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 of the Roman story.
Digestable and entertaining (fragment of a) video on the topic:
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 to say about this but since this is hacker news I'm going ro focus on one:
Caesar was away campaigning a lot and the Pontifex could adjust the calendar only while physically in Rome. So many years went by without calendar fixes.
After having benefited from the confusion and the edge he had by understanding the calendar (like knowing he could safely cross the Adriatic when his opponent assumed that crossing it that given month was a bad luck) he decided to fix the calendar so that it doesn't require a human in the loop.
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.
It looks like there's a legend that this was the case, but January has been the first month of the year through all of recorded history, and Julius Caesar's version was no different.
EDIT: Because there's a lot of confusion in several replies I thought I'd clarify: February was the second month in Julius Caesar's calendar. Romans in the Republic describe the month as being at some point the last month in the calendar, but we don't have any direct record of that. That's what I mean when I refer to it as a legend: it's a story that later Romans tell about their distant past. It is probably accurate but the sources are too far removed from the actual event to be treated as primary sources.
This is true of Roman history in general: any story that dates back to the kings should be treated as a legend that Romans told about their past. It may have elements of the truth, but shouldn't be taken as firm fact. This particular legend has a lot of evidence going for it, but that doesn't make it inaccurate to refer to it as a legend.
As a Persian, I always found the Gregorian calendar weird. In Iran and some other countries, Jalali calendar is used which is much more straightforward:
The Iranian calendar (also known as Persian calendar or the Jalaali Calendar)
is a solar calendar currently used in Iran and Afghanistan. It is
observation-based, rather than rule-based, beginning each year on the vernal
equinox as precisely determined by astronomical observations from Tehran.
There are 12 months. The first 6 have 31 days and the rest have 30 days, except the last month which is 29 days. Every 4 years, it's a leap year and the last month becomes also 30 days.
It's also precisely set to follow seasons. For example, the first day of Fall is actually the first day of "Mehr" (the 7th month). For some reason, the Gregorian calendar has it on Sep. 22.
> For example, the first day of Fall is actually the first day of "Mehr" (the 7th month). For some reason, the Gregorian calendar has it on Sep. 22.
That’s just a convention. In Russia we use “meteorological” convention, for example, and so each season starts on the 1st of some month (March, June, September, December). It is off from the astronomical convention by ≈20 days and it is off from reality by whatever depending on your location and your feelings on what constitutes seasons.
The Julian calendar, which the Gregorian is a revision of, was designed precisely so that societies didn't need a public servant dedicated to keeping the calendar up to date.
>For example, the first day of Fall is actually the first day of "Mehr" (the 7th month). For some reason, the Gregorian calendar has it on Sep. 22.
The particular locations of the equinoxes and solstices on the calendar isn't as important as keeping them more or less in the same places as time goes on.
Yes. My partner is Iranian and their birthday is out of sync (earlier) every leap year. We “discovered” that the one first year it happen to us when suddenly received birthday wishes by all their Iranian network the day “before” the Gregorian calendar birthday.
For what it's worth many early European cultures also considered the start of the year to be at the start of spring, generally the same idea as Nowruz, which is where we got Easter from as a conglomeration of "pagan" rituals and Christian religion. Unfortunately we ended up with this weird Dec. 31st at the end of a year in the middle of winter which doesn't make any logical sense.
Many similarities in languages too. Persian (Farsi) has the same root as some European languages (and should not be confused with Arabic, which is totally different than both).
In Persian | In English
mädar | mother
barädar | brother
dokhtar | daughter
pedar | father
bad | bad
...
I’m familiar. It is fascinating. Same with Sanskrit. I don’t know if we’re all descended from the same people exactly, or if the Indo Europeans were just an extremely successful core group with a culture that all of us adopted as the natives wherever they spread to. But they certainly had a successful culture. Iran should really be an ally with the western democracies. Those people are actually pretty advanced and modern, considering where they are placed in the world.
I say that to my American and European friends, that Iranians have a lot more in common with them than with the rest of the middle east. There are exceptions, of course, but the general public is really well educated, open minded, and leaning towards Western values and culture.
Too bad that the country has received such a negative reputation over the past 4 decades due to its (non-Iranian) regime.
I’m American and that’s my perspective. I can’t be the only one. I never even understood why Iran and the US were at odds. Seems entirely based on politics/elites. From what I see, Iranians would be my first pick as allies in the region. We certainly chose poorly with Saudi Arabia.
> It's also precisely set to follow seasons. For example, the first day of Fall is actually the first day of "Mehr" (the 7th month). For some reason, the Gregorian calendar has it on Sep. 22.
This doesn't really work; the first day of Fall differs from place to place according to the specifics of the local climate.
Why would that be considered the first day of Fall? Even taking a purely astronomical perspective, the autumnal equinox would be the center of Fall, not the beginning.
Spring and autumn start on the equinox, summer and winter on the solstices. Though it's true they tend to be called "mid summer" and "mid winter" day. It's certainly weird.
We also tend to associate summer with days getting longer and winter with days (the period between sunrise and sunset) getting shorter, but the opposite is true: in summer, which is the period from about 21 June to 23 September, days are getting shorter, whereas in winter, between 21 December and 21 March, days are getting longer. Astronomical winter starts on the shortest day, and astronomical summer on the longest day.
I guess we're just eternally confused about calendars. And who can blame us?
> Astronomical winter starts on the shortest day, and astronomical summer on the longest day.
This is a convention used only by modern calendars. Astronomers have no opinion on when particular seasons occur. They care about things like when stars rise above or sink below the horizon. But they don't use the change in the sky to determine when winter occurs. People notice that winter occurs around the same time every year, and they associate whatever the sky is doing at that time with the beginning of winter.
As you already note, the solstices are called "midsummer" and "midwinter". That is because they are traditionally identified as the middle of summer and the middle of winter. Why do you believe that they are the beginning instead?
That doesn't come close to being true. Compare the Cambridge dictionary's "common definition":
> [summer] the season of the year between spring and autumn when the weather is warmest, lasting from June to September north of the equator and from December to March south of the equator
Wikipedia:
> Summer is the hottest of the four temperate seasons, occurring after spring and before autumn. At or centred on the summer solstice, the earliest sunrise and latest sunset occurs, daylight hours are longest and dark hours are shortest, with day length decreasing as the season progresses after the solstice. The date of the beginning of summer varies according to climate, tradition, and culture.
> From an astronomical view, the equinoxes and solstices would be the middle of the respective seasons, but sometimes astronomical summer is defined as starting at the solstice, the time of maximal insolation, often identified with the 21st day of June or December. By solar reckoning, summer instead starts on May Day and the summer solstice is Midsummer.
It "doesn't come close to being true", so you post stuff that confirms what I said?
Only your last sentence presents an alternate definition, the rest confirms it or is close to it. And the astronomical definition is not an uncommon one.
I think you need to reread what I wrote and what you wrote.
This seems a bit mean, especially given its a pretty natural question as to why the equinox is considered start of fall instead of midautumn (in certain regions)
Yes, from a seasonal perspective, the timing of a season varies idiosyncratically from place to place. That was the first thing I said. Why would you then want to locate the beginning of Fall on the equinox?
Quoting from your link:
> seasonal lag is not "seasonally symmetric"; that is, the period between the winter solstice and thermal midwinter (coldest time) is not the same as between the summer solstice and thermal midsummer (hottest time).
> In mid-latitude continental climates, [seasonal lag] is approximately 20–25 days in winter and 25–35 days in summer.
> there is no meteorological reason for designating these dates as the first days of their respective seasons.
Not only did I not ask that, I don't believe that the equinox is traditionally known as the beginning of autumn. Traditional terminology always marks the solstices and equinoxes as the middle of the season in which they occur, because that is obviously the way seasons work. Compare Western European "Midsummer" [the solstice] or Chinese 立秋 ["beginning of Fall", August 8; compare to the equinox on September 23, or to the "Mid-Autumn Festival" 中秋节, fixed to the full moon, but generally around late September].
The equinoxes and the solstices are marked on modern calendars as the beginning of their respective seasons, but I have never heard anyone attempt to justify that. I tend to assume it's the result of the calendar-buying population not having any reason to care what season it currently is.
But even among modern calendar-buying people, I believe they think of big snowdrifts as something that happens in winter, not something that happens in late fall and continues through winter. And the calendar doesn't agree with that.
That actually works pretty well and has worked well for thousands of years for what it was designed to do. The calendar should not necessarily follow the local climate of every region, as that can vary each year and throughout the time. They had to fix a reference point for seasons, and they have chosen the Equinox. This is a sensible reference point (see refs). But also it could be anything else as long as it's measurable and verifiable independently and does not change based on location.
The same works for the clocks. People in Sweden still use the same 24-hour clock, even though they have vastly different daylight conditions in different seasons.
The Persian calendar is actually our most precise [1] calendars to date, and it owes its precision to tying the calendar to astronomical seasons [2].
Calendar seasons are mainly used to talk about the weather. Using Equinox as a fixed reference point is not any more precise than using meteorological convention wrt thermal seasons.
> Using Equinox as a fixed reference point and a is not any more precise than using meteorological convention wrt thermal seasons
Well, no. What meteorological convention? That's a pretty broad term. We are talking about calendars, not a general weather forecast system, as I was comparing Persian calendar with other calendars.
With Equinox, you get a good indication of weather conditions for a wide geography while having a precise reference point to design a calendar which can be used for other equally important purposes.
P.S. While I was thinking about what you wrote, I wondered how these things were argued and arranged in ancient times and what did they think or say considering what they had to come up with affects a significant portion of the civilized world and trade between nations.
That would not match anyone's idea of what a season was. For example, it makes it impossible to say "as you go farther north, the winter gets longer and the summer gets shorter".
> but January has been the first month of the year through all of recorded history
Are you kidding? Not only are September through December literally named "Month 7" through "Month 10", but the year began in late March as recently as AD 1751. That is not a period where we're suffering from a lack of recorded history.
True enough, my mistake! I was only looking at the Roman time period and didn't realize that the calendar shifted back to starting in March during the Christian era. That's really interesting to learn!
My main point is still the same: Caesar's calendar started in January and he was following the order that was current in his day. We do not know when the switch from March to January occurred. There are multiple stories about the switch (the supposed dates range from 750 BC to 153 BC), and there are legends of a 10-month calendar that didn't include January and February at all, but there are no extant contemporary records describing the switch.
The legends about the 10 month calendar are almost certainly a very late invention, which appeared as an attempt to explain why e.g. December is the 12th month.
It is likely that at its conception all the months of the Roman calendar were numbered, but some time later the months January to June were given names corresponding to important religious festivals, which were scheduled during those months.
> but there are no extant contemporary records describing the switch.
We have something of a philosophical disagreement; I would argue that the names of the months themselves constitute a contemporary record describing the switch. It doesn't tell us when the switch occurred, but it tells us very clearly that the switch occurred.
It is true that the record might be accidentally or deliberately falsified; perhaps the months were originally named after unrelated concepts and the names got revised into their numerical forms over time. But a formal history suffers from exactly the same problem, and it still gets to be called a "record"; I don't see why we would consider the fact that our ninth month is named "Month Seven" not to be a record of a shift in the beginning of the year [or rather, in the beginning of the sequence of months].
September through December being months 7 to 10 are because Julius Caesar (July) and Augustus Caesar (August) added months named after themselves after they were named.
That article says "it is unclear when the Romans reset the course of the year so that January and February came first", but doesn't actually deny that the year formerly ended with February.
> The Terminalia 'Festival of Terminus,' because this day is set as the last day of the year; for the twelfth month was February, and when the extra month is inserted the last five days are taken off the twelfth month.
To be clear, I'm not denying that it was the first month at some point. It wasn't when Caesar designed his calendar, and we don't have a record of it changing. I refer to it as a legend not to indicate that it isn't true but to indicate that the only sources we have are referring to it as changing sometime in the distant past.
It is very likely that at its origin the Roman year started on the spring equinox.
That is why March was the first month and February was the last Month.
However, the astronomical rule was not followed later, and due to the inconsistent length of the year the position of the spring equinox had drifted from the 1st of March to around the 25th of March by the time of Julius Caesar.
The present position of the spring equinox around the 20th of March does not correspond to its position at the introduction of the Julian calendar, but to its position around the time of the First Council of Nicaea (AD 325).
