741–750 of 1001 posts
There's also a clever, perhaps unintentional naming in days, where the first day is al-Ahad (The One), which is also a name of Allah (Unique, The One). So it's no longer some awkward Sunday or Thor's Day or Zero Day.
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> 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…
> The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada As an english canadian (alberta), i have never in my life heard of people considering sunday the first day of the week. Edit: appearently people are talking what is printed on calendar. I consider that to be a separate thing. If you asked me to list the days of the week in order i would start on monday, which is a totally separate question…
Out of curiosity, if you have a calendar app on your computer, does it start with Sunday or Monday?
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…
Adjusting the calendar was as part of the duties of the Pontifex Maximus. They decided public holidays and they decided whether to add an "intercalary month" (at the end of February which used to be the last month).
There are many interesting things to say about this but since this is hacker news I'm going ro focus on one:
Caesar was away campaigning a lot and the Pontifex could adjust the calendar only while physically in Rome. So many years went by without calendar fixes.
After having benefited from the confusion and the edge he had by understanding the calendar (like knowing he could safely cross the Adriatic when his opponent assumed that crossing it that given month was a bad luck) he decided to fix the calendar so that it doesn't require a human in the loop.
In a way, he automated himself out of his job.
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> 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…
We have something of a philosophical disagreement; I would argue that the names of the months themselves constitute a contemporary record describing the switch. It doesn't tell us when the switch occurred, but it tells us very clearly that the switch occurred.
It is true that the record might be accidentally or deliberately falsified; perhaps the months were originally named after unrelated concepts and the names got revised into their numerical forms over time. But a formal history suffers from exactly the same problem, and it still gets to be called a "record"; I don't see why we would consider the fact that our ninth month is named "Month Seven" not to be a record of a shift in the beginning of the year [or rather, in the beginning of the sequence of months].
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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)
With that division, seconds would be 0.84 the length of current seconds.
But, one second is exactly 10 alpha cycles in the brain (10 hz), which is the most dominant electrical cycle. So, maybe seconds are biologically sensible. In that case, we need to build a system that connects the rhythms of our biology to the rhythms of our planetary motion. Oh…
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…
> "Mars month" I though marzec came from marznąć meaning "to freeze".
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…
Not correct, as others have pointed out. Regardless, why is it more or less logical for any particular day to be considered the start of the week? Hell, it seems that even in several countries that use Monday as the first day of the week, the names of the day reflect that Monday is the second day of the week!
I personally like Sunday and Saturday to be the opposite ends of the week. Sunday and Saturday are both considered rest days for the most part, and I think rest days are a good way to both start and finish your week. But I recognize that there's still really no logical basis for this; it's just what I grew up with so it "feels right". Just as those of you who grew up in a Monday-indexed week are used to it, so that "feels right" to you.
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…
Many Arabic countries have the weekend on Friday and Saturday and work on Sunday. I think they probably all start the week on Sunday for this reason. No idea why the US does too though!
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As a Persian, I always found the Gregorian calendar weird. In Iran and some other countries, Jalali calendar is used which is much more straightforward: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalali_calendar The Iranian calendar (also known as Persian calendar or the Jalaali Calendar) is a solar calendar currently used in Iran and Afghanistan. It is observation-based, rather than rule-based, beginning each year on the vernal…
> It's also precisely set to follow seasons. For example, the first day of Fall is actually the first day of "Mehr" (the 7th month). For some reason, the Gregorian calendar has it on Sep. 22. This doesn't really work; the first day of Fall differs from place to place according to the specifics of the local climate.
You can't really define seasons with day-precision based on weather or climate.
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 Problem with Time & Timezones" - https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...