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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

#971

Post by krick »

db48x wrote: post #969
krick wrote: post #968

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

I had to invent it to imagine some (however far-fetched) conditions under which it would be usable. But it isn't, because these conditions are not practically possible. It's just stupid (as it often happens to be with sci-fi). It is just living without the calendar, that's all that it is. And calendar is a useful invention, basically a necessity for any society out of stone age.

Sure, you can just set up a timer which would alert you at some arbitrary moment in the future that it is time to do something. It's how computers do it (if we forget about leap seconds and such). But the point of the calendar and the clock with sane time units (like a minute and an hour) is to keep the frequency and time of your dentist appointments, train schedules and vacations somewhat workable in your head. Which would be much less fun to do in Unix-time.

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

#972

Post by eps »

Digory wrote: post #885
eps wrote: post #712

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Tuesday" in Russian is "vtornik", which is derived from "second". "Thursday" is "chetverg", which is a variation of "four". So, no, not all Christianity.

The start of the Russian week was Sunday until the Soviets tried to stamp out Sunday. The current date order is still from 1940, when the state was opposed to Christianity. https://www.rbth.com/history/335241-week-in-russia-began-sun...

That's an odd article.

"Nedelya" doesn't refer to the first day of the week, at least not now. It means is "week". I can see how it may have meant "do-nothing" and also refer to the rest day, but it doesn't place it at the front of the week.

Monday (ponedelnik) splits into "po" and "nedelya". "Po" is a repetition indicator, not "after", so it's more of something that happens every week.

As I've said - Tuesday is "2nd day", Thursday is "4rd day" and Friday is "5th" (pyatnitca - pyat - five). So 3 days out of 7 point at the start of the week being Monday. These names date to the ancient times, not something Soviets invented.

Wednesday ("sreda") does mean "middle day", but it refers to the middle of the work week, excluding Saturday and Sunday, which are named after Christian events and (likely) extended the original 5-day week.

So if you are to argue that a week that has 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th days literally spelled out starts on its 7th day, the only explanation would be that Russians used 0-based indexing for the week days. Which is alright with me even if somewhat far-fetched.

PS. Also, the calendar reform was not a move against the religion, but because Russia Empire was literally 13 days behind the rest of the world, which was not very convenient.

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

#973

Post by tornato7 »

ithkuil wrote: post #743
comeonbro wrote: post #170

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…

People mostly remember Caesar as a ruler, however in 63 BC (5 years before the Gallic wars) Caeser managed to get himself elected as Pontifex Maximus (chief high priest). 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…

At least a dozen engineers read this and decided to name their new microservice "Pontifex"

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

#974

Post by EdwardDiego »

anjbe wrote: post #714
EdwardDiego wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except for where you start a sentence with "yeah," apparently answering in the affirmative a hypothetical question that no one has asked, and adding a superfluous and grammatically incorrect comma, you are vaguely correct. Wow, you must be a hit at parties. The way I phrased that sentence is how some some dialects of English, like the one I speak, express agreement. Consider it shorthand for "I agree,". And perhaps…

> > What is agreed upon by near universal scholarly consensus is instead that Jesus was baptized and crucified. > You're going to need an awful lot of citations there. > Firstly, define the scholars you're referring to. Not being OP, I’ll list at least John Dominic Crossan and James Dunn, who has said that the baptism and crucifixion of Jesus “command almost universal assent.” Of course, I got those names from five m…

I chose sources that are either non-Christian, or their subsequent Christian modifications are well identified (i.e., Josephus' Antiquities), because if you're wanting to make a case for the historical Jesus, then it's best to avoid as much bias as is possible.

And I'm very interested indeed in Crossan and Dunn's sources, sadly Wikipedia doesn't yield any light on this.

The historical sources I mentioned can be found in more detail on newadvent.org, whatever else you think of the Catholics, they compile a humdinger of a wiki, and are probably the experts on Christology and the historical Jesus.

