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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

#231

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

Or the 11 missing days in 1582. I mean, programmers love to bitch about time zones, but that’s nothing compared to the stink we’d have raised if we’d been coding in a time when the date depended on which country you were in.

This is still the case, since timezone differences affect day boundaries.

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

#232
post #110

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…

Portuguese name weekdays by numbers ex Monday, Segunda-feira (Second Market), but I don't think anyone assumes Sunday as the first day.

And I leave the "market" for someone who still didn't have enough of this rabbit hole.

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

#233
post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't mention LEAP-SECONDS which are at THE END OF THE YEAR.

or june 30th

Indeed. See https://www.nist.gov/pml/time-and-frequency-division/leap-se...

And they always are end of June or December in UTC time, so locally they can happen on the first of January or first or July.

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

#234

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…

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…

Obviously Sunday is the left end of the week, Saturday the right.

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

#235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 remo…

Augustus and Julius stole a day from February so theirs' would be long ones.

February had 28 days before Julius Caesar came to power, so he and his successor couldn't have stolen a day from it.

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

#236
post #176
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time I believe the old Sega Dreamcast used this as its standard time in the menu system. Maybe that was for the online service. I would love to move to something like that permanently. Little ambiguity as to when people could meet across time zones.

It's not obvious why a new system is needed. UTC, TAI, or unix-time are sufficient. The primary defect I see in the SIT proposal is that it isn't obviously based on the SI, but rather tied to the Earth. Defining a new unit that is 86.4 seconds long feels troublesome for everyone.

Or, more closely, Julian day number.

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

#237

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…

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…

The way I've always thought it was meant to be is that the "weekend" is really the "week ends," meaning start and end, the same way a shoelace has 2 ends.

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

#238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct. Sunday is the starting end of the week and Saturday is then stopping end of the week.

Or you just say, Sunday is the end of the week and Monday that start of the next one. Funnily enough this is the first time I've heard as Sunday as the first day of the week. I'm from Germany where Monday is the first day and Sunday the last. This also coincides with the work week where the first workday is Monday, then the weekend ends the week and a new week begins with Monday.

Well, most people say Saturday is the weekend.

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

#239
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...

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.

Decimal is a natural convention once you're using fingers to count, which humans usually do while they're figuring it all out.

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

#240
post #150

I 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 called 30-hour clock. This convention is also used by some TV ratings measurement organizations - a show ending Tue 02:00 will be recorded as Mon 26:00, since it logically belonged to the day that ended, not the one that started.

Indeed, the "tv day" stretches from 02:00:00 to 25:59:59, but you usually don't actually use wall time (or in this case, modified wall time), and instead measure instant time as "minutes after midnight" (MAM) or "seconds after midnight" (SAM), so it's just an integer.
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