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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

#481
post #448
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.

The historic Roman year (the one _before_ the one that Caesar replaced) had 10 months, which is probably where that comes from.

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

#482
post #392
post #298

So, 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…

> "second day" Wtorek? That... does not appear to have "dwa" or anything similar in it. Please ELIC (explain like I'm Czech (actually am, tho lived in Poland for a bit))

There is an old Slavic word "vtorý" for "second" (not sure about spelling, but it is documented for example in old church Slavonic). Russian still uses "vtoroj" for "second". Several other Slavic languages have a word for Tuesday based on this root, even though their usual word for "second" follows a systematic derivation based on "dva" (two). Examples includes Czech and Slovak ("úterý" for Tuesday in both) and Polish ("wtorek").

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

#484

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 th…

Not an agreed upon final answer, but a common not arbitrarily changing one - yes. You can easily see that in our history. Every time we have something slightly different in various cultures, we try to unify it and make it more consistent. Various units of measurement got pretty much unified when we needed to work together. Where we didn't, we got issues like losing the Mars orbiter because someone thought inches are still cute. We got time measurement unified and precisely defined, because we needed to synchronise time globally to enable precise GPS. Even on a cultural level, many countries went through some kind of unification/simplification of their language. (simplified Chinese, German orthography reform, Indonesian -> Malaysian, etc.) On a social level, we're so connected, that pointing at a random person today, I could guess they speak English, Spanish, or Chinese and not be wrong too often.

So yeah, once a society gets to travel to other life forms in the universe, you could expect their measurement of time is simplified and plain. Not that they don't understand the historical context of not having it that way though... but that would be far in the past. And it's funny to think of them going "oh, one of those again...", or even "ok, I've seen some weird stuff, but the mixed units on Earth are just disgusting". Probably the same reaction you'd get if you saw a programmer today copying the whole source to another folder with suffix "..._working_8". "oh $deity, I see why you're doing this, but please stop, this hurts my brain, I'll show you version control".

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

#485
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space. Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because…

> Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March It used to be numbers earlier, Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed for them. Apparently the Romans did not find hard naming even persons - they just went by numbers, as in Secundus, Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Octavius, etc.

Augustus' first name was Octavius... now August is the eighth month, full circle.

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

#486
post #421

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He didn't just throw dice or march in, see what's what and grab the locals by the nadgers. JC was quite a chap and of course why its called the Julian Calendar. Many other calendars are available. Kalends is the source of the name for calendar and the Roman day of month counting is pretty involved - http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=calhistory/earlier/roman/kale... Kalends, nones and ides. JS died on the ides of March .…

JS died how?

Typo, it's JC

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

#487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aliens don't exist? You seem very certain of that

I'm pretty certain. It just doesn't make sense for (intelligent) aliens to be out there.

The Fermi argument is on your side. Not a proof, of course.

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

#489
post #133

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…

Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space. Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because…

Chesterton's fence seems to apply here.
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