Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 1001 posts

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

#301

Post by irrational »

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 !?!

Sunday being the first day of the week came long (as in thousands of years) before the weekend was invented (which is a very recent development).

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

#302

Post by nwallin »

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 !?!

Weekends? Weekends are... the ... ends of the week. When you build a bookshelf, do you do:

or do you do:

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

#303

Post by adhesive_wombat »

dageshi wrote: post #119
googlryas wrote: post #92

Earlier 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.

> everyone agrees

Not everyone, Israel has has Friday and Saturday off.

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

#304

Post by hunter2_ »

count wrote: post #261
stuartd wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> .. 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.

Right, I (in the US) always figured "end" in the word "weekend" was akin to the two ends of a line segment, the two ends of a bar, etc.

To instead think of "end" in the word "weekend" as the opposite of "start" is to use a completely different definition of the word "end".

I wonder if "weekend" therefore has two definitions, given the split dependency.

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

#305

Post by int_19h »

Ekaros wrote: 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...

Designing a well-fitting system of units is not hard given all the experience we have already. Units of time are the trickiest due to natural cycles, but there are ways to minimize the irregularity.

The problem is getting that design adopted by everyone.

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

#306

Post by gerdesj »

fimdomeio wrote: post #232
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…

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.

That sounds quite sensible. From memory, our (en_GB) weekdays are named like this:

Monday -> Moon day

Tuesday -> Tiw's day (Norse)

Wednesday -> Woden's day (Norse - Odin - chief god, one eye, two ravens)

Thursday -> Thor's day (Norse - god with a massive hammer) Friday -> Freya's day (Norse, rode a chariot drawn by cats)

Saturday -> Saturn's day (Roman, also: Saturnalia is the winter festival that eventually became Christmas)

Sunday -> Sun day

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

#307

Post by kybernetikos »

naniwaduni wrote: post #236
ISL wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, I played around with a decimal time: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ but eventually realised that my seconds, minutes and hour equivalents were just names for some of the decimal places of the Julian day number.

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

#308

Post by irrational »

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…

The concept of weekend is quite a recent development.

https://youtu.be/zhfpBW-nUWk

The concept of Sunday as the first day of the week dates back thousands of years.

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

#309

Post by Jorengarenar »

irrational wrote: post #292
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…

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.

Why? One word: weekEND

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

#310

Post by smsm42 »

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…

Colloquially, lot of places use 12h - it's always "we're going to the restaurant at 8", never "at 20" or "at 20:00", at least in the countries I've lived or visited. But officially it's still 24h - which may be more confusing or less confusing, depending on your point of view.

And times (with timezones, and leap seconds, and DST, and so on) add another level of fun to it.

Post reply on HN