Quoted post unavailable.
[deleted]
Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
411–420 of 1001 posts
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#412Earlier quoted context omitted.
And in that calender, February is the last month, which makes it the logical month for adjusting leap years.
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 says "it is unclear when the Romans reset the course of the year so that January and February came first", but doesn't actually deny that the year formerly ended with February.
See for example p.187 of https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus-data/L333.pdf for a 1st century BC reference to it:
> The Terminalia 'Festival of Terminus,' because this day is set as the last day of the year; for the twelfth month was February, and when the extra month is inserted the last five days are taken off the twelfth month.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#413I find the implication that aliens are rational and have no subrational concepts due to tradition and habit interesting, as it sort of implies that these kinds of outgrowths are not necessary and can just be done away with. The narrator starts from a position of not wanting to legitimize or historicize beyond reductive statements like "some ancient civilization did XYZ". I'll admit that I skimmed through the last par…
Yeah, often people leap to "aliens" being some higher intelligence than us who will judge our poor sub-optimal decisions. Though to me it seems more likely that any life we encounter is more likely to be less intelligent, if intelligent at all.
Aliens with the ability to visit earth will be much more intelligent than humans.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#414Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm from Winnipeg originally and considered Sunday the first day of the week. Maybe it's regional or cultural?
It doesn't truly matter or? It's not like you are going to work on sundays. You only realize it with calenders in e.g. Outlook, and long gone TV guides....
It's a little disorienting on booking sites (hotels etc) when the first day of the week isn't Monday.
I once booked a train on the wrong day because the localisation changed part way through my search. (Fortunately I noticed.)
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#415> "At the start of the year?" > "nah. The end of the second month" > "WHY WOULD IT BE THE SECOND MONTH?" Because leap day is at the end of the year, but at some time we moved the start of the year two months back (same reason why September through December now are the ninth through twelfth month of the year, not the seventh through tenth) (Historically, I think it was slightly different. February, the last month of t…
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…
I recently read that the reason February has only 28 or 29 days, and not 29 or 39, as you'd expect, is because Augustus wanted his month to have just as many days as Julius' month.
No idea if that's true, but sounds appropriate for the ego of an emperor.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#416"There's 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds" - except sometimes when there are 25 hours, or 23! Because it's too hard to ask people to change their schedules, so we change the time instead. And of course we don't add or remove those hours at the beginning or end of the day, so we never actually have an hour 25, we just repeat one of the middle hours instead. And then, independently, sometimes there are 61 seconds, or 5…
>sometimes there are 61 seconds, or 59
Isn't one of those still just a theoretical possibility? I think all leap seconds so far have been in the same direction.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#417I recently learned that in West the weekdays are named after Roman gods, but in English it's done by the way of Germanic gods. It's just that Romans, when visiting German tribes, interpreted local gods as Roman ones, simply with different names—as they did everywhere else too. So they brought the calendar with them, and explained that Odin is the same as Mercury, etc, and thus where Romance languages have ‘mercredi’ and such, English has wōdnesdæġ.
‘History of the English language’ is a splendid podcast.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#418Earlier 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…
> The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada Interesting. How does software (e.g. Google Calendar) display weeks when in en_CA localization?
[deleted]
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#419Earlier 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…
"Sat and Sun constitute the weekEND, right?"
It's called a bookEND only if it's to the right of the row of books. If it's to the left (for books in an RTL language), we call it a bookSTART
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#420Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'm from Winnipeg originally and considered Sunday the first day of the week. Maybe it's regional or cultural?
What does it even mean to consider Sunday the first day of the week? What does it change?