661–670 of 1001 posts
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Weekends? Weekends are... the ... ends of the week. When you build a bookshelf, do you do: or do you do:
When you want to know how your friend spent the previous Saturday and Sunday, do you ask: "How was your weekend?" Or do you ask: "How were your weekends?"
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There’s still ambiguity in verbal language. On Sunday, if someone messages you “let’s do this next week” - do they mean “in the next 6 days” or “after 7 days from now”?
Almost universally meant to mean in the next 6 days. Next week implies after 7 days.
If I say "next Wednesday" on Thursday, I mean the Wednesday of next week, not "this Wednesday" which was yesterday.
"Next Weekday" of a weekday that's yet to happen, means one week after that day within this week.
"Next Weekday" of a weekday that already happened, means the very next instance of that day in the calendar, "This Weekday" refers to the past.
"Hey, this Tuesday was your presentation right? How did it go?"
"We rescheduled for next Monday actually". <- this is obviously the Monday after the coming weekend.
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Weekends? Weekends are... the ... ends of the week. When you build a bookshelf, do you do: or do you do:
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?
I find the implication that aliens are rational and have no subrational concepts due to tradition and habit interesting, as it sort of implies that these kinds of outgrowths are not necessary and can just be done away with. The narrator starts from a position of not wanting to legitimize or historicize beyond reductive statements like "some ancient civilization did XYZ". I'll admit that I skimmed through the last par…
More like vestigial organs that our society isn't capable enough to excise.
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ah yes, "seconds", the "second minúte part of an hour", i.e. 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of the average time it takes the Earth to rotate towards Sol. very sensible default.
Personally I vote for a new unity as a measure of time, the 10+e7 part of the speed of light, so the equivalent to 2.99792458 seconds, it's a sensible default in my opinion, perhaps also another new unity that is the third of that one, it would be very close to a second (in case the space travelers have practical applications to have such measure of time)
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N=1: No, Monday is that day and I believe I'm majority, despite many Japanese calendars are beginning with Sunday
I can only talk about the people I personally know and I've asked this question myself (because it's funny and interesting from a cultural perspective) and most people I asked said "Sunday", although as I said it's not set in stone.
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…
The US, Canada, China, Japan and most of South America. Oh. And the Phillipines consider Sunday the beginning of the week. And someone just shouted at me that Israel considers Sunday the beginning of the week, but that seems unlikely to me.
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I believe, though am not sure, that once Christians stopped observing the Jewish Sabbath and instead resting on the Lord's day, it also became natural to consider it the end of their week, instead of the beginning.
Then why does the US, a very young culture compared to Europe, universally consider Sunday the first day of the week? Calling Sunday the seventh day must be a very recent development.
I believe that they resurrected the practice of considering Sunday as the first day of the week, based on the Old Testament tradition. Just like New Earth Creationism is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon driven by a renewed interest in literal interpretations of the Bible, that had long since been superseded in Catholic scholarship.
Very entertaining read. The earthling says at one point (for comedic effect probably) that they don’t know why people used to like to count in dozens. I didn’t understand myself until someone explained to me that it makes dividing pay between a group of workers much easier. You pay 12 coins for a job, very simple to divide between a team of two, three, four, six or twelve.
With two hands, you can use this method to count up to 144 (a "gross" in English): one hand counts individual items, the other counts dozens.