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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

#211

Post by [deleted] »

plebianRube wrote: post #111
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.

[deleted]

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

#212

Post by masklinn »

crote wrote: post #129
philsnow wrote: post #68

Don't tell the aliens about the missing 12 days in 1752: https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/lifestyle/columns/201...

Not to mention that quite a few countries are also missing those 12 days, but in completely different years . Greece did so in 1923, for example.

And iirc at least one country decided that was too simple, decided to gradually shift, then reverted, then did it in one go.

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

#213

Post by ysavir »

retrac wrote: post #110
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…

> 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…

> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1.

I can confirm that in Hebrew, the name for Sunday translates into "First Day", Monday into "Second Day", etc. Except for Saturday, which is Shabat.

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

#214

Post by bluejekyll »

“Hasn’t anyone ever tried to fix this?”, “yes, there was the International Fixed Calendar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar..., “and?”, “well, only one company used it and that company eventually lost relevance and was never able to get the broader society to use it”.

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

#215

Post by Cyph0n »

retrac wrote: post #110
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…

> 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…

The Arabic/Islamic calendar starts at Sunday because the weekend is Friday and Saturday. In Islam, the weekly congregation (mass equivalent) takes place on Friday around noon.

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

#216

Post by tolmasky »

octobus2021 wrote: post #205
NorwegianDude wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday? Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts. But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places…

That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...

The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.

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

#217

Post by stnikolauswagne »

shakezula wrote: post #168
retrac wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Time to start a movement to consider saturday the as the beginning of the week!

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

#219

Post by [deleted] »

MayeulC wrote: post #162
athrowaway3z wrote: post #72

I'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).

[deleted]

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

#220

Post by gerdesj »

comeonbro wrote: post #170

I 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…

He didn't just throw dice or march in, see what's what and grab the locals by the nadgers.

JC was quite a chap and of course why its called the Julian Calendar. Many other calendars are available. Kalends is the source of the name for calendar and the Roman day of month counting is pretty involved - http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=calhistory/earlier/roman/kale... Kalends, nones and ides.

JS died on the ides of March ...

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