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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

#991

Post by db48x »

Bakary wrote: post #983
db48x wrote: post #982

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t find it hard to imagine living without a calendar, or with an arbitrary calendar whose divisions are entirely within my control. In fact, while it might be a strain to keep everything straight in my head without a traditional calendar, it wouldn’t be difficult using pen and paper. One use for a paper calendar is to record distant future events such as dentist appointments, and I don’t see how that would be ha…

What about adding a recurring 8 hour calendar block that comes every 17 hours? Then you have a graphical representation of your sleep across time that allows you to fit appointments in. If you can't program it, and the software makes this hard to do, you can use Amazon Turk or something.

Wow, that would be a depressing job to get on Amazon Turk :)

I’m sure there is an API that I could use to add appointments, or I suppose could make an ical file and import it. I don’t quite have enough dentist appointments to make it worth while though. I did however spend an hour to make a spreadsheet. It only predicts my schedule for the next couple of weeks, but historically that’s been good enough for my colleagues.

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

#992

Post by db48x »

mattigames wrote: post #978
db48x wrote: post #970

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yea, but fingers and brains are not strongly correlated. An evolving alien sentience could end up with just about any number of fingers, but most life on Earth has some form of symmetry or other making even numbers more likely. Thus I a can imagine that if we canvassed the entire galactic population, every civilization would use even bases, but there would be no clear bias to 10 in particular. Perhaps a bias away from really large bases, but not one that is in favor of 10 specifically.

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

#993

Post by behnamoh »

BuckRogers wrote: post #962
behnamoh wrote: post #915

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 mo…

I say that to my American and European friends, that Iranians have a lot more in common with them than with the rest of the middle east. There are exceptions, of course, but the general public is really well educated, open minded, and leaning towards Western values and culture.

Too bad that the country has received such a negative reputation over the past 4 decades due to its (non-Iranian) regime.

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

#995

Post by rendall »

adastra22 wrote: post #913
rendall wrote: post #812

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia should never be considered a "source", even per its own documentation. If you must, to support an assertion found in Wikipedia, follow the article's citations and use them. If they even do support the assertion. Quite often, they do not.

Source can have a broader meaning than just “primary source.”

It should not be considered even a "secondary source". It's by intention an aggregator of secondary sources. Which secondary sources are included or excluded, particularly for sensitive or contentious topics, entirely depend on the bias and endurance of the editors of the article, so what you'll get is a grab-bag. Wikipedia has no effective means of detecting and countering, for example, a professional team of coordinated editors, or motivated activists.

As a rule of thumb, think high-school term paper. If that's good enough for your purposes, then sure, use it as a "source".

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

#996

Post by EdwardDiego »

Maursault wrote: post #981
EdwardDiego wrote: post #975

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ...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 pas…

> Being honest, when you opened with... ...whatever your thinking there was, I immediately shut down on engagement. My thinking was the tenor of your comment was overly informal and self-gratifying considering the subject, a major theme of whose teachings was humility. It doesn't quite follow that being antagonistic is not engagement. > Anyway, you got your chronology slightly wrong but only slightly, so very much we…

I reiterate my recommendation of that book by Pheme Perkins. Acts contains the oldest Christian traditions. Oral traditions, natch.

Your comments on my tone are bewildering in their absolute irrelevance - discussing the historical Jesus doesn't require reverence or adherence to the themes of Christianity, like how discussing the historical Muhammad doesn't require me to adhere to the shahada, nor consider dogs unclean.

But hey, maybe you're neurodiverse, or maybe you're just an asshole, but you do you.

If your objection to my tone was because of closely held personal beliefs, then I'm afraid you'll just have to build a bridge and get over it.

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

#997

Post by EmilioMartinez »

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…

Imagine being so powerful that your enemies await your calendar adjustments

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

#999

Post by jaza »

snotrockets wrote: post #691
jaza wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shabbat (apart from meaning "rest") is also generally accepted as deriving from the Hebrew word for "seven", which is "sheva". And Shabbat is sometimes referred to in Hebrew as "yom shvi-i" ("seventh day").

Citation needed. Klein Dictionary gives the etymology of שַׁבָּת as derived from שׁבת (to rest). I also found references suggesting the origin is with the Akkadian šapattum, the 15th of the month, but none related to שׁבע (which originates in Proto-Canaanite). היּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי (note the definite form!) is how Saturday is referred to in Genesis 2:2-3, without actually having the name שַׁבָּת. There's a some discuss…

I know it's not a reliable source by itself, and it lists no citations for the sentence in question, but FWIW, I based my answer on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat#Etymology :

> Other related words are ... to sheva (שֶׁבַע) meaning seven, as Shabbat is the seventh day of the week ...

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

#1000

Post by [deleted] »

anjbe wrote: post #629
tsimionescu wrote: post #628

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe, though am not sure, that once Christians stopped observing the Jewish Sabbath and instead resting on the Lord's day, it also became natural to consider it the end of their week, instead of the beginning.

Then why does the US, a very young culture compared to Europe, universally consider Sunday the first day of the week? Calling Sunday the seventh day must be a very recent development.

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