbered 9, 10, 11, and 12 >False. This is very weird. They used to be months 7, 8, 9, and 10, but some reform to the Roman calendar back in the day resulted in the creation of January and February, which messed everything up. No software project cares what the calendar lo…

It might be a context-specific thing, but I didn't really find the tone snarky or off-putting. Those pedantic historical edge-cases are pretty interesting even though I will probably never have to worry about them.

I found them snarky as well, but interesting enough that I read it through for any help on trivia nights.

And I mean, the site is about calendrical fallacies, I expected a scolding for my preconceived notions on dates and times going in.

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