Why the presupposition that these aliens are more rational than us? Presumably they would be just as vulnerable to their evolved behaviour and inertia of historical decision making as we are.
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
#292This 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…
Why is it illogical to have Sunday be the first day of the week? Maybe Saturday is logically the first day of the week since nobody in their right minds would want a work day (assuming a 5 day work
Week) to be the first day. Like eating dessert first, starting the week with a day off just makes logical sense.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#293Earlier quoted context omitted.
But there are two ends of any line, one on each side. Not two ends, both of which are on the same side.
In a ring buffer, you have a start and an end pointer, not two end pointers.
If we think of it like iterators in C++, though, begin() is Monday, and end() is the next Monday.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Silly reason, but I like that Sunday being the first day keeps the week symmetric. You have the first and last day of the week being days off (in most places), and you have Wednesday in the middle. It's not very logical, but neither is any part of our calendar system.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#295I'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).
Unix time doesn’t include leap seconds.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#296This is mainly tailored toward the Gregorian/Solar calendar. We don't have leap years in Hijri.
The story begins with aliens landing in New Jersey, and describes the calendar most commonly used there.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd love to hear the logic of why Monday should be the first day of the week.
It’s totally arbitrary (as well as totally immaterial) whether the week starts on Sunday or Monday (or any other day for that matter). The fact that the US does it differently than many other countries really isn’t a big deal. Your downvotes show the whole bike shedding nature of the issue. The debate is so contentious because the stakes are so low.
I'm honestly not sure what "bike shedding" is but numerical values for days of the week very much count when building any software containing calendars (or any dates really) to make sure it works properly in different geographic regions.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#298So, for comparison - in Poland we use
- 24 hour clock
- days of the week are called "after not working day", "second day", "middle day", "fourth day", "fifth day", "sabbath", "not working day"
- months are mostly named from the agricultural/weather phenomena "wood cutting month", "strong cold month", "Mars month", "flowers month", "Mai month", "red pigment larvae month", "linden trees month", "sickle month", "heather month", "chaff month", "falling leaves month", "frozen ground month"
Dates are written dd-mm-yyyy or yyyy-mm-dd (less often).
The rest is as bad as in USA.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, the standard US weekend is Saturday–Sunday, even amongst the Sunday=1 holdouts. I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. Not to suggest that the holdouts are a minority, I honestly don’t know but I doubt it. I think, apart from the initial puzzlement of recognizing the inconsistency, most of us don’t give much thought at all to which day is 1. “Weekend” generall…
> I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. I disagree. I can’t remember having ever seen calendars display any day other than Sunday as the first of the week, except in the case of computer software made by non-Americans who didn’t think to localize it.
There’s still ambiguity in verbal language. On Sunday, if someone messages you “let’s do this next week” - do they mean “in the next 6 days” or “after 7 days from now”?
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#300Earlier 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"...
It's biblical. Saturday is the sabbath, the 7th day rest day, which would make sunday the first day. Later, christians decided to hold mass on sunday instead, because it was when Jesus resurrected. Eventually you end up with saturday and sunday as rest days, even though one is biblically the first and one is biblically the last day of the week. But both are the "weekend".