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Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

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Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#921

Post by yencabulator »

avar wrote: post #847
origin_path wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a bunch of less subtle assumptions, like the obviousness of base 10. That comes from us having ten fingers, right? It's easy to imagine aliens having six fingers on each hand and then assuming that base 12 is the most obvious and logical base to use for everything.

There's no reason to suppose that an intelligent alien race would find it convenient to count things in base that matches the number of "fingers" they have, if they even have such a thing. Whales aren't far from being intelligent enough to form a technical civilization, but their body plan makes it unlikely that they'd use their "fingers" (or fins) to count, or to communicate with other whales. Even if you gave an al…

Not even humans always chose the exact mechanism current day westerners are familiar with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger-counting

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#922

Post by collinmanderson »

perilunar wrote: post #764
probably_wrong wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't even have to introduce culture. "We built a simple time system a long time ago. Some of its initial assumptions were wrong and we've been patching it up as we go ever since". I'm sure the aliens have a word for "technical debt". Also, dividing the day into 24hs is kind of genius. Sure, 10 is nice, but good luck dividing it neatly into 3 parts.

It's a shame though that a circle is not 24° (or 240°) instead of 360°. Having °'" match h'" would have been cool.

The 360 probably came from an approximation of the number of days in a year.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#923

Post by usrusr »

They will suspect us as secret purists who only pretend to be open to contact, until we explain or calendar. Then they'll accept that our diversity claims might in fact contain a grain of truth or two.

Yes, it's true that one crazy mix instead of dozens, competing, could also be construed as the result of one cultural framework steamrolling all the others (and the steam pun is certainly intended), but people who want to go down that part should better have a probable backlog of praise for java's pluggable calendars or reconsider.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#924

Post by stormbrew »

kelnos wrote: post #739
bawolff wrote: post #699

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a distinction between what people consider the first day of the week and what is printed on a calendar.

The person originally bringing this up referenced printed calendars always having Monday as the first day of the week, so it seems reasonable to use an observation of printed calendars with Sunday as the start of the week as a rebuttal.

Yes this, except it's not even a rebuttle, I'm just genuinely curious where this might be someone's experience because it's very at odds with my own.

I don't honestly care much what people consider the beginning of the week, I try to avoid ambiguity in planning as much as I can anyways for other reasons (this Sunday vs next Sunday for eg.) but I have been tripped up by an unexpected Monday-first calendar in a webapp.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#925

Post by narag »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #892
narag wrote: post #863

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in a way that doesn't work right. It works great for the purpose that it was used: counting groups of days when regular humans didn't have the luxury of more precise calendars. The part that doesn't "work right" is that the different natural cycles used to measure time are not multiples of others, so adjustements are always needed. That's why calendar is complex, it was fixed repeatedly until it doesn't drift. We…

> It works great for the purpose that it was used: counting groups of days when regular humans didn't have the luxury of more precise calendars. If you want a quarter month then have a quarter month. Having a set of days that pretends to be a quarter month but rapidly falls out of sync is worse than having no quarter month at all. If you gave any other reason for seven days, I wouldn't say it doesn't work right. But…

Having a set of days that pretends to be a quarter month but rapidly falls out of sync is worse than having no quarter month at all.

So you want to reform the week, the only time cycle that hasn't been altered in millennia to sync it with... what exactly?

Different groups of time have different goals. Scientific and technical applications only use the second. Years are useful both for agriculture and astronomy. Year subdivisions, weeks and months are useful for legal, social and personal purposes: weekends, holidays, celebrations, birthdays, embarrassing familiar reunions and all that.