No it hasn't. Your link even points out that Jan and Feb were added to a 10 month calendar starting with March. Moreover, various cultures notionally observing the Julian calendar have assigned varying dates to the start of the year throughout history.
It says that later Romans said that they started with the 10-month calendar and that the second king added 2 months, and that at some point those two months migrated to the front.
The context that I did not include in my original comment and should have is that everything from Rome in the time of the kings is considered to be legend. There are likely things that are rooted in fact, and this story has strong evidence for it, but the number and order of months has not changed in recorded Roman history, we only have indications from later Romans that they believed it changed at some point in the past.
My main point was that Caesar did not have February as the last month, he used the same order as his contemporaries and as we do.
> In the oldest Roman calendar, which the Romans believed to have been instituted by their legendary founder Romulus, March was the first month, and the calendar year had only ten months in all. Ianuarius and Februarius were supposed to have been added by Numa Pompilius, the second king of Rome, originally at the end of the year. It is unclear when the Romans reset the course of the year so that January and February came first.
Most of what we know about pre-republican Rome is from oral tradition, not actual records. So if by the time of the Republic February was the second month of the year, it was the second month of the year through all of recorded Roman history.
Maybe Quintilis, Sextilis, September, October, November and December were the seventh, eight, ninth, tenth, eleventh and twelfth months of the year through all of the “recorded Roman history”. But it seems well accepted that they were once the fifth, sixth, seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months of the year.
In retrospect, I probably shouldn't have referred to it as a legend. That seems to have negative connotations for most people that I didn't mean to convey.
I really don't doubt the authenticity of the story, I mainly was trying to indicate that we don't know when the change occurred but it certainly happened a long time before Caesar: by his day, the change was an oral tradition whose full story was lost in the very distant past.
A legend is a traditional story sometimes regarded as historical but isn't authenticated. You are saying that a legend is a story that is believed to be false. That is exactly opposite from the meaning of the word and is NOT something believed by "all people."
I'm a person, and legend does not have that connotation for me, it means "it was only handed down orally so we can't be sure". I'm sure my idiolect is unusual in that regard, but I stand by my "for most people".
> the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar
Pope Gregory has entered the chat
there have been some changes to the calendar since Caesar, especially when people went to bed Thursday 4 October 1582 and woke up on Friday 15 October 1582, and thereafter there were no more leap years on centuries except every 400 years.
He didn't just throw dice or march in, see what's what and grab the locals by the nadgers.
JC was quite a chap and of course why its called the Julian Calendar. Many other calendars are available. Kalends is the source of the name for calendar and the Roman day of month counting is pretty involved - http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=calhistory/earlier/roman/kale... Kalends, nones and ides.
If Caesar designed the calendar, how did he get a month in there named after something that hadn’t happened yet? When Caesar died Augustus’ name was Octavian, and Rome hadn’t had an emperor yet…
At the time of the calendar reform, the months that are now called July and August were called Quintilis and Sextilis. The Julian calendar came into use on January 1, 45 BC. July was renamed in 44 BC (the year of Caesar’s assassination), and August in 8 BC.
Octavius became Julius Caesar after he was adopted. And also later he was given the honorable designation by the senate and called Augustus. That’s not his name its one of his honors.
Octavian is essentially a past tense of his name and he never truly went by that. It’s a name used by historians.
Designing the calendar does mean "give a name to every month forever".
You could also (a) just design the mechanics of the calendars (leap days, duration of months, etc), but keep the month names the same, or (b) change names too, which could get renamed again later.
I find the implication that aliens are rational and have no subrational concepts due to tradition and habit interesting, as it sort of implies that these kinds of outgrowths are not necessary and can just be done away with. The narrator starts from a position of not wanting to legitimize or historicize beyond reductive statements like "some ancient civilization did XYZ". I'll admit that I skimmed through the last part of the thread, so I might have missed something, but I don't see any mention of the decimal calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar, or why that failed. I get that this is supposed to be funny, but the indirect message of getting rid of whatever doesn't make conscious sense is simplistic, and spoils the fun for me. Humans are stupid, very funny.
The thing that would've brought it around for me is a punchline where the alien says something like "wow, your system is so clean and simple compared to ours".
I do think there's a certain degree of humor when looking back at history. There are plenty of things to laugh at in hindsight. But the thing that rubs me wrong is the undertone that this is somehow a distinctly human trait or inherently a bad thing. That somehow only humanity is subject to the impact of evolution and gradual learning over time.
And to those complaining that we should just have fun with this, I get it. There's some funny stuff in there. But that shouldn't absolve the thread of criticism. It's fair to point out that it's a pretty reductionist take when combined with the implication that humans are uniquely stupid. It's an easy problem to solve with a very slight reframing. $0.02.
> But the thing that rubs me wrong is the undertone that this is somehow some distinctly human trait. That somehow only humanity is subject to the impact of evolution and gradual learning over time.
Well, to be fair, we really don't know that - we don't have another advanced civilization to compare us to.
But I fully agree, our system might have some legacy cruft, but it works surprisingly well. Joel Spolkys wise words on rewrites also apply to our calendar.
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 alien two human hands and knew that their counting system's base was derived from physical features of their "hands" it's not obvious that they'd come up with either base-5 or base-10 if they where starting from first principles.
We have 3 joints that make up our fingers, but the "base 10" assumes we only use one of those. It's not obvious that even a close relative to humans wouldn't come up with base-20 or base-30 just from counting using their fingers.
If you straighten or bend your wrist to add an "extra" finger for counting you're now counting in base-6 on one hand, base-12 on both. Do the same with your elbow joint and you're base-7 and base-14, respectively.
I think the reason whole fingers was picked over joints or phalanges is because when humans started counting stuff the probability of someone having missing a whole finger or two was higher than now (The life of a hunter-gatherer, accidents happen). When you are missing a finger you can still use your "stumps" to count in base-10, but your ability to count using joints or phalanges is impaired.
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.
At the end of the story they isolate us from them and prevent us from reaching the stars, I don't think the implication is that this is just due to the weird calendar system. I think its more than that, our inability to rid ourselves from our tradition and religious heritage has more profound implications. We don't look at things rationally and make decisions to improve ourselves. The aliens may have gone through similar steps in their evolution of their civilization so they probably know what it *means* if a post-interstellar species still uses a gods birthday to count time.
We aren't making any collective rational decisions yet, we build elaborate structures around tradition that more or less managed to reduce our collective human suffering at least in the northern hemisphere. It took us hundreds of years to rid ourselves from slavery and it will probably take us hundreds more to figure out that murdering billions of animals is bad for example. We might never figure out how to prevent poverty, inequality, racism, imperialism, colonialism and war. We probably make earth uninhabitable way before then anyhow.
I can see why aliens want to isolate and not want to talk to us. Not because of the calendar system we use, but because of what it represents.
> The aliens may have gone through similar steps in their evolution of their civilization so they probably know what it means if a post-interstellar species still uses a gods birthday to count time.
Or they might feel that using merely having gods is an obvious sign that we are unsuitable to be included in galactic community.
> I get that this is supposed to be funny, but the indirect message of getting rid of whatever doesn't make conscious sense is simplistic, and spoils the fun for me.
Do you also hate every story ever told? The point of a story is to say what matters.
> Humans are stupid, very funny.
It is funny. You should try laughing at how dumb we are. It's fun.
HN users really love to congratulate themselves for being such high IQ contrarians. Here, I'll snarkily summarize your message for you just as you did the twitter thread: let me explain this joke to you, but in a way that shows why I'm too smart to enjoy it.
> It is funny. You should try laughing at how dumb we are. It's fun.
Individual humans are stupid, probably most of the time, I don't disagree. But what this reminds me of is when people imagine stone age people as "ooga booga"-idiots, instead of human beings that might have not had access to the same technology and intellectual concepts that we can rightfully feel superior about. And as the narrator is implicitly taking sides with the alien, he too is looking down at us backward humans.
I don't know if you have ever met people who hate humanity and try to disassociate themselves the rest. They refer to us as "Humanoids" as if automata that they as superior being have the right to use and manipulate. It is a vibe similiar to this that I picked up, that I object to.
People that are too dumb to understand satire while pointing out why it's satire are indeed dumb, and should laugh at their own stupidity. But people on HN care more about being smart than self-aware, which is why this site is full of the funniest comments. He may as well be arguing about why eating babies is a bad idea after reading A Modest Proposal.
I don’t think it’s a question of whether or not society is capable. If we had to, we’d find a way to switch calendaring systems.
It’s more about pragmatism and priority. The world is filled with big problems that require global collaboration.
Collaboration on such a scale is hard. That we don’t spend time revamping a working system while other systems crumble and burn is arguably a good thing. It means we’re still at least aware of what matters.
There is nothing vestigial about time tracking. You can argue that the names of things are no longer useful, but at that point it’s time to throw out much of our language.
Yeah, often people leap to "aliens" being some higher intelligence than us who will judge our poor sub-optimal decisions. Though to me it seems more likely that any life we encounter is more likely to be less intelligent, if intelligent at all.
It's worse. "Aliens have the same taste in things as me". With the implications being something like "Aliens are super intelligent" and "I am super intelligent".
Except that being farther along the tech tree doesn't imply greater intelligence any more than possessing a car implies greater intelligence than an ancient Roman.
Unless we find some microbes in our little solar system, I highly doubt this. Any civilization able to get to earth is likely to be at least an order of magnitude more intelligent than us.
I'm also not a fan of the "alien-who-is-really-the-writer has an objectively superior and judgmental perspective" genre, even when it's trying to be funny. Some movies: K-PAX was one, Powder, another.
This gets even more complicated when you introduce dealing with foreign countries that actually don't follow the western calendar system. Such as the standard Persian calendar months and years. Also, did you know that the arabic Islamic calendar dates and the persian calendar dates don't agree? Because the traditional calendar dating back to the maximum geograhpical extent of the Persian empire is solar based, while the standard Islamic calendar is entirely lunar based.
And the persian calendar is solar based and the year resets on Nowruz (new years day) around the spring equinox, but the practiced holidays are based on the lunar islamic months? But also some holidays like Nowruz are observed based on the solar date.
This means you've got Nowruz occuring on approximately the same time in the weather season every year, while relative to the western calendar, notable holidays like Eid al-fitr and Eid al-adha and the start of Ramadan etc move backwards in calendar date approxiamtely 10 or 11 days per year. Some years Ramadan might occur in the middle of winter and much later on it will be in the middle of summer.
This series of tweets doesn't even begin to get into the possible opportunities for confusion when working between three different calendar systems... And western countries where the standard work week is M-F but others where Friday is the day of rest and people work on a 6-day work week on a persian or arabic islamic calendar, but some companies give their employees a two day weekend so they're off on Friday and Saturday, but the local timezone equivalent of Sunday is definitely a normal workday... I could go on.
mmmm wait until you know that Persians' extra day off is not Saturday, it's Thursday.
Also that in Muslim countries that take Sat and Sun off, they all leave at Friday noon to attend the Friday prayer.
Now what if you have a Persian embassy in a foreign country (they are at the verge of extinction though), it will be closed on Friday, Sat, and Sun!, plus all the holidays of Iran and the host country. They almost never work (This sentence was not only about their days off)
If you have a company that has a branch in Iran, no luck for remote meetings on Thursdays all the way to Sundays!
The Qeng Ho in Deepness in the Sky had the right idea. They traveled from planet to planet in STL ships, and counted time purely in seconds. They had to account for relativity, but nothing else.
A short task might take a kilosecond (about 16 minutes), a watch schedule might plan for activities covering a megasecond (close enough to a month for you and me), while a gigasecond is a good chunk of your life (32 years).
"Calendar frippery" was left entirely to the civilations they visited. Since individual civilizations rarely lasted long enough to see repeat visits from the same ship, it wasn't important for the traders to learn the local calendar in any detail. One of the characters opines that you know you have stayed in port too long when your crew start using the local calendar.
Except it would be absolutely impractical to actually use in practice by any species/societies that have to sleep on a regular basis and in general need cycles. If all your "natural cycles" happen to fit well into base-10, well, that's great. Otherwise, you need to base your cycles on something else, which is exactly what calendars do.
