41–50 of 138 posts
> South Koreans will become at least a year younger... "At least"? Who is becoming two years younger...?
A Korean born on, say, 2001 December 1st would have been one year old in 2001, two years old in 2002, and 23 years old today, based on the traditional counting. In Western counting, the person would be 21 years old today.
I actually wished a change in reverse direction, the world adopting the Korean standard of age accounting for full existence, not just postpartum existence. The later feels quite arbitrary, at least for me.
The Korean approach is still wrong, arguably. If you want to include the totality of the life of the baby, the next normal stopping point would be conception. That would make the child ~9 months old, not 1 year.
A person's Korean age starts at 1 sal, and increments at New Years. A baby could be born on December and be 2 sal by January. A baby born in January would be 1 sal until next year, and be considered 1 sal younger than the December baby, even though they were only born 1 month apart. Everyone born in the same calendar year is in the same age cohort.
The article is interesting on its own, but giving it a clickbaity title goes against the HN guidelines.
Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.
> Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system Seriously though, I wonder if immigration is going to help with that? Almost everyone else in the world uses metric in everyday life. Immigrants to the US have to go through the unpleasant process of adjusting to not doing so. I'm sure many (most?) of them wish they didn't have to do that. As the immigration process continues, might this lead to growing popular…
RLY? Hello from the UK! Here we are metricated in general and then it goes a bit mad. As you know we generally have at least five ways of saying the same thing. Well actually we don't any more. Mostly metricated but we still have inches and feet etc hanging on in there.
I suspect that most other countries are the same. I recall (my Mum) buying stuff in West German markets by der pfund (slightly larger than the Imperial pound, I think).
We used to measure spirits by the gill and when we joined the EU after a while we metricated most of our measures to this: https://www.gov.uk/weights-measures-and-packaging-the-law/sp...
We still drink pints (obvs!)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…
Yes, even the SI base units. Shhh! Don't let them know that SI's base ten counting isn't some kind of scientific absolute and is just as arbitrary as inches and feet, and if humans had 11 fingers, SI would be different.
Sometimes, they do.
Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…
The fact that the metric system is decimal and all conversions essentially consist of moving a point around are much more trivial. 1000 millimeters is a meter. 100 centimeters is a meter. 10 millimeters is a centimeters. it's in the name. Same for liters, same for kilogram. You don't need to do math, you just move a separator. It's not arbitrary, that's the big advantage.
Especially when you jump several magnitudes. 3.5 liters is 3500 milliliters. What's 3.5 gallons in ounces? eight ounces are one cup, two cups are a pint and two pint are a quart IIRC but then four quarts are a gallon? And there's more units. I always forget them and I actually tried to learn them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You think the moment of birth is more arbitrary than trying to figure out when a clump of cells/a fetus is viable?
Yes. I have a sister 15 years younger. My parents still keep her ultrasound plates around. Her ID states she is from this millennium. But yet the timestamps in the plates show she was already here with us in the end of the past millennium. Every time I see them, it gives me an uneasy feeling the way we're used to count our time is just wrong.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And, for that matter, stop counting years and centuries from one. The 19th century was from 1900 to 1999. The 20th started at the year 2000.
Let's go a step farther and reset the year counting from Jesus to L Ron Hubbard's death. Either that or reset on the singularity, but I'm impatient. [EDIT] I've just been informed LRH didn't completely die. I'll petition for the singularity reset.
> The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme, placing its first year near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution, when humans shifted from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle to agriculture and fixed settlements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
(Of course, the choice to add exactly 10,000 is a compromise to make it trivial to interconvert between HE and AD.)
You can even buy Human Era calendars: https://shop-us.kurzgesagt.org/collections/calendar
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternative take: the US customary units have stuck around because SI has failed to present itself as better enough to switch. Grant that all base units are arbitrary[1], many of the customary units make easier logical sense in day-to-day life, or are designed to be divisible in easier units than SI units are designed to be. Do you want ⅓ of a foot? Well, that's 4 inches (12 inches in a foot, divide by 3, you get 4).…
>make easier logical sense in day-to-day life The fact that the metric system is decimal and all conversions essentially consist of moving a point around are much more trivial. 1000 millimeters is a meter. 100 centimeters is a meter. 10 millimeters is a centimeters. it's in the name. Same for liters, same for kilogram. You don't need to do math, you just move a separator. It's not arbitrary, that's the big advantage.…
448. That's not even hard. There's 128 fluid ounces per gallon. 3×128=384, add 64 to that for 448.
You could work through that from the smaller units if you didn't know off hand. Still, it's pretty unusual to want fluid ounces at that scale. Keep it at 3.5 gallons.
Ah standards. Taking all the fun out of international travel confusion. Now if we could only get the US onto the metric system and abolish daylight saving time.
And, for that matter, stop counting years and centuries from one. The 19th century was from 1900 to 1999. The 20th started at the year 2000.