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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

#401

Post by chungy »

chrisweekly wrote: post #389
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…

"Sat and Sun constitute the weekEND, right?" "Of course." "And Sunday is the 7th day, the day of rest?" "Yeah, that's what they preach at my church." "What about your workplace?" "Everybody knows the standard workweek is Mon-Fri. What's your point?" "Ok, so we're agreed the weekends include Sunday, your Bible says Sunday is the 7th day, and the workweek starts on Monday." "Yep." "So printed calendars and day-planners…

6-day work weeks are still common in agriculture, and the Bible is silent on what the exact weekday the sabbath lands on. Some people really argue that it's supposed to be Saturday, but traditionally Jesus's resurrection is said to have happened on Sunday, so most Christian churches went along with that.

My own personal opinion: it matters not what day you consider to be the sabbath, but it does help when a community agrees on a day and goes along with it. So for me, Sunday it is. (It also doesn't matter how a calendar is printed; it could start on Wednesday for all I care. It'd be weird, but it wouldn't change anything.)

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

#402

Post by stormbrew »

gorbypark wrote: post #224
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…

As a English Canadian who works for a company that was bought by an American company and was force switched to Sunday as the first day of the week….what? Maybe we “officially” or legally have Sundays as the first day but my entire life has been Mondays first. Every calendar I’ve had has been that way as well. It still messes with my mind, even four years later, that at work Sunday is the first day of the week.

What part of English Canada? In Alberta or Ontario (the parts I've lived in, though I was pretty young when I lived in Ontario) I've literally never seen a calendar with Monday as the first day of the week that I can recall.

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

#404

Post by thfuran »

irrational wrote: post #370
messe wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one at the end of the week, and not the start.

Maybe it is both ends. Like book ends.

But then surely a consecutive Saturday and Sunday would be weekends rather than a single weekend?

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

#405

Post by djur »

pantojax45 wrote: post #299
School-Cotton wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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”?

The answer is the same on Saturday as on Sunday, so that doesn't really matter.

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

#406

Post by miniwark »

Thorentis wrote: post #360

> He's written about in a famous book but historical records are spotty Don't want to start a religious debate, but it really annoys me when for some reason, multiple documents that were later compiled into a book are not historical documents, just because they were treated as religious texts by the church councils 300 years later. The Bible isn't a book that Christians all sat down and wrote. It's a collection of ma…

Because it's about a books who explain than at last, two people can come back from death... days after it. Historians have doubts about this (and other weird events from this books) and therefore do not keep this specifics book as very credible sources. That said, no real historian actually doubt of the historical existence of the famous religious leader from the past.

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

#407

Post by probably_wrong »

leto_ii wrote: post #122

Couldn't this whole thread just be condensed to: we have a thing called culture which is not completely rational or efficient? I'm sure the aliens would get that - they would probably have something similar, albeit with different irrationalities and inefficiencies.

You don't even have to introduce culture. "We built a simple time system a long time ago. Some of its initial assumptions were wrong and we've been patching it up as we go ever since". I'm sure the aliens have a word for "technical debt".

Also, dividing the day into 24hs is kind of genius. Sure, 10 is nice, but good luck dividing it neatly into 3 parts.

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

#409

Post by Pigalowda »

AmericanChopper wrote: post #399
permo-w wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m unsure how commonly known this is, but also note that July and August are named after Julius Caesar and Emperor Augustus

If Caesar designed the calendar, how did he get a month in there named after something that hadn’t happened yet? When Caesar died Augustus’ name was Octavian, and Rome hadn’t had an emperor yet…

Are you messing around?

Octavius became Julius Caesar after he was adopted. And also later he was given the honorable designation by the senate and called Augustus. That’s not his name its one of his honors.

Octavian is essentially a past tense of his name and he never truly went by that. It’s a name used by historians.

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

#410

Post by lolinder »

Jap2-0 wrote: post #398
lolinder wrote: post #371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It looks like there's a legend that this was the case, but January has been the first month of the year through all of recorded history, and Julius Caesar's version was no different. EDIT: Because there's a lot of confusion in several replies I thought I'd clarify: February was the second month in Julius Caesar's calendar. Romans in the Republic describe the month as being at some point the last month in the calendar…

That article seems to state the opposite?

> In the oldest Roman calendar, which the Romans believed to have been instituted by their legendary founder Romulus, March was the first month, and the calendar year had only ten months in all. Ianuarius and Februarius were supposed to have been added by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, originally at the end of the year. It is unclear when the Romans reset the course of the year so that January and February came first.

Most of what we know about pre-republican Rome is from oral tradition, not actual records. So if by the time of the Republic February was the second month of the year, it was the second month of the year through all of recorded Roman history.

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