And, just by the way, the Gregorian calendar is bad and messy, but the ideas it's built upon are absolutely great and are not results of shower-thinking and twitter-shitposting, but arise from pure practicality. They suit Earth, and humans are earthlings, their cycles are defined by the Earth. A year is a crucial cycle, because it defines weather so much. A day is a crucial cycle, because it defines when it's dark outside. A lunar month is a natural and pretty good cycle, because Moon cycles do actually affect life on Earth, but it isn't crucial, which is exactly the reason, why Gregorian calendar happens to get away with pretty much ignoring this one, unlike a day and a year. Still, it explains why most calendars through history prefer months being close to 27.3 days, and why weeks are 7 days (a quarter of 28). Both cycles also are both long enough and short enough to be useful for practical reasons, like organizing work schedules even without relying on celestial bodies. Furthermore, it even appears they are not enough, which is why the year is divided into "quarters" for business purposes like accounting. And these happen to be fairly close to 30 days, which happens to be a very neat divider of 360, which is close enough to a year on the one side, and a very neat number that naturally divides all small numbers up to 6 on the other side, which makes it easy to work with (unlike base-10, BTW, since that cannot be divided by 3).
All of which explains, why French Republican calendar is actually a great idea and unfortunately failed (for a fairly stupid reason, IMO), and base-10 day is not so great (although it has merit, since modern digits are base-10) and naturally failed.
Now, these totally imaginary and having nothing to do with reality aliens of yours may not have earth-like and human-like cycles, but they surely have cycles of their own. So it is unlikely that magnitude-1000 time measurement with no cycles in-between can work for them either.
> So it is unlikely that magnitude-1000 time measurement with no cycles in-between can work for them either.
Oh, maybe I didn’t describe it very well. They use precise scheduling whenever possible, and use kiloseconds and megaseconds in casual conversation. For example, you might be scheduled to go on–shift at 1664204400, and every shift is 30 kiloseconds, meaning you go off–shift at 1664234400. Of course the book never gave exact timestamps like that, it only discussed shifts and watches in general terms.
In casual conversation they use “kiloseconds” or “thousand seconds” the same way we use phrases like “half an hour”. For example: “We got the same scut-work shift starting in two thousand seconds. I thought we could go down to the bactry together, trade gossip.” They also use shorter approximations, like “hundred seconds” the way we might use minutes: ‘In his huds, he could see his ships climbing slowly up the sky, still hidden from the naked eye by the nearest tenement. “Another four hundred seconds sir, and you’ll see them come out past the roof just about there.” He pointed at the spot.’
They just don’t have a calendar based on astronomical cycles. When your STL ship needs 400 years to complete a single journey, and each crewmember spends a very small percentage of that time awake and on watch, you don’t need to care about cycles or calendars. And since each of the hundreds of star system that humans have colonized has a completely different calendar based on whatever astronomical cycles are available locally, so Earth’s calendar just doesn’t matter very much.
It's not about the length. It might be a perfect day for them, it's not the point. It's about the fact that you have to use 100 ksec instead of a "day". "Each day" is not the same thing as "each 100 ksecs", since the latter has much more implicit precision. So, practically speaking, your either have a concept of 1-day cycle (because of sleep, sun, or whatever — doesn't matter why they need it and how long must it be for their purposes), or you are stuck with thinking in Unix-time. And if it isn't bad enough for you to fill your calendar in unix-time without "days" or "months" (I can actually believe you might get used to it, somewhat) it makes organisation-level planning and communication hell, if not impossible.
Heck, let's even assume their comfortable "day" cycle is 1ks (after all, they had to chose the length of their second based on something". It still means that their next comfortable MUST be EXACTLY 1 Ms (in their numeric system) to be able to use it as a cycle. If it's off even by 0.1 s, it still will get unusable for thinking and planning sooner or later.
So, yeah, long story short: just think about having all your schedules (like work shifts, payday, train schedules, everything) in Unix-time. I guess this is enough of a clue to arrive by yourself to the conclusion, that calendars (any calendar, that is — not necessarily Gregorian one) are not some "silly tradition of ours", but a really, really useful invention, which is almost for sure a necessity for any civilization, even if it isn't bound to an earth with yearly weather-cycles.
The only way this could work out is if ALL their cycles happen to fit PERFECTLY to orders (degrees) of some number — then they could choose the length of 1 second and their numeric system base accordingly, and I can imagine it being somewhat usable without introducing explicit cycles. But to happen it must be one Math-Wonderland of a Universe they live in. I don't even dare to say it's "implausible". It's... ridiculous.
It’s so ridiculous that you have invented something completely unlike what is in the book. They don’t try to force anything to line up to powers of ten, they haven’t changed the length of the second, and they have wearable computers to eliminate any and all annoyances associated with communicating long timestamps.
Although the book only hints at how things are implemented, the result is apparently really flexible. They regularly schedule things that will happen far in the future. Since they make liberal use of suspended animation, their plans need to cover very long periods of time at varying levels of precision. Most of the events of the book take place over approximately a gigasecond (with the average character being awake less than a quarter of that), but the prolog takes place several centuries earlier, and the backstory of one of the main characters covers at least several millenia.
I had to invent it to imagine some (however far-fetched) conditions under which it would be usable. But it isn't, because these conditions are not practically possible. It's just stupid (as it often happens to be with sci-fi). It is just living without the calendar, that's all that it is. And calendar is a useful invention, basically a necessity for any society out of stone age.
Sure, you can just set up a timer which would alert you at some arbitrary moment in the future that it is time to do something. It's how computers do it (if we forget about leap seconds and such). But the point of the calendar and the clock with sane time units (like a minute and an hour) is to keep the frequency and time of your dentist appointments, train schedules and vacations somewhat workable in your head. Which would be much less fun to do in Unix-time.
I don’t find it hard to imagine living without a calendar, or with an arbitrary calendar whose divisions are entirely within my control.
In fact, while it might be a strain to keep everything straight in my head without a traditional calendar, it wouldn’t be difficult using pen and paper. One use for a paper calendar is to record distant future events such as dentist appointments, and I don’t see how that would be harder on a linear timeline instead of a grid of days.
Naturally I have used scheduling software to arrange meetings, and I can imagine how it would work when you don’t have a fixed calendar.
But perhaps I have an unfair advantage. Due to a minor sleep disorder, I have a 25–hour day; I sleep for 8 hours and remain awake for 17. This means that my sleep cycle is never in sync with anyone else, and the limitations of our calendaring software have always been pretty obvious to me. You can imagine the annoyance that dentist appointments cause me, since I never know if I’ll be awake during the day when I am scheduling one. Paper calendars have very limited utility for me.
What about adding a recurring 8 hour calendar block that comes every 17 hours? Then you have a graphical representation of your sleep across time that allows you to fit appointments in.
If you can't program it, and the software makes this hard to do, you can use Amazon Turk or something.
Wow, that would be a depressing job to get on Amazon Turk :)
I’m sure there is an API that I could use to add appointments, or I suppose could make an ical file and import it. I don’t quite have enough dentist appointments to make it worth while though. I did however spend an hour to make a spreadsheet. It only predicts my schedule for the next couple of weeks, but historically that’s been good enough for my colleagues.
ah yes, "seconds", the "second minúte part of an hour", i.e. 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of the average time it takes the Earth to rotate towards Sol. very sensible default.
No, they obviously use the modern definition based on cesium clocks, or some equivalent. In fact, they set up long–term interplanetary communication systems so that any civilization which had fallen and rediscovered radio could learn their language and units, so customer civilizations mostly used the same definition of a second even though their day/night cycle might be completely different.
Personally I vote for a new unity as a measure of time, the 10+e7 part of the speed of light, so the equivalent to 2.99792458 seconds, it's a sensible default in my opinion, perhaps also another new unity that is the third of that one, it would be very close to a second (in case the space travelers have practical applications to have such measure of time)
At this point I'll note the watering hole frequency is about 20 cm, giving a conveniently big distance unit without additional parameters. If other, alien species aren't using it already, they'll be jealous enough to switch.
10 hours in a day, 100 minutes in an hour, 100 seconds in a minute.
With that division, seconds would be 0.84 the length of current seconds.
But, one second is exactly 10 alpha cycles in the brain (10 hz), which is the most dominant electrical cycle. So, maybe seconds are biologically sensible. In that case, we need to build a system that connects the rhythms of our biology to the rhythms of our planetary motion. Oh…
Don’t forget to point out the absurd arbitrariness the kilo part. Base ten number systems are just as arbitrary as the rest of this stuff we’re mocking.
One thousand is an arbitrary number, and apart from its special place in our base 10 number system is no more special than, say, nine hundred ninety-nine.
I bet that humans at some point will discover thats actually false in the sense that the base 10 system is not completely arbitrary, and brains had an easier time evolving using the base 10 number systems (than say, base 7), and just like electricity flows through the path of least resistence even in other galaxies the same happens with how some areas of the brain evolve, that regardless of their origin they tend to use the base 10 system as well, with some minor differences.
I would be willing to bet that some bases are easier than others, with primes being basically impossible, but not that 10 is inherently easier than 8 or 12.
Yea, but fingers and brains are not strongly correlated. An evolving alien sentience could end up with just about any number of fingers, but most life on Earth has some form of symmetry or other making even numbers more likely. Thus I a can imagine that if we canvassed the entire galactic population, every civilization would use even bases, but there would be no clear bias to 10 in particular. Perhaps a bias away from really large bases, but not one that is in favor of 10 specifically.
I would not discard so easily that brains and fingers are not correlated, I know corvids, dolphins and other species show some level of intelligence but it's nowhere near humans so they are not in the same category to draw conclusions, so the only sample we have is humans, so until we have another sample I wouldn't make any affirmation one way or the other; also we know our advanced tool usage was not only develop due better brains but also due having opposable thumbs.
Because leap day is at the end of the year, but at some time we moved the start of the year two months back (same reason why September through December now are the ninth through twelfth month of the year, not the seventh through tenth)
(Historically, I think it was slightly different. February, the last month of the year was shorter because the year isn’t long enough to give it 30 days, then we moved the start of the year, and then we invented the Gregorian calendar, and picked February for the leap day because it already was an outlier)
It was the Romans who inserted a leap month inside February between the 23rd and 24th. Since the two consuls ruled on alternating months, adding an extra month after February would give one consul one more ruling month, making it somewhat unfair. Since leap years were handled irregularly back then, they were leap months, not leap days.
The Julian calendar introduced the leap day instead, and maintained it in February as originally, and introduced it every 4 years (except years dividable by 100).
This is also around the same time that July and August were named to their current names (named after Caesar and Augustus). Before that, they had had names equal to fifth and sixth month, respectively, like September comes from seventh.
I recently read that the reason February has only 28 or 29 days, and not 29 or 39, as you'd expect, is because Augustus wanted his month to have just as many days as Julius' month.
No idea if that's true, but sounds appropriate for the ego of an emperor.
Are you suggesting that the men were known as Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar? Because that's wrong[0]. Augustus used this name and it became a title for roman Emperors, in reference to Julius Caesar. If people are talking about Caesar, they mean Julius Caesar.
I understand that people often refer to Julius Caesar as "Caesar", but to me at least, it mainly refers to the "title" (though that remains a surname, as succession was hereditary, mostly through adoption).
History is not my field, I am probably making multiple mistakes and oversimplifying, but I don't see something in that link that disproves what I said. Today, we often refer to Augustus as Augustus Caesar or Caesar Augustus (less frequently, Emperor Augustus). I also think it's interesting to point out Julius's first name in light of the previous discussion, as that's where the month name comes from.
If we're splitting hair, Octavian was adopted into the gens Julia, so he was a Julius as much as he was a Caesar, and his full name before ascending to emperor was Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus.
February, the last month of the year was shorter because the year isn’t long enough to give it 30 days
Originally February had 30 days, along with all the other months. (The 5 or 6 remaining days at various times were either extra days which didn't belong to a month or were omitted until there was a month's worth of them to catch up on.)
February got shorter because (being the last month of the year) it had days removed in order to add them to other months -- what was originally February 30th (the end of the year) became February 23rd (the end of the year, after which the leap day is inserted).
The Ethiopian calendar still do this, 12 months of 30 days each and a last 5 to 6 "month".
The reddit thread is funny but it also forget than there is not only one calendar in the actual world... Long time ago, i have meet an indian who was never able to explain to me witch days he was forbidden to eat meat (he was not a strict vegetarian), or even food at all. It was probably a mix of one of the indian calendars, horoscope and religion.
