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

731–740 of 1001 posts

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

#731

Post by anoopelias »

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…

> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have.

There is Tranquility Calendar[1] that was proposed sometime back:

- Starts at the time when man landed on Moon. (Tranquility base)

- 1 year = 13 months each of 28 days (13*4 = 364) + 1 Armstrong day

- Exactly 4 week months.

Back in 2019, (50th year of moon landing) I happened to build a web representation of the same[2].

[1] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48c6d4c3d54cf

[2] https://anoopelias.github.io/tranquility-calendar/

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

#732

Post by throwaway2037 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #616
shakezula wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sunday = 1 Animals. Absolutely barbaric. Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s

Well by struct tm, Sunday is 0. And months start at 0. And the day of the month starts at 1!

I remember years ago that Larry Wall said about Perl 5->6 upgrade: "We can fix some broken things." This was an item on his big list.

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

#733

Post by nullc »

StingyJelly wrote: post #354
nullc wrote: post #65

Wait until someone notices that _base 11_ is the natural base for a being with 10 fingers. A separate symbol for 10 is base 11, not base 10. Base 10 only has separate symbols for up to and including 9.

Maybe it's optimal to have an obvious overflow state

Same can be said about many of the examples in the tweets. :)

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

#734

Post by ajuc »

tasuki wrote: post #392
ajuc wrote: post #298

So, for comparison - in Poland we use - 24 hour clock - days of the week are called "after not working day", "second day", "middle day", "fourth day", "fifth day", "sabbath", "not working day" - months are mostly named from the agricultural/weather phenomena "wood cutting month", "strong cold month", "Mars month", "flowers month", "Mai month", "red pigment larvae month", "linden trees month", "sickle month", "heather…

> "second day" Wtorek? That... does not appear to have "dwa" or anything similar in it. Please ELIC (explain like I'm Czech (actually am, tho lived in Poland for a bit))

Wtóry is oldstyle "second" in Polish.

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

#735

Post by ajuc »

Izkata wrote: post #523
ajuc wrote: post #298

So, for comparison - in Poland we use - 24 hour clock - days of the week are called "after not working day", "second day", "middle day", "fourth day", "fifth day", "sabbath", "not working day" - months are mostly named from the agricultural/weather phenomena "wood cutting month", "strong cold month", "Mars month", "flowers month", "Mai month", "red pigment larvae month", "linden trees month", "sickle month", "heather…

"Middle day" isn't the middle day?

It's the middle day of the work week.

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

#736

Post by adrian_b »

lolinder wrote: post #556
thaumasiotes wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> but January has been the first month of the year through all of recorded history Are you kidding? Not only are September through December literally named "Month 7" through "Month 10", but the year began in late March as recently as AD 1751. That is not a period where we're suffering from a lack of recorded history.

True enough, my mistake! I was only looking at the Roman time period and didn't realize that the calendar shifted back to starting in March during the Christian era. That's really interesting to learn! My main point is still the same: Caesar's calendar started in January and he was following the order that was current in his day. We do not know when the switch from March to January occurred. There are multiple storie…

The legends about the 10 month calendar are almost certainly a very late invention, which appeared as an attempt to explain why e.g. December is the 12th month.

It is likely that at its conception all the months of the Roman calendar were numbered, but some time later the months January to June were given names corresponding to important religious festivals, which were scheduled during those months.

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

#737

Post by ajuc »

ursusmaritimus wrote: post #482
tasuki wrote: post #392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "second day" Wtorek? That... does not appear to have "dwa" or anything similar in it. Please ELIC (explain like I'm Czech (actually am, tho lived in Poland for a bit))

There is an old Slavic word "vtorý" for "second" (not sure about spelling, but it is documented for example in old church Slavonic). Russian still uses "vtoroj" for "second". Several other Slavic languages have a word for Tuesday based on this root, even though their usual word for "second" follows a systematic derivation based on "dva" (two). Examples includes Czech and Slovak ("úterý" for Tuesday in both) and Polis…

Polish uses both "drugi" and "wtóry" for second (wtóry sounds old style, but most people understand it).

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

#738

Post by kelnos »

apexalpha wrote: post #696
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…

>- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; Does anyone know why? This has always seemed a bit weird to me. I mean the US is a fairly religious country and it's pretty much known to anyone that Sunday is the 7th day in Christianity? And on the first day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the first day from all His…

Ignoring the religious angle entirely, I've always thought it was weird that people consider Monday the first day of the week, because to me, Sunday and Saturday are at either "end" of the week, hence they are called "weekend" days.

If Monday is day 1, then Saturday is day 6 and Sunday is day 7, so Saturday is no longer a weekend.

(Yes, I know that you can argue it a different way such that it still makes sense with Monday as the first day of the week. But it just feels "wrong" to me, probably because I lived the first 15-20 years of my life without even knowing that anyone else didn't consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Stuff you grow up with is hard to change.)

(Relatedly, no matter how hard I try, Celsius degrees never feel natural to me. Ditto for kilograms when talking about how much a human weighs. I've managed to get myself comfortable with meters and liters, at least, though I still sometimes have to "translate" in my head for things to make sense to me.)

At any rate, I do wonder when this difference solidified. Was Monday considered the first day of the week in western Europe during the period when Europe was colonizing pre-United-States? If so, when and why did the US (or colonists in the pre-US) switch to Sunday?

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

#739

Post by kelnos »

bawolff wrote: post #699
stormbrew wrote: post #402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What part of English Canada? In Alberta or Ontario (the parts I've lived in, though I was pretty young when I lived in Ontario) I've literally never seen a calendar with Monday as the first day of the week that I can recall.

I think there is a distinction between what people consider the first day of the week and what is printed on a calendar.

The person originally bringing this up referenced printed calendars always having Monday as the first day of the week, so it seems reasonable to use an observation of printed calendars with Sunday as the start of the week as a rebuttal.
Post reply on HN