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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

#951

Post by function_seven »

mrguyorama wrote: post #934
function_seven wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As an unashamed imperial units enthusiast, now I’m sad we don’t have different ones for current and potential. But at least we still have horsepower! My PSU is a 3/4-horse unit. My toaster oven is a full horsepower. I like it.

Your battery-electric vehicle has a capacity of 70 thousand horsepower-hours

Oh boy I wish. I'd only have to recharge like once a year! That's just nuts.

My 70kWh battery holds only 95 horsepower-hours. But I use the British Thermal Unit when talking about energy.

My BEV has 240 kilo-BTUs stored in it.

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

#952

Post by ozim »

dalys wrote: post #317
eastbound wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lag would be enormous between galaxies, unless we invent quantum entanglement, in which case the lag is also irrelevant because you can teleport yourself.

Teleporting would still require energy and therefor money. Plus wearing pants. So I think the biggest problem is coming up with: A) A network protocol for quantum entaglement. B) porting the Zoom client to the Yapple N1 architecture, the most recent Alien Processing Unit from the company Yapple, named by the popular yapple fruit on the planet Mostly Sand. (Yes, they also named their planet after the material that was…

Remember that for last 20 or so years we try to move to IPv6 first we have to finish that before we go any further :)

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

#953

Post by arrow7000 »

pfdietz wrote: post #835
arrow7000 wrote: post #834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Selection bias notwithstanding, we exist, which means life evolved at least once. If the universe can give rise to life it would be extremely odd that it did so exactly once.

"Extremely odd" is just handwaving here, an argument from personal incredulity. Regardless of how rare we are, we'd always observe ourselves. Therefore nothing can be deduced from our own existence.

That doesn't address the point I'm making. Which is that if the universe can give rise to life, it's more likely to have multiple instances of it than for it to be exactly one. In the same way that it takes more effort to ensure you fill a swimming pool to be so full as to overrun by exactly one drop and no more, than it is to fill it imprecisely and either have no spillage at all because it's nowhere near full or lots of spillage because it's now too full.

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

#954

Post by otikik »

jelliclesfarm wrote: post #933
otikik wrote: post #817

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the Moon has no influence in modern everyday life. It did in the past, for scheduling fishing, to attack an enemy tribe when there’s no moon, or to hunt nocturnal animals when there is.

Moon influences us in three ways: Time, Tide and Light. We now have apps that inform us. But. If we can read a lunar calendar, we can organise our life around the moon cycles. There is a reason the word ‘lunatic’ is derived from ‘lunar’. We are mostly made of water. Luna definitely has an effect on our bodies and our moods. Why isn’t it a good thing to understand the ecosystems around us that is time and space..and t…

> We are mostly made of water. Luna definitely has an effect on our bodies and our moods

I accept that the moon has effects in the tides. As for the rest...

I have heard that before, but every time it was by someone who standed to gain something from me believing that - that when Moon is on the 7th House and Jupiter Aligns With Mars then Peace will Guide the Planets and Love Will Steer me to open my wallet and register to this self-help course.

Do you have any reference to a credible source that can prove that the Moon has those other effects you mention? Something like a test with a significant enough number of people involve, and a control group.

> Why isn’t it a good thing to understand the ecosystems around us that is time and space..and the ecosystem with us that is mind and body?

I strive very hard to understand the ecosystems around us (And beyond - from the most distant galaxies to how the atoms and sub-atomic particles make us work how we work). But I use Science for that.

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

#955

Post by mcv »

midasuni wrote: post #809
mcv wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is incorrect. The US is hardly the only country where people consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Anyone with some understanding of the history of our weekdays does so, and that historical understanding is not limited to Americans. It's also not true that the US is the only country to use 12h time; many countries do. Including mine. If you need to write time without ambiguity, you use the 24h format,…

What country is that? I’ve only really seen 12h time in America and it’s colonies.

Netherland. I suspect it's pretty common across continental Europe.

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

#956

Post by drdeca »

oldgradstudent wrote: post #881
drdeca wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you have the day before "seventh day" be called "fifth day"?

"Sabbath" comes from Hebrew for rest or cessation, not from being the seventh day.

Oh! I thought it meant “seventh”! Thanks for the correction.

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

#957

Post by cercatrova »

samatman wrote: post #662
cercatrova wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost universally meant to mean in the next 6 days. Next week implies after 7 days.

This isn't almost universal, in fact it's generally understood not to be the case, some of the time. 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 calend…

You're right. I intuitively know and follow what you're saying, but I didn't put it into words correctly.

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

#958

Post by seba_dos1 »

ajuc wrote: post #737
ursusmaritimus wrote: post #482

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

It's also still retained in words that mean "repeat(ed)" - powtórzyć, powtórny.

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

#959

Post by seba_dos1 »

nothrowaways wrote: post #650
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…

Looks cute.

Roots of most of these words aren't instantly obvious even to Poles though - the meaning is there, but hidden behind layers of language evolution. I was aware of some of those roots already, but with some others I went like "huh, I guess this makes sense" only after reading the parent comment (although I'm not sure whether all of them are actually correct).

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

#960

Post by robbrown451 »

throwawayffffas wrote: post #820
robbrown451 wrote: post #682

Weeks aren't subdivisions of months, they are completely independent of months and years. There is good reason for this. Having months alternate between long and short (as they typically do) is a lot better than just having one short month. It would get weird with things like rent payments if you have one month that is way shorter than the others. (although I do wish they chose a 30 day month to occasionally add a 31…

A week is a quarter of a lunar month, we kept them around after months stopped being lunar, because they are kind of nice.

Although they'd never be exact....otherwise the full moon would always be the same day of week.
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