311–320 of 1001 posts
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Sunday is the first day of the week in crontab. First index in the array, 0.
Sunday is the last day of the week in crontab. Last index in the array, 7.
This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…
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Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space. Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because…
The point of comical absurdities like this is precisely that they appear comical or absurd if you don’t know the reasons for them being the way they are. That doesn’t mean there are no reasons, it’s just that those reasons aren’t necessary or even relevant to appreciating the apparent absurdity.
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Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday? Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts. But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places…
So, the standard US weekend is Saturday–Sunday, even amongst the Sunday=1 holdouts. I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US. Not to suggest that the holdouts are a minority, I honestly don’t know but I doubt it. I think, apart from the initial puzzlement of recognizing the inconsistency, most of us don’t give much thought at all to which day is 1. “Weekend” generall…
You are thinking of how Jesus is said to resurrect on the first day of the week (I.e., Sunday) and later that becomes the Sabbath day for (most) Christians.
Couldn't this whole thread just be condensed to: we have a thing called culture which is not completely rational or efficient? I'm sure the aliens would get that - they would probably have something similar, albeit with different irrationalities and inefficiencies.
This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :) A few notes: - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week; - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is…
Japan does too; I blame the American occupation (and plenty of other illogical things).
Consistency is for small minds. I expect aliens to have much broader issues with time keeping. Rotations of different galaxies? Weird alien rulers imposing their names like "X Æ A-12" for 3rd rotation even if 12 is in the name. Having video calls scheduling is hard between Earth time zones - good luck scheduling video call between two galaxies.
The lag would be enormous between galaxies, unless we invent quantum entanglement, in which case the lag is also irrelevant because you can teleport yourself.
I'm a little bit surprised nobody pointed out the obvious. When we first communicate with aliens about our time system we will start by explaining unix epoch. Only than will we break out the spaghetti code required to map dates and zones and the uncertainty of some historical jumps.
I'm a little bit surprised nobody pointed out the obvious. When we first communicate with aliens about our time system we will start by explaining unix epoch. Only than will we break out the spaghetti code required to map dates and zones and the uncertainty of some historical jumps.
Well, unix timestamps are still tied to UTC, which has leap seconds for some reason... I would prefer if we had a few seconds of an offset with Zulu "GMT" Time (pardon the double acronym).
I sure as heck hope it is, at least...