Common Calendrical Fallacies • Hacker News Board

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#51

Post by nisegami » Wed, Feb 09, 2022, 3:47 PM UTC

cutler wrote: post #36

dahfizz wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire concept of a "season" is invented. Quantizing a continuous natural phenomena into descreet bits is something humans do with everything, and we nearly never do it rigorously. When is it "night"? At what exact moment in time does it become "night"? Nobody knows, nobody cares. It's still a useful concept.

Night is clearly defined by the Sun setting over the horizon and the following rising. The Sun's passage over the meridian is the astronomical midnight.

The sun passing the horizon is affected by your vertical position. Someone in the lobby of a skyscraper has a different sunset time than someone near the top.

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#52

Post by Daishiman » Wed, Feb 09, 2022, 5:20 PM UTC

atoav wrote: post #2

Some of these are quite interesting, e.g. that Oceania has an offset from ITC >12 hours. Others are coming of more like pedantic "gotcha" questions where the answer is that some more or less obscure calendar system is the exception here. Yeah sure it is, why wouldn't the year in the japanese calendar depend on the death of their emperor. That just isn't something my small software tool is likely willing to support an…

> So I think instead of "scolding" the reader with a False here, maybe a Depends would be both more friendly and more well suited.

It's a blog post, how can a "false" make you feel scolded?

Re: Common Calendrical Fallacies

#53

Post by atoav » Fri, Feb 11, 2022, 8:42 AM UTC

Daishiman wrote: post #52

atoav wrote: post #2

Some of these are quite interesting, e.g. that Oceania has an offset from ITC >12 hours. Others are coming of more like pedantic "gotcha" questions where the answer is that some more or less obscure calendar system is the exception here. Yeah sure it is, why wouldn't the year in the japanese calendar depend on the death of their emperor. That just isn't something my small software tool is likely willing to support an…

> So I think instead of "scolding" the reader with a False here, maybe a Depends would be both more friendly and more well suited. It's a blog post, how can a "false" make you feel scolded?

Not sure if scolded is the right word (non-native speaker), but I think "False" as an answer to an rethorical question is only worth much if the point you are making after the false is one that is really obviously false.

If it is false only if you pinch hard and look from the right angle it comes of as "Oh come on, you just don't want me to get this right" — which in this case runs counter to the whole idea of the blog post as I understood it.

I had a teacher once who was like that: whenever someone he didn't like got something wrong he would pull out some pedantic detail to still make it look like the person was false, even though they really really were not. I kinda think this is just a little bit unproductive in an educational context.