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

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

#111

Post by plebianRube »

octobus2021 wrote: post #63

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…

Sunday is the first day of the week in crontab.

First index in the array, 0.

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

#113

Post by [deleted] »

wongarsu wrote: post #52
naniwaduni wrote: post #36

For 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.

This is why September, October, November and December are named after the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10: they are the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month if you start the year in March, like we used to.

[deleted]

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

#115

Post by eastbound »

octobus2021 wrote: post #63

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…

Yes. It should end with “…and this is the best system we’ve found, because all other ones were ditched for being too complicated.”

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

#116

Post by nyokodo »

rocqua wrote: post #59
adventured wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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). Des…

There is one defining difference between us, and aliens that visit earth. They managed interstellar travel, we did not. That inherently puts them at an advantage to us. Definitely a technological advantage. Hence it makes sense to assume (with medium confidence) that such aliens will be better at science than us. Assuming that they will therefore be more rational than us is not much of a leap.

> They managed interstellar travel, we did not. That inherently puts them at an advantage to us.

It means some species that is/ was out there has an advantage. The species that actually visits us could be less intelligent than us but just intelligent enough to operate the equipment they dug up.

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

#117

Post by kklisura »

googlryas wrote: post #92
octobus2021 wrote: post #63

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…

I'd love to hear the logic of why Monday should be the first day of the week.

I'd love to hear the logic of why Monday should NOT be the first day of the week.

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

#118

Post by bonzini »

Svip wrote: post #22
Someone wrote: post #7

> "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…

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…

The Julian calendar didn't have the divisible-by-100 rule, every other fourth year was leap.

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

#119

Post by dageshi »

googlryas wrote: post #92
octobus2021 wrote: post #63

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…

I'd love to hear the logic of why Monday should be the first day of the week.

Mostly because Saturday and Sunday are collectively known as the weekend and it doesn't make a lot of sense to start the week in the middle of what everyone agrees is the end of the week.

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

#120

Post by russellbeattie »

llanowarelves wrote: post #30
Ekaros wrote: post #17

Don'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…

We should start first be redefining the second: 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. It's too long anyways, we can easily perceive time down to at least 1/60th of that.

So let's call it 150 million oscillations, and refer to it simply as "time", since the word second only makes sense in context of an analog clock anyways. Then we can start rounding the other weights and measures accordingly until everything is nice and clean. It appeals to the OCD in me, despite the societal chaos that would ensure.

But then the universe will undoubtedly throw random numbers at us like π or the fine-structure constant and mess it all up.

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