Obligatory link to Falsehoods programmers believe about time:
https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...
Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
961–970 of 1001 posts
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#962Earlier quoted context omitted.
There’s more similarities than just that. Iran was founded by Indo-Europeans.
Many similarities in languages too. Persian (Farsi) has the same root as some European languages (and should not be confused with Arabic, which is totally different than both). In Persian | In English mädar | mother barädar | brother dokhtar | daughter pedar | father bad | bad ...
I’m familiar. It is fascinating. Same with Sanskrit. I don’t know if we’re all descended from the same people exactly, or if the Indo Europeans were just an extremely successful core group with a culture that all of us adopted as the natives wherever they spread to. But they certainly had a successful culture. Iran should really be an ally with the western democracies. Those people are actually pretty advanced and modern, considering where they are placed in the world.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#963I 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…
The thing that would've brought it around for me is a punchline where the alien says something like "wow, your system is so clean and simple compared to ours". I do think there's a certain degree of humor when looking back at history. There are plenty of things to laugh at in hindsight. But the thing that rubs me wrong is the undertone that this is somehow a distinctly human trait or inherently a bad thing. That some…
Their calendar could be updated for interplanetary use.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#964Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, often people leap to "aliens" being some higher intelligence than us who will judge our poor sub-optimal decisions. Though to me it seems more likely that any life we encounter is more likely to be less intelligent, if intelligent at all.
Aliens with the ability to visit earth will be much more intelligent than humans.
The alien that made the space ship will be smarter, the alien that arrives in the space ship might be less smart than us.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#965Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Kilo-" as a prefix just means thousand, derived from Greek. Doesn’t seem arbitrary to me. Can you explain what you mean by that? Of course, all number systems are arbitrary in a sense.
One thousand is an arbitrary number, and apart from its special place in our base 10 number system is no more special than, say, nine hundred ninety-nine.
I bet that humans at some point will discover thats actually false in the sense that the base 10 system is not completely arbitrary, and brains had an easier time evolving using the base 10 number systems (than say, base 7), and just like electricity flows through the path of least resistence even in other galaxies the same happens with how some areas of the brain evolve, that regardless of their origin they tend to use the base 10 system as well, with some minor differences.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#966I 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…
Yeah, often people leap to "aliens" being some higher intelligence than us who will judge our poor sub-optimal decisions. Though to me it seems more likely that any life we encounter is more likely to be less intelligent, if intelligent at all.
Unless we find some microbes in our little solar system, I highly doubt this. Any civilization able to get to earth is likely to be at least an order of magnitude more intelligent than us.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#967This 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…
What is the advantage of adopting any of those, other than being a bit more in sync with other countries? None of them imply anything other than semantic difference, there is very little advantage and a lot of pain if we were to adopt those "standards".
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#968Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except it would be absolutely impractical to actually use in practice by any species/societies that have to sleep on a regular basis and in general need cycles. If all your "natural cycles" happen to fit well into base-10, well, that's great. Otherwise, you need to base your cycles on something else, which is exactly what calendars do. And, just by the way, the Gregorian calendar is bad and messy, but the ideas it's…
100 ksecs works out to roughly 27 hours. That's a bit long for a day, but probably not too infeasible to adapt to.
It's not about the length. It might be a perfect day for them, it's not the point. It's about the fact that you have to use 100 ksec instead of a "day". "Each day" is not the same thing as "each 100 ksecs", since the latter has much more implicit precision. So, practically speaking, your either have a concept of 1-day cycle (because of sleep, sun, or whatever — doesn't matter why they need it and how long must it be for their purposes), or you are stuck with thinking in Unix-time. And if it isn't bad enough for you to fill your calendar in unix-time without "days" or "months" (I can actually believe you might get used to it, somewhat) it makes organisation-level planning and communication hell, if not impossible.
Heck, let's even assume their comfortable "day" cycle is 1ks (after all, they had to chose the length of their second based on something". It still means that their next comfortable MUST be EXACTLY 1 Ms (in their numeric system) to be able to use it as a cycle. If it's off even by 0.1 s, it still will get unusable for thinking and planning sooner or later.
So, yeah, long story short: just think about having all your schedules (like work shifts, payday, train schedules, everything) in Unix-time. I guess this is enough of a clue to arrive by yourself to the conclusion, that calendars (any calendar, that is — not necessarily Gregorian one) are not some "silly tradition of ours", but a really, really useful invention, which is almost for sure a necessity for any civilization, even if it isn't bound to an earth with yearly weather-cycles.
The only way this could work out is if ALL their cycles happen to fit PERFECTLY to orders (degrees) of some number — then they could choose the length of 1 second and their numeric system base accordingly, and I can imagine it being somewhat usable without introducing explicit cycles. But to happen it must be one Math-Wonderland of a Universe they live in. I don't even dare to say it's "implausible". It's... ridiculous.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#969Earlier quoted context omitted.
100 ksecs works out to roughly 27 hours. That's a bit long for a day, but probably not too infeasible to adapt to.
It's not about the length. It might be a perfect day for them, it's not the point. It's about the fact that you have to use 100 ksec instead of a "day". "Each day" is not the same thing as "each 100 ksecs", since the latter has much more implicit precision. So, practically speaking, your either have a concept of 1-day cycle (because of sleep, sun, or whatever — doesn't matter why they need it and how long must it be…
It’s so ridiculous that you have invented something completely unlike what is in the book. They don’t try to force anything to line up to powers of ten, they haven’t changed the length of the second, and they have wearable computers to eliminate any and all annoyances associated with communicating long timestamps.
Although the book only hints at how things are implemented, the result is apparently really flexible. They regularly schedule things that will happen far in the future. Since they make liberal use of suspended animation, their plans need to cover very long periods of time at varying levels of precision. Most of the events of the book take place over approximately a gigasecond (with the average character being awake less than a quarter of that), but the prolog takes place several centuries earlier, and the backstory of one of the main characters covers at least several millenia.
Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
#970Earlier quoted context omitted.
One thousand is an arbitrary number, and apart from its special place in our base 10 number system is no more special than, say, nine hundred ninety-nine.
I bet that humans at some point will discover thats actually false in the sense that the base 10 system is not completely arbitrary, and brains had an easier time evolving using the base 10 number systems (than say, base 7), and just like electricity flows through the path of least resistence even in other galaxies the same happens with how some areas of the brain evolve, that regardless of their origin they tend to…
I would be willing to bet that some bases are easier than others, with primes being basically impossible, but not that 10 is inherently easier than 8 or 12.