No, the calendar had 12 months + 1 intercalary month before the Julian reforms. The calendar you're thinking of was the one supposedly introduced by Romulus and replaced by his successor--there's no evidence of its actual use.
> Because leap day is at the end of the year, but at some time we moved the start of the year two months back (same reason why September through December now are the ninth through twelfth month of the year, not the seventh through tenth)
There is actually no hard evidence that the Romans ever started their calendar in March instead of January. The earliest contemporaneous use of the calendar relies on January 1 as the start of the year, short February, and with intercalation happening after (or maybe within) February.
The primary evidence we use to indicate that the start of the year shifted is... the apparently wrong month names. Some writers did describe a calendar that starts at March and ends in December, with winter basically having no proper calendar--but these are writers describing how their calendar worked several centuries ago, attributing it to mythological figures, and the explanation strikes me as very heavily a "just so" explanation.
If you want my hypothesis, the Roman civil year never started in March. But March would have had some amount of primacy, as it indicates the start of the planting year. Shenanigans in the calendar would have occurred in February to ensure that the equinox is properly timed to happen in March. But the civil year would have started closer to the beginning of winter for other reasons (perhaps taxation? but finding this level of granularity of information on Roman taxation is difficult).
In this hypothesis, the month names were not incorrect because they were never intended to count from the beginning of the year. Note that the first 6 months of the civil year have names, while the last 6 are merely numbered. It makes no sense to me that you'd make up special names for the first 4 and the last 2 months of the year, while skipping everything in the middle.
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.
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 would be exactly as funny and exactly as interesting, which is to say: not very.
This is right up there with noticing that sometimes the "b" in certain English words is completely silent! Haha isn't that totally irrational and crazy you guys??
Well, there are some languages that semi-regularly update their orthographies to better match their pronunciations.
And yes, the grammarians arbitrarily inserting random silent letter into middle of the words so those look more regular or match the (supposed) etymologies are annoying. English "doubt" never historically had "b" inside it either written or spoken: it was "dout", and it was pronounced like this. Same happened to French "doigt" — it used to be "doit" for as long as language itself was called French, but then some Latin-loving guy decided to stick "g" in so that it would be more obvious that the word descended from Latin "digitus".
I didn't find it particularly funny either. It's mostly predicated on this belief that somehow we "should" have optimized our date and time system and that it's silly that we're using an inconsistent, legacy system formed for many cultural reasons.
My analogy is that it's like writing a tweetstorm about how aliens landed on Earth to find that humans use different languages! And different writing systems! How quaint!
How I would have ended would be with the aliens saying we should just adopt galactic standard time because it is so much easier, but in fact it is twice as complicated and confusing, but they are used to it so it appears simple. Still funny better message.
Parts of it yes. The day/month/year thing though is fundamenally based on astronomical observations that dont fit into each other with fractions (rotation of earth around sun, orbit of moon around earth, orbit of earth around sun) which is kind of missed here.
"But enough about our calendar, let's hear about yours"
"Well, due to what makes a planet habitable, you won't be surprised that our planets year and day isn't incredibly different from yours..."
"But it took you millions of years to get here, why is your calendar based on a place you haven't been to in so long?"
"Well our species lifespan is about 100 years, so, actually, I was never there"
"But I guess you use that calendar to communicate back home?"
"Well, actually, the planet was swallowed by the star during its first red giant phase..."
"So your clock and calendar is based on a planet your separated from by generations, and which doesn't even exist anymore?"
"It does seem silly when you put it like that..."
"But it must be tiring writing out several digits for the year..."
"Oh, we solved that problem, we generally just write the last few digits, and it only becomes a problem every few generations"
"Cool, we just got rid of a system like that, but I'm sure it'll come back soon.
Changing the subject, why do you have so many different computers?"
"Well, this is going to seem a bit silly, but we started using quantum computers a long time ago. Since there were 7 quantum states, each manufacturer had its own idea of which state should come first in memory."
Definitely the best comment I read on this thread.
Not sure if this was the intention, but I read it as both recognizing the original post as funny, and yet recognizing that we (as in humanity) aren't "stupid" for having this complex system, but that's just how things develop.
Having both views live together is the best take on this.
Wtorek? That... does not appear to have "dwa" or anything similar in it. Please ELIC (explain like I'm Czech (actually am, tho lived in Poland for a bit))
There is an old Slavic word "vtorý" for "second" (not sure about spelling, but it is documented for example in old church Slavonic). Russian still uses "vtoroj" for "second". Several other Slavic languages have a word for Tuesday based on this root, even though their usual word for "second" follows a systematic derivation based on "dva" (two). Examples includes Czech and Slovak ("úterý" for Tuesday in both) and Polish ("wtorek").
You’d think old Church Slavonic to be an obscure language, but in my local church (in eastern Slovakia) you can attend a liturgy in this language twice a week.
Roots of most of these words aren't instantly obvious even to Poles though - the meaning is there, but hidden behind layers of language evolution. I was aware of some of those roots already, but with some others I went like "huh, I guess this makes sense" only after reading the parent comment (although I'm not sure whether all of them are actually correct).
For what it's worth, leap day is at the "end" of a year. It's just a year that starts in March—an assumption shared with several other odd properties of this calendar.
This is why September, October, November and December are named after the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10: they are the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month if you start the year in March, like we used to.
I always assumed that it made sense until july and august were added, which is how i explain it to children. This thread has mentioned several times that those were quintillis and sextillis or something prior. I still like my version better, it implies that emperors are egotistical.
Evidence for this is September October November and December are named as seventh eighth ninth and tenth months which matches with a year starting in March obviously intentionally at the spring equinox but calendar inaccuracies lost that.
Quarters should begin and end with equinoxes and solstices and be equivalent with seasons, major holidays aligned with quarter transitions and solar milestones make sense.
For a few years I lived my life rigorously to the beat of the french revolutionary calendar - i was very enamoured by its consistent month partitioning, and dumping the leap day at the end of the year's festival days. The major downside is that the months were named after French seasonal characteristics, which... doesn't really work.
I gave it an honest try, but I found it much harder to adapt to than the calendar. I could just about do head-conversion for dates between Gregorian and Revolutionary calendars for things like appointments, but found it much harder to do it for both dates and time. I still have a love for the system, though.
I mean, programmers love to bitch about time zones, but that’s nothing compared to the stink we’d have raised if we’d been coding in a time when the date depended on which country you were in.
It might actually have been easier. Our current time system is regular enough that you can get away with skipping many irregularities (leap year is pretty much the one that matters). If you were forced to regularly deal with time conversions, you would just accept that different people have different times and you just need to convert.
Not to the same extent. Sure it can be Wednesday 28th in Paris while it’s still Tuesday 27th in London… but then it will be Wednesday 28th in London soon.
That’s really not the same thing as it being Wednesday 28th in Paris while it’s Wednesday 17th in London. When the 28th rolls round in London, it won’t be a Wednesday…
This is sadly more of an urban legend. There recently was an article about this which also disproved this theory quite well, best seen in other civilizations that have no connection to the european one.
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 used conversationally;
- May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) but I consider omitting the whole DST thing a major missed opportunity. :)
Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. I believe they still maintain some Internet presence but mostly gave up on promoting it. Good luck breaking 1000+yo habits.
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week
/Officially/ almost everyone has standardized on ISO 8601 where Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7. But unofficially, not really. The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada, and probably some other parts of the English-speaking world.
A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. But yes, the other is more common. Most of the Slavic languages, and Chinese, among others, use indexed from Monday = 1.
Then there's Swahili: Saturday = 1 and Friday = 7. Though personally, I believe Sunday is the 0th day of the week.
As a English Canadian who works for a company that was bought by an American company and was force switched to Sunday as the first day of the week….what? Maybe we “officially” or legally have Sundays as the first day but my entire life has been Mondays first. Every calendar I’ve had has been that way as well. It still messes with my mind, even four years later, that at work Sunday is the first day of the week.
What part of English Canada? In Alberta or Ontario (the parts I've lived in, though I was pretty young when I lived in Ontario) I've literally never seen a calendar with Monday as the first day of the week that I can recall.
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.
It doesn't truly matter or? It's not like you are going to work on sundays. You only realize it with calenders in e.g. Outlook, and long gone TV guides....
In IT, this mess leaks to places it really shouldn't. I've never permanently lived nor worked in native english place, but the amount of time I've seen somewhere in some web app or work outlook weeks starting on Sundays... its maddening, you easily make mistakes in good faith that can have pretty bad consequences, without realizing them.
I think its airbnb that still shows me calendar starting form Sunday. Not cool when you are looking at all those other sites for flight bookings or car rentals, all of them starting from Monday since they respect your locale, and then you book accommodation by muscle memory (since you re-did the searches numerous times as planning decisions about vacation took place), starting at given field for day of the week, only realizing that its moved by 1 day earlier (or later, not sure now). Good if you find out quickly, bad if on the 'arrival' day and your family have nowhere to sleep and its already dark.
I know that this won't ever be resolved mainly due to big egos of those involved, in same way that there will always be those ridiculous feet and inches and miles and absurd conversions between those, on top of fahrenheit madness. Tells something about maturity of mankind...
Walk into a stationery store in British Columbia and you'll find both options.
Perhaps though that is due to the increasingly globalized world and stationery stores desire to have a lot of varied product from great product makers in Japan, USA and further afield.
I grew up aware that some people considered Sunday the start and others Monday, but didn't seem like there were any real firm rules about it where it mattered. I feel like I saw both being used. I always preferred using Monday as the start of the week.
Edit: Had a quick look at the Vancouver recycling calendar they sent me in the mail: Sunday first.
The Bible does not say that Sunday is the 7th day. It says that Saturday, the Sabbath, is the 7th day. And that Jesus rose on the day after the Sabbath, which means it was on the first day of the week. And that's the day most Chistians have adopted as their day of worship. (Except Seventh Day Adventists who keep it, as their name suggests, on the 7th day: Saturday.)
If your church preaches differently, they should read their Bible more carefully.
Seventh‐day Adventists are definitely the most prolific Christian keepers of a Saturday sabbath, but they are not totally alone. The next most prominent groups I can think of are Seventh Day Baptists and Messianic Jews. SDAs are in the tens of millions worldwide, Messianics in perhaps the hundreds of thousands, and SDBs under one hundred thousand.
Although they’re fairly distinct traditions, in my experience each places great importance on religious liberty and separation of church and state, because historically all three groups have faced governmental persecution from blue laws. SDAs go so far as to believe Revelation’s mark of the Beast refers to a blue law to come in the future.
Messianics also have been known to face religious persecution in Israel. To the extent Christianity is viewed with mistrust by Judaism due to Christendom’s history of persecuting Jews, Messianic Judaism is further seen as an attempt by Christians to co‐opt or corrupt Jewish practices.
(Another fun fact: Seventh‐day Adventists hyphenate their name, but Seventh Day Baptists don’t.)
6-day work weeks are still common in agriculture, and the Bible is silent on what the exact weekday the sabbath lands on. Some people really argue that it's supposed to be Saturday, but traditionally Jesus's resurrection is said to have happened on Sunday, so most Christian churches went along with that.
My own personal opinion: it matters not what day you consider to be the sabbath, but it does help when a community agrees on a day and goes along with it. So for me, Sunday it is. (It also doesn't matter how a calendar is printed; it could start on Wednesday for all I care. It'd be weird, but it wouldn't change anything.)
The day of the sun, or the Lord's day, is not the 7th day sabbath, it was declared by the Catholic Church to supersede the Sabbath and celebrate the resurrection instead.
In saying “the Sabbath . . . has been replaced by Sunday” (CCC 2190), the Church does not dismiss the significance of the Sabbath. The Catechism reminds us, “Sunday is expressly distinguished from the Sabbath which it follows chronologically every week” (CCC 2175).
As for which day is the 7th, you can check with descendants of the good book's authors, still around, and still keeping count. The Jewish faith hasn't lost track.
Thanks, that's good info :) I definitely have new things to study and ponder about.
I'm of the Latter-day Saints tradition and we basically use Lord's Day and Sabbath interchangeably, though I'm speaking anecdotally and from casual use. I may very well be using it incorrectly!
