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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

#441

Post by remarkEon »

This entire Twitter thread (and most of the comments here) operate from some really weird assumptions about these aliens. As in, that there’s some agreed upon final answer for how everything from time to historical events should be logged, categorized, and accounted for in your little planet’s revolution around its Star. And that this regime is perfectly predictable without knowing anything about the life forms on the planet you’re observing.

Do people here really think this is reasonable, or realistic?

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

#442

Post by fabatka »

nwallin wrote: post #302
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 !?!

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

When you want to know how your friend spent the previous Saturday and Sunday, do you ask:

"How was your weekend?"

Or do you ask:

"How were your weekends?"

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

#443

Post by yen223 »

vsnf wrote: post #26
daedalus2027 wrote: post #16

I saw when i was in Japan a various billboards marking a 25 hour service I thought it was some kind of mistake but apparently they call 1 am the hour 25...I think I saw it in Okinawa

It’s more than just 25, they often go to 29, to indicate 5am. They do this to make it clear that it is an overnight service starting in one calendar day and terminating in another. It’s not just a simple substitute for “1 am”.

I've seen this when working on a side project involving public transport timetables from Google Transit. A service can run on 26:00 on Sunday, to indicate that the Sunday service is running 2 hours past midnight (i.e. on Monday 02:00).

https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference#stop_ti...

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

#444

Post by shadowofneptune »

dwighttk wrote: post #339
shadowofneptune wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Swatch time is a variation on the fractional day. Astronomers use it, with .00 being noon and .50 being midnight. You can extend it to any precision you like, 1/100,000th of a day makes for a good 'decimal second.' I like knowing what percentage of the day is over, a friend of mine says it'd drive her crazy knowing exactly how much time gets wasted.

Why does midnight matter? And since we don’t use local noon, why does noon matter?

It matters in the astronomer's case (which does use local noon) because that's when they do their work. For the version where .00 is midnight in the local time zone, well... it's how we live our lives! I'd argue the week is more important than the months for the same reason.

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

#445

Post by mcv »

russellbeattie wrote: post #73

We really need to update the system of years, it gives way too much weight to Christianity and serves as reinforcement to their misguided belief that their religion is somehow preeminent. It also gives the impression to the general public that history "began" at year 0, rather than being clear that recorded human history goes back around 5000 years. Living in the year 5022 gives a much different perspective of histor…

I thought it was nicely egalitarian and oecumenical to have the years from oune religion, months from another, and weekdays from a third. Let's give every religion a stake in the calendar system.

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

#446

Post by pessimizer »

int_19h wrote: post #239
timbit42 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Who thought using decimal was a good idea? We should be using dozenal. At least 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 so doing thirds and quarters is messy. Being able to do fifths isn't as useful as thirds and quarters and you can multiply 12 by 5 and use 60 if you want to divide by fifths, like clocks do.

Decimal is a natural convention once you're using fingers to count, which humans usually do while they're figuring it all out.

As most of us have successfully figured out counting, we can move on to measurement systems that are more convenient when dividing.

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

#447

Post by modeless »

thfuran wrote: post #416
modeless wrote: post #209

"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.

So far. But it's definitely still possible. Earth's rotation has been speeding up lately. https://www.timeanddate.com/news/astronomy/shortest-day-2022

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

#448

Post by mcv »

EGreg wrote: post #161

My reply: https://twitter.com/gregmozart/status/1574139558102716416?s=... Previously there were 10? The Hebrew calendar always used 12 months I think. What are you referring to, and where is your evidence? Happy Rosh HaShana!

Yeah, that sounds like a mistake by the tweeter. As far as I know there have always been 12 months, but the start of the year got moved from March to January at some point.

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

#449

Post by lolinder »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #429
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…

No it hasn't. Your link even points out that Jan and Feb were added to a 10 month calendar starting with March. Moreover, various cultures notionally observing the Julian calendar have assigned varying dates to the start of the year throughout history.

It says that later Romans said that they started with the 10-month calendar and that the second king added 2 months, and that at some point those two months migrated to the front.

The context that I did not include in my original comment and should have is that everything from Rome in the time of the kings is considered to be legend. There are likely things that are rooted in fact, and this story has strong evidence for it, but the number and order of months has not changed in recorded Roman history, we only have indications from later Romans that they believed it changed at some point in the past.

My main point was that Caesar did not have February as the last month, he used the same order as his contemporaries and as we do.

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

#450

Post by mcv »

bananamerica wrote: post #11
uoaei wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even the 12-hour system (vs 24-) is used by a relatively small minority of Earth's population.

The 12h and 24h system is essentially the same thing, no? In my country we use a 24h system in writing, but mainly a 12h system in speech.

I think most of the world does that. I don't believe the claims that almost nobody uses the 12h format. At least not without a very thorough survey of the many ways many cultures use time.
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