141–150 of 164 posts
Are you calling the Ancient Egyptians stupid? I think you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_calendar
And the Aztecs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nēmontēmi
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What technique is this? I am unaware of any Office of Decades charged with deciding precisely what constitutes the sole definition of "decade".
> I am unaware of any Office of Decades charged with deciding precisely what constitutes the sole definition of "decade" ISO 8601 defines what a 'decade' is. I mean you're free to ignore it of course, like you're free to say March has 34 days if you want... but you may have trouble communicating with people and integrating with existing systems.
> your name for the thirteenth month is questionable In my plan for twelve 30-day months, I intended to call the leftover 5/6 days "Etcember", for et cetera. :P (This submission appears to be a riff on the classic "Programming Language Checklist": https://www.famicol.in/language_checklist.html )
Which in turn is a riff on the "spam solutions" checklist: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt
> ( ) planetary-scale engineering is impractical I find your lack of vision disturbing. Given that we likely need planetary-scale engineering anyway in the next 50-100 years, getting a few asteroids to nudge the earth’s orbit a bit over a long period of time isn’t that much of a stretch. With asteroid mining it might even pay for itself. Note: I didn’t do any calculations but over millions of years we’ll need to stab…
Author does not lack vision: https://qntm.org/destroy
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Well that's just a matter of time. I posit that given sufficient time for technology to develop, anything can be practically engineered.
If one combines theory of evolution and biological rhythms, then planetary scale engineering would be a drastic health effect.
> ( ) by that logic, 2000 was the final year of the Nineties I'm annoyed by this argument, which came up again at the start of this year in dumb Twitter discussions about whether 2020 marks the beginning of a new decade. 2000 was not the final year of the Nineties. 2000 was the final year of the second millennium, and of the 20th century, and of the tenth decade of the 20th century. The Nineties were the years 1990-1…
And yet people will say that 2000 is the beginning of the millenium, and 2020 is the beginning of a decade, because colloquially it's easier and understandable. And no amount of begging, pleading, or berating will change that (although it might get you punched in the face). That pope Gregory XIII neglected to include a year 0 in his calendar doesn't have to condemn us to suffer the mental gymnastics in our daily live…
I like the solar hijri calendar (not to be confused with the lunar hijri). Better than anno domini would be a anno mundi system, but to make a new scientific anno mundi system rather than the old way, due directly to the Earth going around the Sun, because that is how the year is considered, so to count years starting from that, too. For time keeping, use local time based on mean solar time, with no daylight saving t…
. . . anno mundi . . . ante meridiem . . . :P
Am I supposed to be able to select an option?
The premise is that this would be pasted in its entirety into a reply to a usenet or listserv post, with the text of the appropriate line- or lines- modified from "( )" to "(x)". The implication is that amateur calendarists, who do not fully grasp the enormity of the task, frequently post to this list with proposals for a new calendar. The regular contributors to this list see so many ill-conceived proposals that the…
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Months are fine. Leap years are fine. It’s leap seconds that annoy me.
> Leap years are fine. It’s leap seconds that annoy me. The implementation of leap seconds is obviously worse than the implementation of leap years, though. (This might make more sense if leap seconds had come first...) In a leap year, February 28 is followed by February 29, a day that doesn't ordinarily exist. It has the same weight as any other day. If you had a dentist appointment on the 29th, then on March 3rd pe…
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A decade is any interval of ten years, so all years are the start of a decade, except for the nine years at the end of the universe. Which explains why it is so difficult to make a reservation at Milliways.
> so all years are the start of a decade This isn't the standard technical meaning of 'decade'.