IIRC it was very common for early Christians, who were mostly Jews initially, to go to temple on the Sabbath (Saturday) and then have their own meetings on Sunday, as they didn’t consider them separate.
I think we can trust the Jews to have kept the Sabbath fairly consistently. The Christians literally changed their reserved day of the week in honour of Jesus' resurrection. Luckily the fact that this was the day after the sabbath is completely unambiguously pinned down in the Bible.
The Arabic/Islamic calendar starts at Sunday because the weekend is Friday and Saturday. In Islam, the weekly congregation (mass equivalent) takes place on Friday around noon.
Growing up in Saudi Arabia, we started our work week on Saturday, with Wednesday being the last day of the work (school for me) week. It took me a long time to transition over to think about Saturday/Sunday as the days off. I still get random pangs of excitement on Wednesday thinking it’s the end of the week if my brain hasn’t warmed up.
I believe this is still the case in the gulf states and I would assume other Islamic countries.
You made me think of Malaysia, Brunei, Indonesia: All are Islamic majority in Southeast Asia. I Googled and look what I found: "Identify the first day of the week based on the locale"
> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1.
I can confirm that in Hebrew, the name for Sunday translates into "First Day", Monday into "Second Day", etc. Except for Saturday, which is Shabat.
Shabbat (apart from meaning "rest") is also generally accepted as deriving from the Hebrew word for "seven", which is "sheva". And Shabbat is sometimes referred to in Hebrew as "yom shvi-i" ("seventh day").
Klein Dictionary gives the etymology of שַׁבָּת as derived from שׁבת (to rest). I also found references suggesting the origin is with the Akkadian šapattum, the 15th of the month, but none related to שׁבע (which originates in Proto-Canaanite).
היּוֹם הַשְּׁבִיעִי (note the definite form!) is how Saturday is referred to in Genesis 2:2-3, without actually having the name שַׁבָּת. There's a some discussion about why שַׁבָּת isn't mentioned there as a name for the day, but regardless, your comment is the first time I read of the etymology of שַׁבָּת deriving from שׁבע.
Trying to read this on Android (in Materialistic) was fascinating, each line containing a Hebrew (?) word caused some of the words around it to switch places, but the words themselves are fine??
> 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 from the layout of a printed calendar.
> which is a totally separate question from the layout of a printed calendar
I have no strong preference on Monday/Sunday, and I don't think either is inherently more logical than the other. However, it would be illogical, whether Sunday or Monday first, to have the 7th and last day of the week, laid out as the first column on the calendar.
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?
Majority of calendars in Japan are starts from Sunday but IMO now people think week starts from Monday. It's relevant to whether people work (or went to school) on Saturday or not (so two consecutive holidays). Some research shows that old ages (who worked on Saturday) tend to think it starts from Sunday.
Calendars tend to follow traditions, and the difference isn't much matter. Also computer apps are tend to follow the US culture since US dominates the industry.
> I don't think anyone assumes Sunday as the first day.
That is not up to assumptions, but to conventions and arbitrariness. You find both conventions among Portuguese speakers, but mostly domingo/Sunday as the first day of the week.
A good way to check this is to websearch pictures for "calendário em português", and look for the first column of the calendar. Most will have D/Dom (domingo/Sunday); however a large minority will have S/Seg (segunda-feira/Monday) instead.
>And I leave the "market" for someone who still didn't have enough of this rabbit hole.
It's mostly a fossilised meaning.
Latin "feriae" originally meant holidays, holy days, vacations, and the likes; that's why the clergy¹ chose "feria" for the weekdays, as you'd be praising their god instead of the Pagan gods². However, already in Late Latin, this backformation also meant "fair"³. In Portuguese that second meaning eventually evolved to "street market", likely due to influence of the names of the days of the week - you don't work in domingo/Sunday or sábado/Saturday, but you gotta work and sell stuff in the "dias de feira" (feira days).
1. This clergy intervention was done in Latin. This is visible for the name of Tuesday being terça-feira ← tertia feria instead of *terceira feira (third holy day).
2. The traditional names for Monday to Friday were lues, martes, mércores, joves, vernes. Ecclesiastical interference got rid of the names for Sunday and Saturday early on, but if Portuguese inherited the Roman names they'd be something like "soes" and "sadurnes" respectively.
3. In fact that's where English got the word "fair" from. At least when it comes to those fancy markets/exhibitions/etc.; not to be confused with the homophone "fair" for just, beautiful, etc., as this one is native and unrelated.
On a side note, it's not 100% clear (to me, at least) that the word for Monday (ponedelnik) means "per week" or anything about the week per se.
In Russian the word for week is "nedelya", so "ponedelnik" does seem to naturally tie into that. But the word for Sunday in Russian is "voskresenie" (literally means resurrection). Notice this! Every religious word used in non-religious context is suspicious!
If we examine Bulgarian, the week is called "sedmica" (sedm == seven). And Sunday is called "nedelya" (I perceive it as "ne delya" === "no work").
Thus, in Bulgarian the word ponedelnik becomes like "the day after Sunday", rather than "the day starting every week".
Now going back to the Sunday resurrection theme, it's obviously of religious origins, so I dare assume that it may have replaced something that was already there (like nedelya). And then I imagine the people still wanted to keep the word around, so they started using it to mean "week" instead of "Sunday".
If so, then it would make sense that ponedelnik just means "post Sunday".
[The above is just a pet theory I haven't spent any time on, so I'm not guaranteeing its legitimacy]
Note that this off-by-one is exactly the difference between Jewish/Biblical-based weeks, where the Sabbath is clearly the last day of the week (based on Genesis, the day when God rested), and more "revisionist" Jesus Christy-based weeks, where the day that Christ was resurrected is considered more important than the Sabbath and takes its place as the end of the week.
While the majority of Christians meet on Sunday and consider it the “new” Sabbath or the fulfillment of the Sabbath, in commemoration of Jesus’s resurrection, how does that relate to restructuring the week so Sunday is the last day? The Bible is clear that Jesus was resurrected on the first day of the week, the day after the Sabbath.
Matthew 28:1 (NIV): “After the Sabbath, at dawn on the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to look at the tomb.”
Mark 16:1–2 (NIV): “When the Sabbath was over, Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James, and Salome bought spices so that they might go to anoint Jesus’ body. 2 Very early on the first day of the week, just after sunrise, they were on their way to the tomb…”
Luke 24:1 (NIV): “On the first day of the week, very early in the morning, the women took the spices they had prepared and went to the tomb.”
John 20:1 (NIV): “Early on the first day of the week, while it was still dark, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb…”
I believe, though am not sure, that once Christians stopped observing the Jewish Sabbath and instead resting on the Lord's day, it also became natural to consider it the end of their week, instead of the beginning.
Then why does the US, a very young culture compared to Europe, universally consider Sunday the first day of the week? Calling Sunday the seventh day must be a very recent development.
The USA was founded and its culture heavily influenced by very deeply religious Protestants. While by the time of the founding of the USA, Sunday was decently well established as the seventh day in both Catholicism and Orthodoxy, most protestants were Bible originalists.
I believe that they resurrected the practice of considering Sunday as the first day of the week, based on the Old Testament tradition. Just like New Earth Creationism is in fact a relatively recent phenomenon driven by a renewed interest in literal interpretations of the Bible, that had long since been superseded in Catholic scholarship.
Actually Orthodoxy is arguably more inclined to treat Sunday as the first day of the week as witnessed by the Greek language.
There are also several patristic writings that conceptualise Sunday as the eighth day of creation, i.e. the resurrection perfecting and completing creation (this also suggests that literal seven day creation wasn’t taken that… er… literally back in the day).
Well, in Polish, Monday is poniedziałek, which means "after Sunday" (Sunday is "niedziela") and not "start of the week" and it looks analogous in Russian...
With the exception of Saturday. Tacitus associated the Hebrew sabbath («sábado») with Saturn, but the word for the day itself is not «saturno» as it would be if it were like English.
I'd always thought (though I don't have a specific source I can recall), that the seven days of the week was drawn from the seven non-fixed celestial bodies visible ot the naked eye: the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. The planets were frequently associated with and named after deities, so the days of the week also have the names of deities.
Friday literally means Day of Frigg (Old English), referring to Frigga, the wife of Odin. Yes, Freya is believed to be the same goddess as Frigga, but the day is named after Frigga not Freya.
Considering that the word is from the British and the fact that the week ends with Sunday there, that can't be it. It would also be weekends, not weekend if there was multiple ends. The upcoming weekends doesn't mean Saturday and Sunday in the US... It occurs over a time period of at least one whole week into the future...right?
> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. But yes, the other is more common. Most of the Slavic languages, and Chinese, among others, use indexed from Monday = 1.
For portuguese the name being number based has nothing to do with when the week starts, portugal is historically a very christian country and always had the week end on sundays, "and on the seventh day he rested", in both casual/formal speech and formally with calendars and such, saturday and sunday are always put at the end.
The names being numerical was because that's how the names were named during Holy Week (the week that ends with easter sunday), christians were supposed to rest and not work during that week, so sunday was the first rest day, monday the second rest day, etc. which is what the names mean, some people today think it means fair as in state fair/market, e.g. monday is "segunda-feira" = "second fair", but it actually means something closer to holiday, the modern portuguese word being férias.
The reason it took over was basically because the church said so, the old names were still based on old gods and the new nomenclature was adopted for all weeks instead of being Holy Week exclusive.
I guess if the aliens landed in portugal that would be another thing to add to the thread :)
All Christian denominations agree with the Jewish ones: God rested on the seventh day - The Sabbath, or Saturday. Jesus was then resurrected on the day after the Sabbath, the first day of the Jewish week, which became the Lord's Day in many European languages (Domenica, Domingo, Duminică etc). It was quickly understood as a non-working day, a day of religious celebration, but it was still the first day of the week.
Now, since Jesus and his resurrection are much more important in Christianity than the creation of the world, the Sabbath began losing its importance, and so renumbering the week started making sense, but was a contentious religious and political issue for a long time. Of course, having two rest days, and one of them being based on Jewish customs in a quite anti-semitic medieval Europe, played a part as well in wanting to change things.
I'm relatively sure that the Portuguese week day names are based on the original Jewish week.
> A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1.
Vietnamese only numbers the days of the week from Monday to Saturday, with Monday = 2 and Saturday = 7. Sunday has its own name that isn't a number and is always put at the end of the week.
In Polish, Sunday is „niedziela”, and Monday is also „poniedziałek”, so it actually makes more sense than in Russian :) I suspect “niedziela” («неделя») was the original, proto-Slavic word for the day of the week, as some variations of it are used for I think all Slavic languages except Russian, who at some point decided to rename it to celebrate Resurrection.
Not-Doing can be a false alias: the week is nedelya and ponedelnik may thus mean "one going with the week*, i.e. starting it.
Altough I'm not sure since the sibling proto-slavic explanation makes much sense. Fun fact: slavic languages split off in medieval times when the calendar and the week were already thorougly taken care of.
In other Slavic languages it's mostly some form of ty + djen' (Polish tydzien Croatian tjedan Czech týden Belarusian тыдзень Ukrainian тиждень). But see Bulgarian (седмица seven-thing (fem.)).
I suspect (without evidence) that, in Russian, it's referring to Sundays as a way of reckoning weeks.
week:Sunday :: year:summer :: month::moon. Cf. "When I was but 10 summers old", "Many moons ago", etc.
That would fit with the use of the archaic word for Sunday as well.
This is incorrect. The US is hardly the only country where people consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Anyone with some understanding of the history of our weekdays does so, and that historical understanding is not limited to Americans.
It's also not true that the US is the only country to use 12h time; many countries do. Including mine. If you need to write time without ambiguity, you use the 24h format, but in everyday use and in cases where context makes it clear what you mean, people use the 12h format.
Yeah I agree. 12h time is the natural consequence of using analog clocks where one rotation of the hour hand on the dial represents 12 hours. But I guess it won't be hard to represent 24h if the speed of the hour hand is halved, although I have never seen such clocks.
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.
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?
I'm from this planet, and even I am confused with all of us, but especially with Americans.
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” generally is used colloquially to mean whichever two simultaneous days the speaker or audience is off work, insofar as they have two consecutive days off work.
