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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

#581

Post by fsckboy »

comeonbro wrote: post #170

I didn't appreciate until recently that the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar. Like not by some forgotten technocrats incidentally during his time, but Julius Caesar himself as a subject matter expert, as a side-project. With consultation, certainly, but by his initiative, from long-standing engagement with the problem in one of his early jobs from long before he was a main character…

> the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar

Pope Gregory has entered the chat

there have been some changes to the calendar since Caesar, especially when people went to bed Thursday 4 October 1582 and woke up on Friday 15 October 1582, and thereafter there were no more leap years on centuries except every 400 years.

https://www.onthisday.com/articles/gregory-conquers-julius-c...

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

#582

Post by allenu »

w10-1 wrote: post #536
econ101time wrote: post #457

This is how a 12 year old internet atheist sees the world. Advanced alien species is just a stand-in for the know-it-all author. Grow up. These things all have good historical reasons. And you don't turn society upside down just to get some nice parsimony in the calendar. We have a system that works and is remarkably accurate. Changing it would upset millions of social customs, accounting systems, computer systems, e…

Actually, what you're suggesting is that even if it is broken, it's too costly to fix. Then you should ask: costly compared to what? If we fixed it, then innumerable generations after us would not have to deal with the problem. The idea of "historical reason" and "social custom" assumes what it tries to prove, that the past is more important than the future. The real problem is that we don't pay for the costs we impo…

> If we fixed it, then innumerable generations after us would not have to deal with the problem.

In day to day use, I'd argue the date and time system works perfectly fine. I know when my birthday is, I know when Christmas is, I know when my next dentist appointment is. I'm not confused because months have different days or that the day is broken into 24 hours.

Date and time systems for the most part are useful to us for social and cultural reasons. It works perfectly fine. It may seem "silly" that it's arbitrarily broken up into irregular months, but I'm not sure what we would gain if we used some new date system.

Yes, computing the difference between two days is complicated, but when we're dealing with date-time in computing, we generally do not use year/month/day in our computations, but instead use some epoch number and convert to localized formats as needed for display.

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

#583

Post by scheme271 »

Jorengarenar wrote: post #309
irrational wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it illogical to have Sunday be the first day of the week? Maybe Saturday is logically the first day of the week since nobody in their right minds would want a work day (assuming a 5 day work Week) to be the first day. Like eating dessert first, starting the week with a day off just makes logical sense.

Why? One word: weekEND

Except for Friday-Saturday is the weekend in quite a few countries especially islamic ones. Israel also has Friday-Saturday weekends to make observing the Sabbath easier. There may be other exceptions as well.

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

#584

Post by twelvechairs »

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.

Parts of it yes. The day/month/year thing though is fundamenally based on astronomical observations that dont fit into each other with fractions (rotation of earth around sun, orbit of moon around earth, orbit of earth around sun) which is kind of missed here.

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

#587

Post by WirelessGigabit »

I wished people would refer to time I’m an unambiguous way. Sure your standard is 24h. I still gotta ask clarification when you tell me the meeting is at 8. Be specific. Having a 24h clock is useless id you say 8 in the evening.

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

#589

Post by ericpruitt »

kemitche wrote: post #552
ClumsyPilot wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A week is not a bookshelf, it's a snake. Does a snake have one end, or does it have two? Does a dog have two tails and two butts?

Weeks are not snakes, either. They're continuous, forever. Do snakes line up mouth to tail forever?

When they're stressed or ill, yes:

- https://www.iflscience.com/stressed-out-snake-eats-itself-24...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouroboros

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

#590

Post by anjbe »

myth2018 wrote: post #76

In Portuguese, Monday-Friday are numbered (2a-feira - 6a-feira). I wonder if are there other languages also presenting this feature. I believe there are.

The Quakers numbered their weekdays and also their months, to avoid referencing foreign gods in their calendar. https://www.swarthmore.edu/friends-historical-library/quaker...
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