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You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

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Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#151

Post by zzo38computer »

kibwen wrote: post #2

> 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 )

They missed:

You appear to believe that: [ ] The entire world speaks Unicode

Unfortunately, your language (has/lacks): [ ] comments [ ] include files [ ] hygienic macros [ ] unhygienic macros [ ] string escaping [ ] name quoting [ ] come from [ ] undefined behaviour

Your implementation has the following flaws: [ ] It won't let you program dangerous behaviour

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#152

Post by chrisseaton »

yencabulator wrote: post #150
chrisseaton wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so all years are the start of a decade This isn't the standard technical meaning of 'decade'.

Says who? I routinely refer to something I did a long time ago as "two decades ago", whether the current year ends in zero, one, or something else.

> Says who?

ISO

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#153

Post by patrickthebold »

Arcorann wrote: post #41
patrickthebold wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a big proponent of continuous time zones, so that noon drifts ever so slightly as position changes. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

Already addressed: https://qntm.org/continuous Suffice to say, we stopped doing that in the 19th century for very good reasons.

I didn't even think about the international date line.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#154

Post by [deleted] »

efitz wrote: post #47

I advocate a solution similar to proposals floated years ago on alt.pave.the.earth on UseNet. 1. Disintegrate the moon, anyone who has ever advocated for lunar calendars, and anyone who fails to convincingly support this Plan(tm), converting their mass to energy that we can use for productive purposes such as orbital adjustments. 2. Adjust the rotational period of the earth to an aesthetically pleasing multiple of th…

[deleted]

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#155

Post by nl »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #133
nl wrote: post #53

My favorite calendar disaster was the Swedish calendar[1] between 1700 and 1753. They had a somewhat (?) reasonable plan: In November 1699, the Government of Sweden decided that, rather than adopt the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian…

> Good luck writing billing software for that. How often do you need to bill someone for events that took place 300 years ago?

It's a joke. As is the story it is posted on. Enjoy.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#157

Post by inopinatus »

chrisseaton wrote: post #123
inopinatus wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“Decade” isn’t a technical term, which is the point here. It has no intrinsic meaning except “a span of ten years”. Everything else is nominal, not technical; conflating the two is basically nerd sniping, and enlightens no-one.

> “Decade” isn’t a technical term This whole article and thread is about building technical systems for dates. In a technical context, 'decade' is a term with a specific standard meaning, which is that it starts on a year ending with a zero. It's not nerd sniping to point that out in a thread already all about giving dates precise technical meanings!

The article is satire.

The thread is nothing but nerd sniping.

There is no technical context for time defining “decades” that is anything other than nominal.

The fact that people are so hung up on this detail is itself evidence that it has no concrete philosophical foundation. Any definition you care to toss around is arbitrary.

It is pure bikeshed, and this is what gives the article its glimmer of truth that validates the satire.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#158

Post by tom_mellior »

kstenerud wrote: post #92
tom_mellior wrote: post #85

> ( ) 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 don't think you read all of my comment. 2020 is absolutely the beginning of a decade. So is 2021. It's just not the same decade.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#159

Post by sofetch »

chrisseaton wrote: post #152
yencabulator wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says who? I routinely refer to something I did a long time ago as "two decades ago", whether the current year ends in zero, one, or something else.

> Says who? ISO

I feel like this entire thread has been an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that you know an ISO definition. With the carefully constructed adjectives used to describe the definition ("standard technical meaning", "In a technical context") leading inexorably to the "ISO" gotcha.

To save others time, here's the ISO-8601 document which is apparently being referenced: https://dgn.isolutions.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:8601:-1:ed...

"decade" is defined in 3.1.2.22:

decade time scale unit (3.1.1.7) of 10 calendar years (3.1.2.21), beginning with a year whose year number is divisible without remainder by ten Note 1 to entry: Decade is also used to refer to an arbitrary duration (3.1.1.8) of 10 years, however decade is not used as such in this document.

Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

#160

Post by dtech »

jfengel wrote: post #142
chrisseaton wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

8601's definition of a decade is somewhat different from common parlance. They're using it only to mean "the first digit of a two-digit year", and doesn't really apply it beyond that. If you stick to only that definition of a decade, you're going to have communication problems with human beings.

Nah. 99/100 people will say the 90's decade is 1990-1999
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