I believe, but I may be wrong, that the inconsistency arises from Sunday being the Christian sabbath. That “starts” the week, but it’s a traditional day off for religious observance. And this tradition goes back well before the 40 hour work week, and the common Monday–Friday work week. Which is to say that “weekend” didn’t originally have connotations about which days were work days, they were typically all work days except for the Christian sabbath. Which as a retcon makes the present colloquial usage even odder, even if it’s (maybe?) more consistent with how other countries/cultures use it.
> I say holdouts, because it helps to understand that this isn’t agreed on even within the US.
I disagree. I can’t remember having ever seen calendars display any day other than Sunday as the first of the week, except in the case of computer software made by non-Americans who didn’t think to localize it.
There’s still ambiguity in verbal language. On Sunday, if someone messages you “let’s do this next week” - do they mean “in the next 6 days” or “after 7 days from now”?
"Next" has terrible ambiguity, beyond the phrase "next week." If it's Monday and someone says "next Thursday" do they mean the coming Thursday (+3) or the one after that (+10)? I assume the latter, except when it's said by people who I know disagree!
But even with people I don't put in that category, I'd hesitate to assume +13 days if they said "next Sunday" on Monday. More likely they mean +6 when it's so far out...
Tell me about it. My wife and I cannot agree on the meaning of "next" for almost anything, and we are Spanish speakers.
For example, when driving, to her "turn at the next corner" means "the corner after the next", while to me it means "the corner the car is about to cross". What I call "the next corner" to her is "this corner".
I don’t know if it would translate, but I’ve had good outcomes navigating with my brother by saying “following” instead of “next”. As in “okay we’re coming to Delaware street and we’ll take a left at the following intersection”. It’s not even language my brother uses but he immediately understood “next next not this next” and so I stuck with it.
Oh wow. The only context in which I (and people around me) use "next" like that is with days, which is confusing in its own right, but at least it's contained.
“Next Thursday” vs “next week Thursday”. The former, for me, means +3 and the latter +10. I don’t think there’s ever been a time when someone I know has said the former but implied +10.
Interesting to see so many people here who do interpret it that way.
In my area it's fairly common to say, for example, "X happens every Thursday. Do you want to go this Thursday or next Thursday?" which is equivalent to +3 versus +10.
Same with my wife; she tells apart "this Thursday" and "next Thursday" in exactly the way you describe. I don't. Predictably, all sorts of confusions ensue.
That kind of ambiguity is everywhere, though. If it's Friday, and I say "next Monday", those two days are close enough that you may need clarification - do I mean "this coming Monday" or "the Monday after that". Or another example for day 1 = Monday, if on Sunday I said "let's do that next week", you may need the same form of clarification.
Human speech doesn't often work on just the literal meanings of words though, hence the ambiguity. Very very rarely at 10PM on a Sunday night does anyone mean "tomorrow" when they say "See you at the club next Monday". They usually don't mean that because we have the word "tomorrow" and that's more precise.
Likewise, on a Friday afternoon most people (in my experience) don't say "Hey we're having a cook out next Sunday, want to come?" and mean the Sunday in exactly two days. Again, because the phrase "this Sunday" is available and more precise.
In fact, I think in my experience "next X" almost always implies a full 7 days between now and the X. If my boss on Monday says "we need this in production next Friday" I don't normally take that to mean "we need this in production in the next 4 days.
There's a real ambiguity, but it isn't in the examples you gave.
It's the case of saying "next Tuesday" on a Thursday, and meaning that no Tuesdays will pass before the date in question, versus saying "next Thursday" on a Tuesday, where a Thursday will happen before the date.
That's because on Thursday, "this Tuesday" has already happened. But sometimes people will be thinking of "Tuesday after next" when they say "next Tuesday" on a Thursday, because they mean "the Tuesday after the coming Tuesday" and not "the Tuesday of next week".
Both cases are still ambiguous because even though “this” Tuesday has already passed on Thursday, no one gets confused when you say “I’m having a cook out this Tuesday, want to come?” because the future tense of the sentence automatically excludes the Tuesday in the current week which has already passed.
Since “next Tuesday” also puts the sentence context into the future, the ambiguity exists around whether it means “Tuesday in 5 days” or “Tuesday in 12 days”
If no such ambiguity existed, we wouldn’t need common phrases like “this coming Tuesday” which clarifies the speaker is talking about the “next Tuesday with no other Tuesday’s in between”
Amusingly I don’t think there’s much ambiguity around “the Tuesday after next” as a phrase even though it should be equally ambiguous, but I’ve never heard that phrase to mean “3 Tuesdays from now”
> I don’t see any ambiguity in “next Monday”. It literally is saying the next day which is Monday.
But when communicating with other people, it matters what they understand. And I've come across enough people who don't use "next Monday" like that to understand the word "next" means trouble.
Sorry I read your post incorrectly. If I say, let's do something this week, it means up to and including Sunday. If I say next week, it means after the upcoming Sunday.
That makes sense for places where the week starts with Monday, but I guess this week means up to and including Saturday for Americans if it's actually normal that the week starts with Sunday.
I was always under the impression that Americans basically agreed on that the week started on Monday, that the weekend ended with Sunday and that next week meant after Sunday. I thought Sunday as the first day in American calendars was a "yeah, it's stupid we do it like that, but I guess that is how it used to be back in the days" kind of thing.
I disagree with the sibling poster. Your first paragraph is correct.
The week starts on Sunday. The weekend ends on Sunday. It only makes sense if you consider two adjoining endpoints of previous weeks to be one "weekend", which I've never known anyone not to do without thinking about it.
Someone talking at work might mean something different, but I don't usually hear "next week" to mean Monday-Sunday in general conversation and we'd probably clarify for Sunday anyway.
If someone says "The week of the 15th" and Sunday is the 15th, they mean the seven days from 15-21 not the seven days of 9-15.
"Next week, maybe Sunday" means the next calendar Sunday as in Sunday-Saturday, not the Sunday after that as in Monday-Sunday.
Anyone who says otherwise is selling calendars with a Monday start of the week. :)
Your 2nd paragraph is correct. No one actually thinks about when the week starts, it's almost universally understood to be Monday based even if the calendar says Sunday based.
No. It starts from the creation story where creation starts on Sunday and ends on Friday and then the seventh day (Saturday) is the day of rest - the sabbath.
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.
Thank you for the additional detail about the origin of Sunday as a sabbath, and the nuance that it’s not observed on Sunday by all Christians. I was not actually thinking about the resurrection story, or even about how Sunday came to be observed as such, but it led to some interesting reading.
I've found it hard to search for details of this aspect of labor history because results are almost entirely about the movement for, and details of, what came after: the 8 hour workday. But my understanding is still that Sunday was historically the conventional rest day in the US (at least for workers who could enjoy a rest day at all), regardless of the history of the traditional Jewish/pre-Christian/Restorationist sabbath observed on Saturday. The best source I’ve found so far[1] doesn’t explicitly say so, but does strongly suggest that Saturday came later as a recognized day off because the competing “weekend” equivalent spanned Sunday–Monday (I’m also fascinated to have learned about Saint Monday). I’m sure there are other sources to find, but I’m going to leave it here to enjoy the remainder of my rest day/weekend/first day of the week.
Weeks are always displayed as beginning on Sunday in the US (I get confused and annoyed when a calendar app is improperly localized for en_US and shows weeks as starting on Monday).
Separately, we call Saturday and Sunday “the weekend”. Yes, these two facts are logically inconsistent, but we live with it and I have never observed it causing any difficulty in practice.
The way I've always thought it was meant to be is that the "weekend" is really the "week ends," meaning start and end, the same way a shoelace has 2 ends.
That was my point, if the workweek in US is Monday through Friday, and US weekend is Saturday and Sunday, there's NO REASON WHATSOEVER to call Sunday "the first day of the week"...
It's biblical. Saturday is the sabbath, the 7th day rest day, which would make sunday the first day. Later, christians decided to hold mass on sunday instead, because it was when Jesus resurrected. Eventually you end up with saturday and sunday as rest days, even though one is biblically the first and one is biblically the last day of the week. But both are the "weekend".
Think of it as "weekends" as in the limits of the week not "weekend" as in the last part of the week.
In SMWTTFS the Saturday and Sunday are at the ends as in limits of the week, and furthermore it makes sense for there to be two "weekend" days like there are two bookends. In MWTTFSS Sunday is the only actual end of the week with Saturday being included just because(?) and Monday being "weekbegin", which isn't really a word in English.
So based on this SMWTTFS seems more logical and sensible at least in English.
Why would I think of a weekend not as a weekend but as weekendS, which is 2 days, one of which is the end and another is beginning? It's called weekend, as in the end which follows the week. Which therefore starts on Monday and ends on Sunday.
I mean I get it that Sunday being the first day of the week is a leftover from religious past but this does not make it any more logical when applied to the workweek/weekend cadence. Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it?
> Moreover, most of European countries where workweek starts on Monday already consider it the 1st day of the week, why can't US do the same and be done with it?
What benefit would we get from doing so? Metric I can understand the benefits of, though I also see why Americans are resistant implementing such a disruptive change in daily life. But shifting our definition of the week by one day provides no benefit that I can see, nor does keeping it the way it is cause any harm. The primary argument I’ve seen in these threads is “because the word ‘weekend’ doesn’t make sense,” but that’s not very convincing to me since I and every other American I know find the phrasing perfectly natural—and if we want to make the English vocabulary perfectly ‘logical’ and ‘consistent,’ there are far more disturbing malapropisms in common use to tackle first.
The year also starts and ends with winter. The day starts and ends with night. So growing up it seemed to fit that the week would start and end with weekend.
There are many reasons to call Sunday the first say of the week. Mostly historical ones. Weeks have existed for far longer than the US or in fact any modern country has. Or the concept of a 5-day work week, in fact. The Monday as the first day of the week is modern revisionism.
There’s no reason whatsoever (other than historical) for any of the inconsistencies explored in the tweet thread. Why should the start of the week be any different?
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 followed the moon. Starting with the new moon, first quarter, second quarter and third quarter. Their festivals were based on the 1, 7 etc and 15 day with the 15th day being observed as the bright full moon.
It must have been from the Babylonians that the Hebrews adopted the 7 day week because they had seen them celebrate the 7th day, “sebūtu“. Altho they probably chose the word for the 15th day/full moon of Babylonian šabattu as it’s closer to Hebrew ‘sabbot’ and their word for ‘rest’. Post exile Hebrews took this to create the Hebrew calender and created sabbot as the 7th day of rest.
The Babylonians celebrated 1, 7, 21 and 28th day after new moon as the beginning of each quarter. Hebrews simply took each quarter to be a slice of time instead of differentiating between the four quarters between two new moons.
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.
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.
A lot of people have already commented on how Israel and the Middle East consider Sunday to be the first day of the week, but I'd like to add that the week itself seems to originate in Judaism (Wikipedia, "Week"):
"A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history without reference to the phases of the moon was first practiced in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest."
In Judaism the week starts from Sunday, so you could argue that it's not completely illogical for it to be the case in the US.
Changing the rest day of the week to Sunday was a change made in Christianity by the Council of Laodicea:
"Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ".
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 Romans used to go to war in the Spring.
Asimov had an excellent chapter on calendar in his divulgative book The Universe, explaining why it's not so easy to design a regular "logical" calendar.
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.
FWIW, I wasn't trying to explain why it isn't funny, but why I don't find it funny. YMMV.
Nobody needs to know all those annoying details, but once you know, the joke doesn't work so well, at least it didn't for me.
Also I believe that the Moon deserves some respect. It makes nights less scary, inspires whimsical humans and provided a convenient way to measure middle-length periods of time when a precise calendar hadn't been developed... many moons ago.
Many people going to read this thread and think "yes, everything is completely backwards and nonsensical, I hate all forms of historical traditions and reasoning"
I'm also making a comical absurdity just fyi. Do people like this exist? I don't know
> Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases.
But in a way that doesn't work right.
> 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 Romans used to go to war in the Spring.
Yes? That's a mess and that's basically what the tweets said. They didn't mention the emperors but that makes it even messier. I'm not sure what you're arguing there. There's no "perfectly understandable" reason for having some gods some emperors and some wrong numbers.
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.
Weeks and months are not kept because we don't know better, but because they're useful units for social reasons.
There's no "perfectly understandable" reason for having some gods some emperors and some wrong numbers.
That's a different part of the comment, addressing the hint that there's a religious reason for the calendar.
