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

541–550 of 1001 posts

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

#541

Post by coldtea »

lolinder wrote: post #463
kgwgk wrote: post #454

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December were the seventh, eight, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth months of the year through all of the “recorded Roman history”. But it seems well accepted that they were once the fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months of the year.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have referred to it as a legend. That seems to have negative connotations for most people that I didn't mean to convey. I really don't doubt the authenticity of the story, I mainly was trying to indicate that we don't know when the change occurred but it certainly happened a long time before Caesar: by his day, the change was an oral tradition whose full story was lost in the very…

>That seems to have negative connotations for most people that I didn't mean to convey.

Not just "for most". It has negative connotations (of the kind reffered to here) for all people.

"Legend" connotes "didn't take place".

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

#542

Post by jimmygrapes »

dawsmik wrote: post #456
Thorentis wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If Aliens find us, it seems reasonable they would be smarter/more advanced.

But would you say the same about humanity if we stumbled across an alien culture and were somehow able to communicate with them?

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

#544

Post by coldtea »

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…

Designing the calendar does mean "give a name to every month forever".

You could also (a) just design the mechanics of the calendars (leap days, duration of months, etc), but keep the month names the same, or (b) change names too, which could get renamed again later.

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

#545

Post by Zekio »

freetime2 wrote: post #288

How about the fact that 10/11/12 can variously refer to October 11, 2012, November 10, 2012, or November 12, 2010 - depending on what country you are in?

sometimes more than one of them in the same country depending on whether people use the old format or the "new" official format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_and_time_notation_in_Denm... and isn't even consistent in delimiters

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

#546

Post by lolinder »

coldtea wrote: post #541
lolinder wrote: post #463

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have referred to it as a legend. That seems to have negative connotations for most people that I didn't mean to convey. I really don't doubt the authenticity of the story, I mainly was trying to indicate that we don't know when the change occurred but it certainly happened a long time before Caesar: by his day, the change was an oral tradition whose full story was lost in the very…

> That seems to have negative connotations for most people that I didn't mean to convey. Not just "for most". It has negative connotations (of the kind reffered to here) for all people. "Legend" connotes "didn't take place".

I'm a person, and legend does not have that connotation for me, it means "it was only handed down orally so we can't be sure". I'm sure my idiolect is unusual in that regard, but I stand by my "for most people".

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

#547

Post by Izkata »

rocqua wrote: post #59
adventured wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always amused by the fantasy that aliens are more likely to be rational and have far less convoluted systems than we do. It's some manner of borderline religious, faith-based notion about the assumed nature of aliens. People seem to get quite upset if you intrude on their fantasy about what aliens must surely be like (not like us, far better than us; humans are the primitive dredge of the universe basically). Des…

There is one defining difference between us, and aliens that visit earth. They managed interstellar travel, we did not. That inherently puts them at an advantage to us. Definitely a technological advantage. Hence it makes sense to assume (with medium confidence) that such aliens will be better at science than us. Assuming that they will therefore be more rational than us is not much of a leap.

Their engineers perhaps, but what about everyone else?

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

#548

Post by noslenwerdna »

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…

There are many documents dating from ancient Rome (and earlier) that we don't consider historical because of their fantastic or religious nature. The set of documents you refer to are self-contradictory and describe supernatural events that no other author recorded.

Hell, historians take Herodotus with a grain of salt, and he was an actual historian.

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

#549

Post by Izkata »

rsynnott wrote: post #481
mcv wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, what I'd learned as a kid was that Julius and Augustus inserted themselves in the middle to turn it from 10 to 12 months, which is why the latter months are named wrong, but comments up above are saying they just renamed months.

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

#550

Post by needle0 »

fkarg wrote: post #253

Isn't there also additional calendars in at least Japanese and Chinese culture?

Japan uses the Western calendar pretty much as-is. One addition is the Japanese gengou system of year/era counting, which resets with a new era name every time a new emperor is enthroned (at least in recent years). Most people are aware of and use both the Western and Japanese methods of year counting, though.

The last reset was in May 1st 2019, when Heisei year 31 switched to Reiwa year 1. (Yes, a single year can have two era-based names since the switch doesn't necessarily occur on New Year's Day. Annoying.) It is now Reiwa 4.

Post reply on HN