They neither have to be in sync with anything, just being useful to track days in a year, nor they need to be mathematically pleasant, any programmers worth their salt will write you a perpetual calendar generator in five minutes.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#926

Post by jelliclesfarm »

anjbe wrote: post #655
jelliclesfarm wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Hebrew calendar kept changing as they moved and adapted the calendar designed by the ruler of the lands. Hebrew words for the week came from Akkadian and sabbath itself can be traced back to the Babylonian loan word for fifteen..mistaken as seven. šabattu is the 15th day of the month, the time of the full moon Vs “sebūtu“ was the 7th day of the lunar quarter. The Akkadians had no concept of ‘week’. They simply fo…

I’ve seen this theory proposed, but is it actually widely accepted by historians? Wikipedia says that a connection “has been suggested”[0], which doesn’t seem like very strong wording. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shabbat

Yes..it was proposed by a linguist, iirc. There is only one 2015 paper where I have read it. But it seems most plausible. Consider this. The Greeks had no calender. Cannanite Hebrews had no Egyptian admixture. So what remains is the sandwich period from where the record keeping must have been directly influenced by the Babylonians.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#927

Post by origin_path »

avar wrote: post #847
origin_path wrote: post #688

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also a bunch of less subtle assumptions, like the obviousness of base 10. That comes from us having ten fingers, right? It's easy to imagine aliens having six fingers on each hand and then assuming that base 12 is the most obvious and logical base to use for everything.

There's no reason to suppose that an intelligent alien race would find it convenient to count things in base that matches the number of "fingers" they have, if they even have such a thing. Whales aren't far from being intelligent enough to form a technical civilization, but their body plan makes it unlikely that they'd use their "fingers" (or fins) to count, or to communicate with other whales. Even if you gave an al…

Yes, all granted, but I think the point is that without fingers tool use is hard, without tool use flying to other planets is hard, and we selected base 10 as the default despite its disadvantages, primarily because of our biology (unless there's some other advantage to base 10 I'm missing?).

To assume aliens wouldn't have fingers or do the same thing seems like the odd assumption. Whales are nowhere even close to creating technical civilization, that's really left field. Dolphins at least occasionally do use tools, I think, but without fingers they have to use their nose for everything and it really limits them.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#928

Post by bawolff »

kelnos wrote: post #742
bawolff wrote: post #697

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada As an english canadian (alberta), i have never in my life heard of people considering sunday the first day of the week. Edit: appearently people are talking what is printed on calendar. I consider that to be a separate thing. If you asked me to list the days of the week in order i would start on monday, which is a totally separate question…

How would the colloquial understanding of the first day of the week get divorced from what's printed on calendars, though? I feel like one should inform the other, no? Out of curiosity, if you have a calendar app on your computer, does it start with Sunday or Monday?

I would guess that in a globalized world, stuff printed in the united states doesn't always match local culture.

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#929

Post by midasuni »

weberer wrote: post #846
midasuni wrote: post #809

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What country is that? I’ve only really seen 12h time in America and it’s colonies.

In Finland its common to use 12h time in conversation. Digital clocks are 24 hours, but many people still use analog clocks, which are always 12 hours. And for what its worth, the name for Wednesday, keskiviiko, means midweek.

German “mittwoch” for midweek too.

We might say beers at 5, but I haven’t seen “5.00p” rather than 1700 in written form for decades outside of the US

Re: Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar

#930

Post by throw1234651234 »

ithkuil wrote: post #743
comeonbro wrote: post #170

I didn't appreciate until recently that the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar. Like not by some forgotten technocrats incidentally during his time, but Julius Caesar himself as a subject matter expert, as a side-project. With consultation, certainly, but by his initiative, from long-standing engagement with the problem in one of his early jobs from long before he was a main character…

People mostly remember Caesar as a ruler, however in 63 BC (5 years before the Gallic wars) Caeser managed to get himself elected as Pontifex Maximus (chief high priest). Adjusting the calendar was as part of the duties of the Pontifex Maximus. They decided public holidays and they decided whether to add an "intercalary month" (at the end of February which used to be the last month). There are many interesting things…

Completely off-topic, but someone on HN posted a theory that Caesar let himself be killed, because he was afraid that he wasn't able to keep up his stellar reputation as winning everything as he got older. Was one of the few "eye-openers" for me, since as you get older, nothing is really "new" or "interesting". If the parent post turns out to be true, it goes on that list. Will research after work.
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