There are several eras used by different countries, and the common western calendar has several layers: weekdays seem to be of Sumerian origin, months at least in Latin and other European languages come from Roma and the AD year counting is "Christian" and widely used maybe because the last major useful adjustement was this one:
But it seems they didn't bother to change the names of previous layers. If something works, just leave it alone. You may argue that there are more "rational" ways to organize time measurement. I would recommend to read what Asimov had to say on the subject.
> 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 that reason makes the length of the week supremely half-assed.
> But it seems they didn't bother to change the names of previous layers. If something works, just leave it alone. You may argue that there are more "rational" ways to organize time measurement. I would recommend to read what Asimov had to say on the subject.
You're conflating two very different problems when you talk about it like that. Trying to make the units line up is legitimately difficult. Bad naming is not because of legitimate difficulty.
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.
They didn't have too many personal names in general, IIRC about 20 or so commonly used, including numeric ones (there's even Decimus - I guess they had big families). And looking at how Ceasar is always Julius Ceasar (while his personal name was Gaius) it looks like they didn't use it too much outside of family and close friends. Which kinda makes sense - if you know 10 guys with personal name Gaius, it's not very useful to say just "we're having a party at Gaius' place tonight".
Also, if you start in March, it suddenly makes sense that leap year adjustments are done in February (and also that it's the shortest month to begin with).
> Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno...
January, March, and June are named for Janus, Mars, and Juno. February, April, and May are not known to be named for any god, nor is there any particular reason to believe they are.
> You may ask whence I suppose the name of the month of May to be derived. The reason is not quite clearly known to me [because there are too many theories].
[J. G. Frazer's translation for the Loeb series]
That the name honors a Maia is one of three theories he goes on to present, the others being that May is named after the personification of Majesty [maiestas] and that May is named in honor of society's elders [maiores].
Oxford English Dictionary says: classical Latin Māius (adjective and, short for Māius mēnsis , noun), probably < the name of a deity cognate with the name of the goddess Māia (see Maia n.) and with magnus great (see magni- comb. form).
For April, on the other hand: classical Latin Aprīlis, use as noun (short for mēnsis Aprīlis month of April) of masculine of Aprīlis of April, of uncertain origin; perhaps < Etruscan.
(Oxford English Dictionary is a great resource. In the UK you can often get free online access through free membership of a public library.)
Absolutely true, but difficult to get access from the US without a university affiliation.
However, it isn't obvious that the OED is a better source on the meaning of a classical Latin month name than a classical Roman is. It's certainly possible, but not close to a slam dunk. And the OED is appropriately hesitant to say that it knows the origin of the name.
I'd be curious when the entry was updated, except that I can imagine the entry for "May" being updated for quite a few other reasons than to review the etymology.
(I might as well note that Ovid also presents two theories for the name of June, one that it is named in honor of Juno and one that it is named in honor of either the goddess Youth [Iuventas] or youths [iuvenes] in general, forming a contrast with May. There appears to be no real distinction between honoring Youth or honoring youths, despite the fact that honoring Maiestas and honoring the maiores are explicitly presented as separate theories.
I would say the June-from-Juno theory is on much stronger ground than the May-from-Maia theory simply because Juno is so much more important a god, but that is also open to debate.)
"This entry has been updated (OED Third Edition, March 2001; most recently modified version published online September 2022)."
And there's a link to "Previous version: OED2 (1989)" where the etymology is given as: ... "The etymology of the Latin name is obscure; some ancient writers connected it with the name of the goddess Maia."
(Since you read Ovid probably there's nothing new for you in that!)
Hum, no. There is no reason not to change it (except for inertia, what is a better reason than any you will see). It is logical (once you get over the fixation with 60), but none of that logic is a good reason to keep it.
This reminds me of the discussion the other day about how the A_n paper sizes are superior because you can fold them in half to get the next size down. Just like having a more logical calendar - it would be nice but not very useful. The value is in the network effect of everyone using the same system (so kind of like the "inertia" you mentioned).
just because something has historical reasons does mean it makes sence today. There is no reason for the Moon to have any place in a modern calendar.
You already have 2 values: year and day, and they do not divide nicely. But they serve a practical purpose in a modern society, so we have to deal with them. The moon does not, but adds a third factor.
I disagree. Moon is the closest celestial body to earth and we have historically been able to make very accurate observations and calculations based on its orbit and waxing and waning phases.
I think the point is that our current calendar does have historical roots involving the moon but isn’t actually useful for predicting moon phases, tides, etc. and thus is not in fact an important mechanism for modern calendars.
The purpose of a calender is to measure and predict the march of time. Ancient calenders used the moon and sun to determine time and seasons.
Modern calenders are designed to determine when people will work and when they will rest. The purpose is entirely different in our time.
Current calender’s historical roots only start from Ptolemaic and early Roman periods when the Romans created a planetary week. But it didn’t gain popularity especially in Western Europe. So they adopted the 6 day Jewish week and one day of the Lord’s day of rest.
Only where there was Roman rule and expansion, the new calender and planetary week was installed. Because the Romans needed to keep track of time to monitor work of their conquered territories.
Everywhere else, it was still the lunar calender/sun rise+set for time keeping and solar calender tracking the sun for seasons.
I hear you. I am just saying ‘modern’ is ‘western’ and the west is using time to clock in and clock out people who work. That’s for why if you are rich and don’t have to work, every day is weekend and every hour can be the proverbial ‘happy hour’.
In our time, calenders and clocks are used to track our obligations and when to file tax returns. I still follow the Indian Vedic lunisolar calender for moon cycles and seasons because it keeps me grounded and sane. I feel connected to the earth and sky.
It takes some effort to compartmentalise time for different purposes, but it gives me comfort and escape from the modern world. I am not disagreeing or trying to discredit the western and modern calender. I am just sharing what works for me and the origins of it from my culture/religion.
ETA: calendar has been misspelt as calender throughout. I think I did it once and for some reason, auto complete keeps using it. I don’t want to search and correct every spelling mistake. So this is a blanket correction.
But the Moon has no influence in modern everyday life. It did in the past, for scheduling fishing, to attack an enemy tribe when there’s no moon, or to hunt nocturnal animals when there is.
Moon influences us in three ways: Time, Tide and Light.
We now have apps that inform us. But. If we can read a lunar calendar, we can organise our life around the moon cycles.
There is a reason the word ‘lunatic’ is derived from ‘lunar’. We are mostly made of water. Luna definitely has an effect on our bodies and our moods. Why isn’t it a good thing to understand the ecosystems around us that is time and space..and the ecosystem with us that is mind and body?
> We are mostly made of water. Luna definitely has an effect on our bodies and our moods
I accept that the moon has effects in the tides. As for the rest...
I have heard that before, but every time it was by someone who standed to gain something from me believing that - that when Moon is on the 7th House and Jupiter Aligns With Mars then Peace will Guide the Planets and Love Will Steer me to open my wallet and register to this self-help course.
Do you have any reference to a credible source that can prove that the Moon has those other effects you mention? Something like a test with a significant enough number of people involve, and a control group.
> Why isn’t it a good thing to understand the ecosystems around us that is time and space..and the ecosystem with us that is mind and body?
I strive very hard to understand the ecosystems around us (And beyond - from the most distant galaxies to how the atoms and sub-atomic particles make us work how we work). But I use Science for that.
No, I don’t have the time to search for a credible source about the effect of Moon upon Planet Earth.
However, I am a student of astrology tho’…maybe I can see how your natal Moon will steer you. But I am not sure how much you will appreciate it being invested in Science and all that. Take care.
> Why is it unacceptable to you for someone to explain why they do not find something funny?
I mean, it's not "unacceptable", free speech and all. It's just silly to jump in and "well actually" a joke, especially when the explanation is kind of why the joke was funny.
I believe that it is in spirit of this website that you are encouraged to explain poorness of a joke, if you find it poor. After all, if it inspires curiosity what's the issue?
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
It's not the only one. In Portuguese, the names of Monday .. Friday are literally "second .. sixth fair [day]", with Saturday and Sunday being "sábado" (sabbath) and "domingo" (lord's day).
I'm not sure which other countries follow the convention, but it's the numbering used in the Bible so I would be surprised if there aren't others.
This is along the same general idea as the Persian/Farsi day names, you've got Jummah which is the western Friday (Islamic day of rest), then the rest of the days are named shanbe, yakshanbe, doshanbe, sehshanbe, and so on.
shanbe = day (first day of the week after Jummah)
yak = one
do = two
seh = three
Literally just day one, day two, day three.
You count upwards in day number until you reach six, then it's Jummah again and it resets.
The city of Dushanbe, Tajikistan being part of the historical extent of the Persian empire and language is literally just named second day.
> the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;
Here in Norway we use 24 hours when writing; but we use 12 hour system when speaking - if that makes any sense?
I.e. we would say: "Vi spiser middag klokka fem (5)" [We eat dinner at five o'clock]; but we'd write it with 17 typically. We never use the terms AM/PM but can occasionally specify daytime/nighttime if it's uncertain which of the two we are talking about. I.e. "Jeg kom hjem fra jobb klokka fem (5) om morgenen" [I came home from work at five in the morning].
It could be, but since it could also be interpreted as sometimes used, I wrote a comment to say that we use the 12 hour system exclusively when we speak about time, and the 24 hour system for written purposes. Perhaps that's what he meant, but I'm not sure...
Both of your first points are factually incorrect - I’d have to imagine some bubble-bias involved, but many countries aside from the US use the 12 hour clock and start their calendars on Sunday.
There was a more significant effort to decimalise time (and the calendar to some extent) after the French Revolution, along with introducing the metric system everywhere. People hated it and they eventually switched back. A bit of related trivia is that France only accepted the Greenwich Meridian on maps/charts on the condition that the international meridian conference (of 1884) also concluded that the convened nations also resolved that decimal time was a good idea and they should work towards it.
>- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
Does anyone know why? This has always seemed a bit weird to me. I mean the US is a fairly religious country and it's pretty much known to anyone that Sunday is the 7th day in Christianity?
And on the first day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the first day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the first day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.
edit: just looked it up. Apparently Sunday = Restday is a catholic thing and Jews / Muslims use Sunday as their first day!
How and why America switched as Christian nation I'm still not sure.
Sunday is still considered the first day in Christianity. Jesus rising on the first day led to Christians celebrating the resurrection on Sunday and it eventually eclipsing the Saturday Sabbath. Also much of Latin America and Southern Africa also consider Sunday the first day of the week.
Ignoring the religious angle entirely, I've always thought it was weird that people consider Monday the first day of the week, because to me, Sunday and Saturday are at either "end" of the week, hence they are called "weekend" days.
If Monday is day 1, then Saturday is day 6 and Sunday is day 7, so Saturday is no longer a weekend.
(Yes, I know that you can argue it a different way such that it still makes sense with Monday as the first day of the week. But it just feels "wrong" to me, probably because I lived the first 15-20 years of my life without even knowing that anyone else didn't consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Stuff you grow up with is hard to change.)
(Relatedly, no matter how hard I try, Celsius degrees never feel natural to me. Ditto for kilograms when talking about how much a human weighs. I've managed to get myself comfortable with meters and liters, at least, though I still sometimes have to "translate" in my head for things to make sense to me.)
At any rate, I do wonder when this difference solidified. Was Monday considered the first day of the week in western Europe during the period when Europe was colonizing pre-United-States? If so, when and why did the US (or colonists in the pre-US) switch to Sunday?
The argument I’ve heard against this is that Sunday is a week”end” day, not a week “start” day - here interpreting “end” as “terminator” rather than something like “bookend”
It is more logical for Monday to be first, because it comes right after end of the last week - week-end. The last two days are weekend - end of the week.
In Hebrew the days of the week are named numerically: first day, second day etc. Sunday is the first day of the week in israel. Saturday, the last day of the Hebrew week is the only one not named numerically, it’s called sabbath.
> - 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 used conversationally;
For German speaking countries: rather always#. In fact, you don't even say 3 PM. Just "drei".
I think everything from 8 AM to 7 PM is considered "business hours" - and everything else needs clarification ("4 in the morning").
And we call 0:00 "12 Uhr Mitternacht" as well, I think nobody says "0 Uhr". But at least writing it down makes sense.
