My reply: https://twitter.com/gregmozart/status/1574139558102716416?s=...
Previously there were 10?
The Hebrew calendar always used 12 months I think. What are you referring to, and where is your evidence? Happy Rosh HaShana!
Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
161–170 of 1001 posts
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#162I'm a little bit surprised nobody pointed out the obvious. When we first communicate with aliens about our time system we will start by explaining unix epoch. Only than will we break out the spaghetti code required to map dates and zones and the uncertainty of some historical jumps.
Well, unix timestamps are still tied to UTC, which has leap seconds for some reason...
I would prefer if we had a few seconds of an offset with Zulu "GMT" Time (pardon the double acronym).
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Every end is a new beginning, according to an old aphorism.
This would imply that a Weekend and a Weekbegin could easily coincide.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#164Very entertaining read. The earthling says at one point (for comedic effect probably) that they don’t know why people used to like to count in dozens. I didn’t understand myself until someone explained to me that it makes dividing pay between a group of workers much easier. You pay 12 coins for a job, very simple to divide between a team of two, three, four, six or twelve.
Yep, one of the reasons US construction industry sticks to feet and inches instead of using decimal system.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#165Don'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…
Not sure what you are trying to say with your quoted phrases.
There was an issue with the standard for the Kilogram, which was recognised then corrected by introducing a definition which is based on physically measurable phenomenon. The new approach allows independent experiments to derive the value of the Kilogram.
That seems to me like a process that works, and I struggle to think of a better outcome.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#166Don'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...
Yeah. Who thought using decimal was a good idea? We should be using dozenal. At least 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 so doing thirds and quarters is messy. Being able to do fifths isn't as useful as thirds and quarters and you can multiply 12 by 5 and use 60 if you want to divide by fifths, like clocks do.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#167This 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…
Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space. Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because…
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Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#168This 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…
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week /Officially/ almost everyone has standardized on ISO 8601 where Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7. But unofficially, not really. The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada, and probably some other parts of the English-speaking world. A quick check of Wikipedia suggests…
> Sunday = 1
Animals. Absolutely barbaric.
Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#169This 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…
the historical record of someone named Jesus existing isn't debated by any historical scholar It is debated by people like Richard Carrier https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEB&search_query=richard... who says that (IIRC) while it's not unlikely that one or several people with similar messages preached in Judea 2000 years ago, the Jesus of the Bible looks like a literary invention when you go back to all the earlie…
Richard Carrier is an extremely fringe figure regarding the historical Jesus. The overwhelming majority of scholars in the field from conservative to liberal historians dismiss his ideas as fringe, and his methodologies as inconclusive, at best.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#170I didn't appreciate until recently that the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar.
Like not by some forgotten technocrats incidentally during his time, but Julius Caesar himself as a subject matter expert, as a side-project. With consultation, certainly, but by his initiative, from long-standing engagement with the problem in one of his early jobs from long before he was a main character of the Roman story.
Digestable and entertaining (fragment of a) video on the topic: