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

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

#861

Post by genewitch »

thenoblesunfish wrote: post #753

I think I pieced this together from Wikipedia at one point, but don't have the exact ref: The strangeness that December sounds like it should be month ten comes from the fact that in Roman times, it was the tenth and last month. After that there was just.. not much going on until the new year started and in fact it was actually a political question as to which day March started on! Does anyone know this more precisel…

upthread, the year started march 1st which was also the first day of spring, thus making it march, april, may june, quintilis, sextilis, september, october, november, december.

the 12 or 15 day shift at one or more points made the spring equinox "move" from march 1st to "around march 21st", and the "new year" was moved to January 1st. Thus completely misaligning the months and the seasons, and making september the 9th month. To compensate, they renamed the 5th and sixth months to honor a couple of emperors.

Don't cite me.

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

#862

Post by fanf2 »

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…

The metric system was based on the existing unit of time and the dimensions of the earth. The metre was originally defined as 1/40,000,000 of the circumference of the earth (through the poles and Paris). From the metre they derived units of weight and volume.

There was some debate at the time about using a pendulum with a 1s period to define the metre, but it was known to be less accurately reproducible than the geodetic version.

Their aim was to define a system that could in principle be recreated from scratch anywhere on Earth without necessarily relying on access to the physical prototypes. In practice the relative imprecision of the original measurements compared to the later demands of science and engineering meant that the prototypes became the definition.

It’s interesting to compare with the British Imperial units reform in the 1820s. Part of that act specifies how to recreate the prototypes from physical properties of the units. When the Palace of Westminster burned down in the 1830s the ancient prototypes were destroyed. But the replacements were recreated from copies, not from the specification in the act. And not much later, the official definition was based on the metric system because the metric standards were manufactured to much greater quality.

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

#863

Post by narag »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #612
narag wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space. Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because…

> Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. But in a way that doesn't work right. > Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because Romans used to go to war in the Spring. Yes? That's a mess and that's basically what the tweets said. They didn't m…

But in a way that doesn't work right.

It works great for the purpose that it was used: counting groups of days when regular humans didn't have the luxury of more precise calendars.

The part that doesn't "work right" is that the different natural cycles used to measure time are not multiples of others, so adjustements are always needed. That's why calendar is complex, it was fixed repeatedly until it doesn't drift.

Weeks and months are not kept because we don't know better, but because they're useful units for social reasons.

There's no "perfectly understandable" reason for having some gods some emperors and some wrong numbers.

That's a different part of the comment, addressing the hint that there's a religious reason for the calendar.

There are several eras used by different countries, and the common western calendar has several layers: weekdays seem to be of Sumerian origin, months at least in Latin and other European languages come from Roma and the AD year counting is "Christian" and widely used maybe because the last major useful adjustement was this one:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

But it seems they didn't bother to change the names of previous layers. If something works, just leave it alone. You may argue that there are more "rational" ways to organize time measurement. I would recommend to read what Asimov had to say on the subject.

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

#864

Post by genewitch »

JoeAltmaier wrote: post #139
Ekaros wrote: post #17

Don't even go to those idiots over there who uses these weird units for measuring temperature, distance, weight and ugh volume... When we actually have this well designed system where everything fits beautifully together...

Two pints in a quart! Two quarts in a 'pottle'! Two pottles in a gallon! Except nobody remembers what a 'pottle' is.

pottle? What about the hay-gallon?

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

#865

Post by fanf2 »

jrmg wrote: post #156
mod wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Pint" varies in the US as well, when ordering a beer. You're just gonna get whatever glass they have. They'll probably tell you if they know it's not a true pint, but I expect most bartenders have no idea.

A pint in the USA is 16 fluid ounces. In the UK (in the ‘imperial’ system) it is 20. [Technically the fluid ounce is also different in the two systems, but not enough to matter at this scale.] Some US bars will serve imperial pints on request and/or offer them for British or Irish beers.

The difference is about 10% which is easily noticeable.

Typically in a British pub you will be served beer in a glass that is calibrated as “pint to brim”, and any head on the beer is taken out of the nominal pint. So usually a pint as served is much closer to half a litre.

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

#866

Post by shiyah »

kadonoishi wrote: post #791
antognini wrote: post #268

A fun bit of trivia is that it wasn't until the middle of the 18th century that it became standard in Europe to start the new year on January 1. Up until that point many regions used March 25 as the date of the New Year. So, for example the day March 24, 1715 would have been followed by March 25, 1716. March 25 was the Feast of the Annunciation whereas January 1 was the Feast of the Circumcision, so the two dating me…

Oh, is that why Tolkien had Frodo throw the Ring in the Fire on March 25? And then King Elessar made that day the first day of the New Year. And the tradition held on until the 18th century. Huh.

No post body was provided.

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

#867

Post by fanf2 »

mcv wrote: post #433
EdwardDiego wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NZ, all legal weights and measures are metric, yet for some stubbornly cultural reason we still tend to discuss height in feet and inches (ladies on dating apps who are discriminating on height will specify that you need to be 6 foot, not 183cm) the weight of a newborn baby in pounds (but only for newborn babies!), and order our beer in pints, which generally means "a large glass of beer somewhere between 400 and…

I feel like I need to specify that the Dutch sometimes coloquially also use pounds and ounces, but Dutch pounds are exactly 500 grams and Dutch ounces 100 grams.

Crikey, that’s a big ounce! Rough rule of thumb is that an egg is about 2oz.

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

#869

Post by genewitch »

davchana wrote: post #601
robofanatic wrote: post #532

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.

This is far and away the most glaringly not-ok cultural thing we have leftover. I know there's an actual ISO for dates, but even if there weren't, if you use, oh, a file system, a spreadsheet, or even a filing cabinet, having the year, then the month, then the day, then the hour, minute, second, and so on makes everything sort correctly. We've been using computers for more than a generation at this point.

I get stressed any time i have to parse dates not in this format, usually for old emails, news articles, etc.

I think a huge sticking point is how most people write checks, Jun 6, 2022. Also the US postal system screws up the ordering in a way similar to writing things Jun 6, 2022. first the street number, then street, then subdivision (the building/apartment/department,) then city, then state. Then a zip code (which has the potential to be smaller than the street number, or larger than a city.

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

#870

Post by kevincox »

retrac wrote: post #729
bawolff wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> which is a totally separate question from the layout of a printed calendar I have no strong preference on Monday/Sunday, and I don't think either is inherently more logical than the other. However, it would be illogical, whether Sunday or Monday first, to have the 7th and last day of the week, laid out as the first column on the calendar.

I like to have my two weekend days next to each other since they are a fairly discrete chunk of time in my mind and planning.
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