Live data from Hacker News

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

twitter.com

601–610 of 1001 posts

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

#601

Alien: so how do you write the date? year-month-day? "nope, there are several variations but most popular are monthnumber-day-year and day-monthnumber-year. For example - 6-6-2022 "oh so you do use numbers for months." "yeah sometimes" "so in your example how do you know which one is day and which one is the month" "depends upon which part of the earth you are standing on"

& even in the same part aka USA, in day to day life & on state issued paperwork, ids, social security card, its 6-7-22 m-d-yy is June 7th, but on passport its dd MMM YYYY `07 JUN 2022`. Immigration documents issued by USCIS uses 06072022 mmddyyyy as June 07, 2022. So, not always the same sequence on same part of the earth.

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

#602

An interesting aside the Cotsworth Calendar is such an obvious approach to the months problem it makes me wonder why it was not adopted in the first place. We have 13 months of 28 days each. The 9th is always a Monday the 19th is always a Thursday. "Two months from now" always means the same thing and always means the same number of days. The extra day is New Years Day. It's a holiday and does not belong to any month…

13 is prime and thus quarterly planning gets complicated. Quarterly planning is there because of the seasons and agriculture.

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

#603
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sat and Sun constitute the weekEND, right?" "Of course." "And Sunday is the 7th day, the day of rest?" "Yeah, that's what they preach at my church." "What about your workplace?" "Everybody knows the standard workweek is Mon-Fri. What's your point?" "Ok, so we're agreed the weekends include Sunday, your Bible says Sunday is the 7th day, and the workweek starts on Monday." "Yep." "So printed calendars and day-planners…

6-day work weeks are still common in agriculture, and the Bible is silent on what the exact weekday the sabbath lands on. Some people really argue that it's supposed to be Saturday, but traditionally Jesus's resurrection is said to have happened on Sunday, so most Christian churches went along with that. My own personal opinion: it matters not what day you consider to be the sabbath, but it does help when a community…

The day of the sun, or the Lord's day, is not the 7th day sabbath, it was declared by the Catholic Church to supersede the Sabbath and celebrate the resurrection instead.

In saying “the Sabbath . . . has been replaced by Sunday” (CCC 2190), the Church does not dismiss the significance of the Sabbath. The Catechism reminds us, “Sunday is expressly distinguished from the Sabbath which it follows chronologically every week” (CCC 2175).

https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-lords-da...

As for which day is the 7th, you can check with descendants of the good book's authors, still around, and still keeping count. The Jewish faith hasn't lost track.

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

#604
post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know how many fingers you have, but decimal system makes more sense to me...

You can count to twelve on your hands just as easily. And that’s per hand . Numberphile explains: https://youtu.be/U6xJfP7-HCc?t=500

Since childhood, I have always counted 16 on 4 fingers. Top of finger tip as 1, then the dark lines between knuckles, on inside side of finger as 2,3,4. After 16, I continue with 17 on first finger again, but left hand has now 1 touched by my thumb. Technically its 16x16 numbers.

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

#605
So the moral of the story is that having history and cultures is… bad somehow? Or at least weird?

The way I see it, a realistic alien would be more likely to answer

  "You think that's complicated? Our own calendar has to track our lifecycle according to the orbit of a planet that doesn't exist any more!"
Or maybe:

  "Ah, of course, you tend to use base-10 because you have ten fingers. I keep forgetting about those."
…while apologetically waving a mass of tentacles in the air :D

Incidentally, I wonder where this trope of aliens as hyperrational observers came from? Because it does not match at all the one instance of a space-going species that we know about (us).

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

#606
post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sat and Sun constitute the weekEND, right?" "Of course." "And Sunday is the 7th day, the day of rest?" "Yeah, that's what they preach at my church." "What about your workplace?" "Everybody knows the standard workweek is Mon-Fri. What's your point?" "Ok, so we're agreed the weekends include Sunday, your Bible says Sunday is the 7th day, and the workweek starts on Monday." "Yep." "So printed calendars and day-planners…

The Bible does not say that Sunday is the 7th day. It says that Saturday, the Sabbath, is the 7th day. And that Jesus rose on the day after the Sabbath, which means it was on the first day of the week. And that's the day most Chistians have adopted as their day of worship. (Except Seventh Day Adventists who keep it, as their name suggests, on the 7th day: Saturday.) If your church preaches differently, they should re…

Seventh‐day Adventists are definitely the most prolific Christian keepers of a Saturday sabbath, but they are not totally alone. The next most prominent groups I can think of are Seventh Day Baptists and Messianic Jews. SDAs are in the tens of millions worldwide, Messianics in perhaps the hundreds of thousands, and SDBs under one hundred thousand.

Although they’re fairly distinct traditions, in my experience each places great importance on religious liberty and separation of church and state, because historically all three groups have faced governmental persecution from blue laws. SDAs go so far as to believe Revelation’s mark of the Beast refers to a blue law to come in the future.

Messianics also have been known to face religious persecution in Israel. To the extent Christianity is viewed with mistrust by Judaism due to Christendom’s history of persecuting Jews, Messianic Judaism is further seen as an attempt by Christians to co‐opt or corrupt Jewish practices.

(Another fun fact: Seventh‐day Adventists hyphenate their name, but Seventh Day Baptists don’t.)

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

#607
post #213
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week /Officially/ almost everyone has standardized on ISO 8601 where Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7. But unofficially, not really. The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada, and probably some other parts of the English-speaking world. A quick check of Wikipedia suggests…

> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. I can confirm that in Hebrew, the name for Sunday translates into "First Day", Monday into "Second Day", etc. Except for Saturday, which is Shabat.

Similar in Arabic, except Friday is juma and Saturday is sabat.

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

#608

This is mainly tailored toward the Gregorian/Solar calendar. We don't have leap years in Hijri.

In Hinduism, there is a whole extra month after few years, kind of like December Bad. It is thought to not to do anything special in this month because its a bad month, labeled as like creature who lives under earth.

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

#609

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…

That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...

No reason other than some 6000-7000 years of record keeping by Hebrews, tracking the 7th day.

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

#610
post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

6-day work weeks are still common in agriculture, and the Bible is silent on what the exact weekday the sabbath lands on. Some people really argue that it's supposed to be Saturday, but traditionally Jesus's resurrection is said to have happened on Sunday, so most Christian churches went along with that. My own personal opinion: it matters not what day you consider to be the sabbath, but it does help when a community…

The day of the sun, or the Lord's day, is not the 7th day sabbath, it was declared by the Catholic Church to supersede the Sabbath and celebrate the resurrection instead. In saying “the Sabbath . . . has been replaced by Sunday” (CCC 2190), the Church does not dismiss the significance of the Sabbath. The Catechism reminds us, “Sunday is expressly distinguished from the Sabbath which it follows chronologically every w…

Thanks, that's good info :) I definitely have new things to study and ponder about.

I'm of the Latter-day Saints tradition and we basically use Lord's Day and Sabbath interchangeably, though I'm speaking anecdotally and from casual use. I may very well be using it incorrectly!

Post reply on HN