Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

It was the Romans who inserted a leap month inside February between the 23rd and 24th. Since the two consuls ruled on alternating months, adding an extra month after February would give one consul one more ruling month, making it somewhat unfair. Since leap years were handled irregularly back then, they were leap months, not leap days.

The Julian calendar introduced the leap day instead, and maintained it in February as originally, and introduced it every 4 years (except years dividable by 100).

This is also around the same time that July and August were named to their current names (named after Caesar and Augustus). Before that, they had had names equal to fifth and sixth month, respectively, like September comes from seventh.

I'm always amused by the fantasy that aliens are more likely to be rational and have far less convoluted systems than we do.

It's some manner of borderline religious, faith-based notion about the assumed nature of aliens. People seem to get quite upset if you intrude on their fantasy about what aliens must surely be like (not like us, far better than us; humans are the primitive dredge of the universe basically). Despite the fact that there's no evidence to support either side of the premise, so it ends up revealing what the person thinks about themselves (self-hate) and humanity generally more than anything else.

And if you really want to see their heads explode, suggest the notion that the odds - as far as we know - are just as good that humans are the most advanced beings in the universe as not; and the odds are just as good that we're the very first spacefaring beings in the universe rather than the zillionth.

It’s more than just 25, they often go to 29, to indicate 5am. They do this to make it clear that it is an overnight service starting in one calendar day and terminating in another. It’s not just a simple substitute for “1 am”.

I follow about 80 people on Twitter and Foone usually takes up more than half of my feed :D

The metric "interface" has nice "round" numbers, but the implementation idk:

"In the SI, the standard metre is defined as exactly 1/299,792,458 of the distance that light travels in a second."

"The kilogram was originally defined as the mass of one cubic decimetre of water at 4 °C, standardized as the mass of a man-made artefact of platinum-iridium held in a laboratory in France, which was used until a new definition was introduced in May 2019. Replicas made in 1879 at the time of the artefact's fabrication and distributed to signatories of the Metre Convention serve as de facto standards of mass in those countries. Additional replicas have been fabricated since as additional countries have joined the convention. The replicas were subject to periodic validation by comparison to the original, called the IPK. It became apparent that either the IPK or the replicas or both were deteriorating, and are no longer comparable: they had diverged by 50 μg since fabrication, so figuratively, the accuracy of the kilogram was no better than 5 parts in a hundred million or a proportion of 5x10−8:1. The accepted redefinition of SI base units replaced the IPK with an exact definition of the Planck constant, which defines the kilogram in terms of the second and metre."