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

591–600 of 1001 posts

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

#591

Post by zxexz »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #563
octobus2021 wrote: post #63

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…

Nit: foone uses they/them pronouns and has previously expressed some displeasure with the way they get misgendered when their posts hit hacker news. Queer folks seem to agree that if you aren’t sure what someone’s pronouns are, they/them is a good default (only until they tell you or you find out the correct pronouns). As a non-binary person myself I always find it interesting when people assume he/him for every rand…

Not sure why this got flagged.

Anyways, I find it’s best to use they/them pronouns (or rather remain gender/pronoun neutral) when referring to people on the internet, unless their pronouns are obvious.

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

#593

Post by ivlad »

dullcrisp wrote: post #282
torstenvl wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Russian, Sunday is "Resurrection Day" and Monday is "The Thing concerning Not-Doing being in the Past-Perfective Tense" (po + ne+del + nik) It looks like Polish is similar except that Sunday is "Not-Doing"

Hmm, and the week is the not-done-thing?

Etymology is hard, the week “ne-delya” could be understood as something that cannot be divided, “not-divisible”. I am not sure which one is correct.

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

#594

Post by em-bee »

psnehanshu wrote: post #381
mcv wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. The US is hardly the only country where people consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Anyone with some understanding of the history of our weekdays does so, and that historical understanding is not limited to Americans. It's also not true that the US is the only country to use 12h time; many countries do. Including mine. If you need to write time without ambiguity, you use the 24h format,…

Yeah I agree. 12h time is the natural consequence of using analog clocks where one rotation of the hour hand on the dial represents 12 hours. But I guess it won't be hard to represent 24h if the speed of the hour hand is halved, although I have never seen such clocks.

you can find them in novelty shops

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

#595

Post by ivlad »

irrational wrote: post #308
NorwegianDude wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday? Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts. But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places…

The concept of weekend is quite a recent development. https://youtu.be/zhfpBW-nUWk The concept of Sunday as the first day of the week dates back thousands of years.

Why is this important? Maybe it was, but the ISO standard now is that Sunday is the last day of the week.

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

#596

Post by db48x »

The Qeng Ho in Deepness in the Sky had the right idea. They traveled from planet to planet in STL ships, and counted time purely in seconds. They had to account for relativity, but nothing else.

A short task might take a kilosecond (about 16 minutes), a watch schedule might plan for activities covering a megasecond (close enough to a month for you and me), while a gigasecond is a good chunk of your life (32 years).

"Calendar frippery" was left entirely to the civilations they visited. Since individual civilizations rarely lasted long enough to see repeat visits from the same ship, it wasn't important for the traders to learn the local calendar in any detail. One of the characters opines that you know you have stayed in port too long when your crew start using the local calendar.

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

#597

Post by davchana »

octobus2021 wrote: post #63

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…

> 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 used

India uses 12h time (except in military talk; & railway timetable display boards) in day to day life. I have never heard in 29 years somebody using 15 as 3, or 20 as 8pm. Even till few years ago, atound 2008, flights times at Delhi Airport too were displayed in 12h, on mechanical card spinner display board (where a card with letter falls & next one comes, on a roll until desired letter comes). Seeing that board as a kid was highlight of my childhood trips to airport.rt.

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

#598

Post by davchana »

chaps wrote: post #27

A good way to know whether a month has 31 days is by counting the knuckles and gaps between knuckles. "Landing" on a knuckle means that month is 31 days. So, Pointer finger knuckle = January = 31 days Between pointer/middle = Feb != 31 days Middle finger knuckle = March = 31 days And so on, just looping back to the first knuckle when you get past the pinky knuckle.

Pinky knuckle is July 31 days, & conveniently next knuckle is index finger August, again 31 days :)

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

#599

Post by dkbrk »

chungy wrote: post #375
12baad4db82 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you are trying to say with your quoted phrases. There was an issue with the standard for the Kilogram, which was recognised then corrected by introducing a definition which is based on physically measurable phenomenon. The new approach allows independent experiments to derive the value of the Kilogram. That seems to me like a process that works, and I struggle to think of a better outcome.

> Not sure what you are trying to say with your quoted phrases. That the metric system is just as arbitrary as the customary units. Things like the meter and (kilo)gram were based on arbitrary objects rather than anything objective. They've since been redefined using physical constants to come close enough to the old reference objects. (And the US customary units are officially defined as exact fractions from the SI…

> That the metric system is just as arbitrary as the customary units

No-one claims it isn't arbitrary. Any choice of units is arbitrary. "Not being arbitrary" just isn't a desideratum when considering what makes a good system of units.

The main desirable property is coherence [0], which SI has.

But I don't think anyone would claim SI is perfect. It's not; it's got at least a couple of warts. One is that "kg" is a base unit and is prefixed. But that's about the worst of it.

CGS is also coherent, but has a similar problem with a prefixed base unit (in this case, cm).

US Customary units is not only incoherent, but does things like conflate mass and force (lb is a technically a measure of force, so is the long/short ton, and slug is the proper unit for mass) and has far too many derived units that measure the same thing (e.g. ft lb/s, hp and BTU/h, vs just W).

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_(units_of_measuremen...

Post reply on HN