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

#975

Post by EdwardDiego »

Maursault wrote: post #894
EdwardDiego wrote: post #671

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Except for where you start a sentence with "yeah," apparently answering in the affirmative a hypothetical question that no one has asked, and adding a superfluous and grammatically incorrect comma, you are vaguely correct. Wow, you must be a hit at parties. The way I phrased that sentence is how some some dialects of English, like the one I speak, express agreement. Consider it shorthand for "I agree,". And perhaps…

> Wow, you must be a hit at parties. Ad hominem attack. > The way I phrased that sentence is how some some dialects of English, like the one I speak, express agreement. Consider it shorthand for "I agree,". There is no English dialect that does not include the adverb, "yeah," etymologically formed from drawling the affirmation, "yes," colloquially and informally. More often, however, "yeah" is employed as a common fi…

> ...as such, when written, it is meaningless and superfluous. In modern usage, however, it may most often be correctly replaced with the phrase, "as a Millennial, I informally

The distinction between spoken and written seems a) arbitrary and b) entirely irrelevant to a comment section on a website. I'm writing conversationally, comments aren't technical documentation or tenders, they're comments. Observations in passing.

Being honest, when you opened with... ...whatever your thinking there was, I immediately shut down on engagement.

Genuine feedback - you know your shit, so just lead with that, not the part where you decide to lead with "You started a sentence with 'yeah', and that's wrong". It helps establish a rapport.

Anyway, you got your chronology slightly wrong but only slightly, so very much well done, and I mean that genuinely, and it only erred in where you placed Acts, which contains the earliest Christian writings. (That we know of (so far))

Anyhoo, I'm a big fan of this book if you've not read it yet: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-New-Testament-Pheme-Perkins/d...

But I suspect you may have.

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

#976

Post by mnw21cam »

chungy wrote: post #401
chrisweekly wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sat and Sun constitute the weekEND, right?" "Of course." "And Sunday is the 7th day, the day of rest?" "Yeah, that's what they preach at my church." "What about your workplace?" "Everybody knows the standard workweek is Mon-Fri. What's your point?" "Ok, so we're agreed the weekends include Sunday, your Bible says Sunday is the 7th day, and the workweek starts on Monday." "Yep." "So printed calendars and day-planners…

6-day work weeks are still common in agriculture, and the Bible is silent on what the exact weekday the sabbath lands on. Some people really argue that it's supposed to be Saturday, but traditionally Jesus's resurrection is said to have happened on Sunday, so most Christian churches went along with that. My own personal opinion: it matters not what day you consider to be the sabbath, but it does help when a community…

I think we can trust the Jews to have kept the Sabbath fairly consistently. The Christians literally changed their reserved day of the week in honour of Jesus' resurrection. Luckily the fact that this was the day after the sabbath is completely unambiguously pinned down in the Bible.

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

#977

Post by otikik »

avar wrote: post #847
origin_path wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a bunch of less subtle assumptions, like the obviousness of base 10. That comes from us having ten fingers, right? It's easy to imagine aliens having six fingers on each hand and then assuming that base 12 is the most obvious and logical base to use for everything.

There's no reason to suppose that an intelligent alien race would find it convenient to count things in base that matches the number of "fingers" they have, if they even have such a thing. Whales aren't far from being intelligent enough to form a technical civilization, but their body plan makes it unlikely that they'd use their "fingers" (or fins) to count, or to communicate with other whales. Even if you gave an al…

I think the reason whole fingers was picked over joints or phalanges is because when humans started counting stuff the probability of someone having missing a whole finger or two was higher than now (The life of a hunter-gatherer, accidents happen). When you are missing a finger you can still use your "stumps" to count in base-10, but your ability to count using joints or phalanges is impaired.

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

#978

Post by mattigames »

db48x wrote: post #970
mattigames wrote: post #965

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bet having 10 fingers makes base 10 slightly easier to understand at early ages than 8 or 12 (specially 12 and anything else greater than 10)

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

#979

Post by psnehanshu »

em-bee wrote: post #594
psnehanshu wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I agree. 12h time is the natural consequence of using analog clocks where one rotation of the hour hand on the dial represents 12 hours. But I guess it won't be hard to represent 24h if the speed of the hour hand is halved, although I have never seen such clocks.

you can find them in novelty shops

Idk what "novelty shop" is.

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

#980

Post by eps »

eps wrote: post #972
Digory wrote: post #885

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The start of the Russian week was Sunday until the Soviets tried to stamp out Sunday. The current date order is still from 1940, when the state was opposed to Christianity. https://www.rbth.com/history/335241-week-in-russia-began-sun...

That's an odd article. "Nedelya" doesn't refer to the first day of the week, at least not now. It means is "week". I can see how it may have meant "do-nothing" and also refer to the rest day, but it doesn't place it at the front of the week. Monday (ponedelnik) splits into "po" and "nedelya". "Po" is a repetition indicator, not "after", so it's more of something that happens every week. As I've said - Tuesday is "2nd…

Erratum:

"... 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th ..." should read "... 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th..."

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