Reminds me of Dave Allen's sketch about teaching kids to tell the time:
“and the third hand is the second hand…”
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update: found it: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI
Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
31–40 of 1001 posts
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#32This would be better written in a short story format but I digress. This is precisely the type of thing that would probably happen in almost any society. There are many standards that pop up that are vestiges of one thing or another. The fact we get base 60 from Sumeria but use Base 12 or Base 24 for hours is not a big deal, weird things happen. I doubt any advanced alien would be just so flabbergasted over this. We…
Yeah, from what I understand, it's generally accepted that some rabble rouser called Yeshua existed, and later had followers who considered him to be holy.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#33At least New Year’s Day no longer falls on 25th March.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#34Since when do we assume everyone uses the same calendar?
The look on an American's face when you describe something as being "a fortnight away"
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#35This actually made me feel very much better about all the weirdness. Seeing it all in one place made it look clearly inevitable and also made it clear how little of a problem any of it is.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#36For what it's worth, leap day is at the "end" of a year. It's just a year that starts in March—an assumption shared with several other odd properties of this calendar.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#37Don't even go to those idiots over there who uses these weird units for measuring temperature, distance, weight and ugh volume... When we actually have this well designed system where everything fits beautifully together...
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…
So what are the "imperial" Volts and Amperes?
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#38> "At the start of the year?" > "nah. The end of the second month" > "WHY WOULD IT BE THE SECOND MONTH?" Because leap day is at the end of the year, but at some time we moved the start of the year two months back (same reason why September through December now are the ninth through twelfth month of the year, not the seventh through tenth) (Historically, I think it was slightly different. February, the last month of t…
February, the last month of the year was shorter because the year isn’t long enough to give it 30 days
Originally February had 30 days, along with all the other months. (The 5 or 6 remaining days at various times were either extra days which didn't belong to a month or were omitted until there was a month's worth of them to catch up on.)
February got shorter because (being the last month of the year) it had days removed in order to add them to other months -- what was originally February 30th (the end of the year) became February 23rd (the end of the year, after which the leap day is inserted).
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#39I saw when i was in Japan a various billboards marking a 25 hour service I thought it was some kind of mistake but apparently they call 1 am the hour 25...I think I saw it in Okinawa
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”.
Actually it is pretty elegant system. Bit strange and extra calculation, but rather elegant option to pick.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#40I saw when i was in Japan a various billboards marking a 25 hour service I thought it was some kind of mistake but apparently they call 1 am the hour 25...I think I saw it in Okinawa
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