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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

#261

Post by count »

stuartd wrote: post #248
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…

> .. considers Sunday to be the first day of the week How can the first day of the week happen in the middle of the weekend !?!

Both ends of the week are the weekend.

One is the starting weekend, and the other the ending weekend.

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

#262

Post by simonh »

narag wrote: post #133
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…

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…

The point of comical absurdities like this is precisely that they appear comical or absurd if you don’t know the reasons for them being the way they are. That doesn’t mean there are no reasons, it’s just that those reasons aren’t necessary or even relevant to appreciating the apparent absurdity.

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

#263

Post by strenholme »

Dealing with calendars can be pretty difficult. Since I recently wrote a script in Lua to be my personal assistant, processing calendars, todo lists, mailing lists, etc., here’s a Lua form of the code to calculate the day of week. This is accurate for any Georgian date:

  -- Calculate the day of the week
  -- Input: year, month, day (e.g. 2022,9,16)
  -- Output: day of week (0 = Sunday, 6 = Saturday)
  function dayOfWeek(year, month, day)
    -- Tomohiko Sakamoto algorithm
    local monthX = {0, 3, 2, 5, 0, 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2, 4}
    if month

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

#264

Post by xyzzyz »

torstenvl wrote: post #221
FastEatSlow wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought that that in Slavic languages Sunday would be the first day of the week, since the Polish for 'monday' means 'after sunday'. EDIT: got 'monday' and 'sunday' the wrong way round

In Russian, Sunday is "Resurrection Day" and Monday is "The Thing concerning Not-Doing being in the Past-Perfective Tense" (po + ne+del + nik) It looks like Polish is similar except that Sunday is "Not-Doing"

In Polish, Sunday is „niedziela”, and Monday is also „poniedziałek”, so it actually makes more sense than in Russian :) I suspect “niedziela” («неделя») was the original, proto-Slavic word for the day of the week, as some variations of it are used for I think all Slavic languages except Russian, who at some point decided to rename it to celebrate Resurrection.

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

#266

Post by School-Cotton »

NorwegianDude wrote: post #181
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…

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…

Weeks are always displayed as beginning on Sunday in the US (I get confused and annoyed when a calendar app is improperly localized for en_US and shows weeks as starting on Monday).

Separately, we call Saturday and Sunday “the weekend”. Yes, these two facts are logically inconsistent, but we live with it and I have never observed it causing any difficulty in practice.

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

#267

Post by wartijn_ »

MayeulC wrote: post #127
Svip wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Julius and Augustus you mean, both were Caesars (Augustus, AKA Octavian, was adopted).

Are you suggesting that the men were known as Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar? Because that's wrong[0]. Augustus used this name and it became a title for roman Emperors, in reference to Julius Caesar. If people are talking about Caesar, they mean Julius Caesar.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus#Name

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

#268

Post by antognini »

A fun bit of trivia is that it wasn't until the middle of the 18th century that it became standard in Europe to start the new year on January 1. Up until that point many regions used March 25 as the date of the New Year. So, for example the day March 24, 1715 would have been followed by March 25, 1716.

March 25 was the Feast of the Annunciation whereas January 1 was the Feast of the Circumcision, so the two dating methods were called Annunciation Style and Circumcision Style.

Obviously this created some ambiguity since the Circumcision Style date March 24, 1716 would be rendered March 24, 1715 when written Annunciation Style. Around the time of the transition to Annunciation Style dating in Britain you actually see people writing both dates together to avoid confusion, usually with the Circumcision Style date below the Annunciation Style date. (You can see an example here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Memorial...)

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

#269

Post by octobus2021 »

timbit42 wrote: post #171
octobus2021 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, one of the reasons US construction industry sticks to feet and inches instead of using decimal system.

The decimal system should have been the dozenal system but good luck getting people to switch from decimal to dozenal.

I don't know how many fingers you have, but decimal system makes more sense to me...

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

#270

Post by GoldenRacer »

drusepth wrote: post #43
Buttons840 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliens are likely to view 12 or 60 as prettier numbers than 10 or 100. Try writing the multiplication tables in base 12 and you'll see how much nicer they are.

Here's the base 12 multiplication tables: https://math.tools/table/multiplication/base/12 It doesn't look more or less nice to me than the base 10 version. Can you describe what is supposed to make it look nicer, especially to aliens?

In base 10, the times tables for 2 and 5 are easy because they divide 10. If I want 2*7, I know 7/5 is 1 remainder 2 so it's 10+2*2=14. As for 5x7, I know 7/2 is 3 remainder 1 so it's 30+1*5=35.

In base 12, there are similarly easy rules for 2, 3, 4, and 6. Doesn't seem like that great of a trade off but it could be beneficial. That also just comes down to 12 being a "superior highly composite number".

If I personally was allowed to rewrite our number system, I think I'd choose a base that is either a superior highly composite number or a power of 2. So something in the set [2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 32, 60, 64...]. I doubt 10 would even cross my mind as an option if I didn't have 10 fingers.

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