# Nobody I knows really uses "15 Uhr" to say 3 PM (people might sometimes do, but I never hear it, it sounds wrong, maybe "nerdy")
I live in Germany and I have the exact opposit experience from everything you just said. the only people that use "drei" or "halb fünf" etc. are those one generation older than me, and everyone says "null Uhr" or "vierundzwanzig Uhr" (depending on which day-crossing you're referring to), I have honestly never before heard the phrase "12 Uhr Mitternacht". "Die Party geht bis 24 Uhr" oder "..bis 0 Uhr". Nobody says "die Party geht bis 12 Uhr Mitternacht", do they?
I guess it depends on where you live exactly in D/A/CH shrug
I believe the old Sega Dreamcast used this as its standard time in the menu system. Maybe that was for the online service. I would love to move to something like that permanently. Little ambiguity as to when people could meet across time zones.
Yeah, that was the idea, they invented it to make things easier for people around the world communicating over the Internet. They even launched a series of watches which displayed Swatch time. It was so cool, too bad it never took off :(
It's not obvious why a new system is needed. UTC, TAI, or unix-time are sufficient.
The primary defect I see in the SIT proposal is that it isn't obviously based on the SI, but rather tied to the Earth. Defining a new unit that is 86.4 seconds long feels troublesome for everyone.
I don't see what makes the second less tied to the Earth than the day. The SI system is for scientific purposes, it doesn't have units important for civil purposes like liters. If you were to completely redefine civil timekeeping (good luck!), the day feels like a better unit to focus on.
Yeah, I played around with a decimal time: https://kybernetikos.github.io/UIT/ but eventually realised that my seconds, minutes and hour equivalents were just names for some of the decimal places of the Julian day number.
> 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 used conversationally;
Maybe this is because I grew up when analog clocks were common, but it would feel extremely weird to say “15 o’clock” in speech instead of “3pm”. Even though it’s written down as 15.
I think you’re right that younger generations that grew up with digital are more likely to answer “fifteen oh seven” when you ask the time whereas I’d be more likely to read the same time and say “ten past three”
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
Not correct, as others have pointed out. Regardless, why is it more or less logical for any particular day to be considered the start of the week? Hell, it seems that even in several countries that use Monday as the first day of the week, the names of the day reflect that Monday is the second day of the week!
I personally like Sunday and Saturday to be the opposite ends of the week. Sunday and Saturday are both considered rest days for the most part, and I think rest days are a good way to both start and finish your week. But I recognize that there's still really no logical basis for this; it's just what I grew up with so it "feels right". Just as those of you who grew up in a Monday-indexed week are used to it, so that "feels right" to you.
Nit: foone uses they/them pronouns and has previously expressed some displeasure with the way they get misgendered when their posts hit hacker news. Queer folks seem to agree that if you aren’t sure what someone’s pronouns are, they/them is a good default (only until they tell you or you find out the correct pronouns).
As a non-binary person myself I always find it interesting when people assume he/him for every random internet commenter. Happens on HN a lot.
Anyways, I find it’s best to use they/them pronouns (or rather remain gender/pronoun neutral) when referring to people on the internet, unless their pronouns are obvious.
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
No, in Israel Sunday is the first day of the week too, because the weekend is Friday-Saturday (Shabbath). In Hebrew, though, the week days are named rather simply - except for Sabbath, they are just "Day 1" (Sunday), ..., "Day 6" (Friday). OTOH, that's exactly how they were numbered in the Bible, so...
In Denmark we use 24h, but we call them by their 12h equivalent, e.g. "15:15" is "a quarter past three". However, you could also say: "It's now 21 30" to signify half past nine. Or some people would say: "It's half 10". Okay, having 24h clocks don't make it easier it seems.
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
Just adding to the rest of the responses but Japan also has a very... contrived relationship with what counts as "the beginning of the week" and most people would say Sunday is that day.
I can only talk about the people I personally know and I've asked this question myself (because it's funny and interesting from a cultural perspective) and most people I asked said "Sunday", although as I said it's not set in stone.
> however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;
That happens in Portuguese (brazilian, at least). Digital clocks go through 0-23 hours, but the second half is _sometimes_ named as 1-11 afternoon/night (whatever fits your taste). Hour 0 is never referred to as 12, though: it's always 0 or "half night"
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
There's one other country in particular that firmly designates Saturday as the seventh day of the week: Israel. (Canada, Japan and Brazil also use Sunday as the first day of the week.)
I'm not religious, but I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, which worships on the seventh day, which for the past couple millennia has been Saturday. There is no end to conspiracy theories in the church about the seventh day of the week being designated as Sunday and how this (and particularly the compulsion to worship on Sunday instead of Saturday) is a sign of the end times.
>* - 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 used conversationally;*
I think most countries use 12h time casually (conversationally and so on), but most understand 24h time - and it's used officially (e.g. in state communications) in many. It's in the US though that people often need it explained.
In Arabic, Sunday is Ahad (first) Monday is Ithnain (second) and so on until Friday which is Jum’a (gathering) and Sabit (comes from Sabbath I think?) as Saturday.
So the US is not the only country that considers Sunday to be the first day, etymologically speaking. I think the first day in the Middle East is Saturday because people work on that day (on Friday is a day off, unless things changed since the 70s)
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
Many Arabic countries have the weekend on Friday and Saturday and work on Sunday. I think they probably all start the week on Sunday for this reason. No idea why the US does too though!
Living in Brazil, I always heard that Sunday is the first day of the week. Accordingly, we do name most of the week days by number, sort of. Monday is ”Segunda-feira”, which a literal translation would be “Second fair”. The “Third fair, Fourth fair, Fifth fair, Sixth-fair”.
> 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 used
India uses 12h time (except in military talk; & railway timetable display boards) in day to day life. I have never heard in 29 years somebody using 15 as 3, or 20 as 8pm. Even till few years ago, atound 2008, flights times at Delhi Airport too were displayed in 12h, on mechanical card spinner display board (where a card with letter falls & next one comes, on a roll until desired letter comes). Seeing that board as a kid was highlight of my childhood trips to airport.rt.
Saudi Arabia used to have Thursday and Friday as weekend. They changed that recently (2013) to Friday and Saturday, because that gives them a bigger overlap with the rest of the world, which is good for business.
> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have.
Swatch Time is just a rebranding of French Revolutionary decimal time displaying the hour number next to the minute. It was introduced a bit before the metric system in 1793 but was made optional in 1795 and finally dropped in 1806. Swatch has always been extremely good at marketing but I don’t like crediting a corporation for something they didn’t invent.
1) I've seen calendars with both starting days (Sunday/Monday). Anecdotally, calendars with Sunday as the first day seemed to be more popular when I was a kid; now, calendars with Monday as the first day seem to be more common.
2) The 12-hour system is far more popular here than the 24-hour system. Not that we don't use it, but in my experience, 24-hour tends to be mainly used in professional settings; 12-hour is used essentially everywhere else.
Colloquially, lot of places use 12h - it's always "we're going to the restaurant at 8", never "at 20" or "at 20:00", at least in the countries I've lived or visited. But officially it's still 24h - which may be more confusing or less confusing, depending on your point of view.
And times (with timezones, and leap seconds, and DST, and so on) add another level of fun to it.
There are certainly countries where a translation of "16 o'clock" or similar is the default way to say that time.
France is one I'm familiar with.
In Britain, people reading out an important time presented in 24h format (like when discussing booking a flight) will usually read it out as fifteen thirty etc.
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
In Brazil, I think most people consider Sunday the first the of the week, in Portuguese the days of the week sound like ordinal numbers, Monday sounds like 2nd, Tuesday sounds 3rd, and so on. So it's pretty logical to consider Sunday the first day of the week.
I don't know that we necessarily consider Sunday first in any way except in the default / traditional presentation of weeks in calendars -- which is to say, it's a visual thing but not something that seems to impact work or life in any meaningful sense. I think pretty much all calendaring programs can show Monday as the first day if you prefer.
The Swatch time is a variation on the fractional day. Astronomers use it, with .00 being noon and .50 being midnight. You can extend it to any precision you like, 1/100,000th of a day makes for a good 'decimal second.'
I like knowing what percentage of the day is over, a friend of mine says it'd drive her crazy knowing exactly how much time gets wasted.
It matters in the astronomer's case (which does use local noon) because that's when they do their work. For the version where .00 is midnight in the local time zone, well... it's how we live our lives! I'd argue the week is more important than the months for the same reason.
> May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off)
Reading through to the last bits I was foreseeing the launch of a specific space faring vehicle except it would have failed in some way because of non-metric units (purposefully not saying of which kind) thus closing by leaving a loose thread up another level of insanity.
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
In a few EU countries people have started implying Sunday could somehow be the start (even though they are protestant societies! Makes no sense), so I think the US is leaking lunacy to the rest of the world.
> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
Where I live we are taught that Monday is the first day of the week, yet most calendars start on Sunday. It's the sort of question you ask your teachers at school and nobody knows how to answer.
What is the advantage of adopting any of those, other than being a bit more in sync with other countries? None of them imply anything other than semantic difference, there is very little advantage and a lot of pain if we were to adopt those "standards".
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
First day of the working week is Sunday in Nepal. I assume they consider Sunday the start of the week, but I'm not Nepalese. This is just a random fact I remember from visiting.
In Hebrew the days of the week don't really have names. They are simply called (direct translation here) "first day" "second day" etc. Except for Saturday which is called "Shabbat" instead of "seventh day".
"Nedelya" doesn't refer to the first day of the week, at least not now. It means is "week". I can see how it may have meant "do-nothing" and also refer to the rest day, but it doesn't place it at the front of the week.
Monday (ponedelnik) splits into "po" and "nedelya". "Po" is a repetition indicator, not "after", so it's more of something that happens every week.
As I've said - Tuesday is "2nd day", Thursday is "4rd day" and Friday is "5th" (pyatnitca - pyat - five). So 3 days out of 7 point at the start of the week being Monday. These names date to the ancient times, not something Soviets invented.
Wednesday ("sreda") does mean "middle day", but it refers to the middle of the work week, excluding Saturday and Sunday, which are named after Christian events and (likely) extended the original 5-day week.
So if you are to argue that a week that has 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th days literally spelled out starts on its 7th day, the only explanation would be that Russians used 0-based indexing for the week days. Which is alright with me even if somewhat far-fetched.
PS. Also, the calendar reform was not a move against the religion, but because Russia Empire was literally 13 days behind the rest of the world, which was not very convenient.
Thanks for the link. It had another interesting fact:
> In 1978, the UN recommended that Monday be made the first day of the week in most countries. It was established in 1988, according to ISO 8601, an international standard for exchange and communication of date and time-related data.
I’m really curious about why the UN made that decision. Is this the primary reason so many countries now consider Monday the first day?
The US, Canada, China, Japan and most of South America. Oh. And the Phillipines consider Sunday the beginning of the week. And someone just shouted at me that Israel considers Sunday the beginning of the week, but that seems unlikely to me.
Well, since Saturday and Sunday are called "weekEND", so it logically follows that Monday is a "week start". Most people think about it like this: Monday is a start of a new work-week, and then you get two days of rest at the end of the week.
Just call it "evening" if it's before midnight. That way you get four nicely subdivided periods.
00-06 - night
06-12 - morning
12-18 - afternoon
18-24 - evening
Would need to refactor the name of "midnight" tho to minimize confusion. But if we use it as a starting point to count hours in a day from, it doesn't make sense to simultaneously designate it as a middle of anything.
(BTW, such subdivision is actually common in many places of the world.)
I feel we've just rediscovered why appeals to grammar[0] don't actually solve much of anything. (Not saying you're appealing to grammar, just that grammar is generally not that useful for discerning... anything really.)
Anyway, to be a bit more substantive: What really baked my noodle when I was younger is the fact that the seasons and the night/day cycle are much more disconnected than it appears when you live on Earth. Of course, it makes sense when you understand the tilt/rotation thing, but still... it really weirds me out sometimes.
[0] English in this case, but any language, really.
That only applies to things that are not obviously oriented. No one would try to argue that when they said "we'll do a recap at the end of meetings", what they meant is both the start and the end. This is not ambiguous at all and I don't even believe you believe in this argument.
Well I’d suggest the “obvious” orientation is actually the effect of what you believe the words to mean, not the cause.
This is what I was taught, I do indeed think it’s pretty silly, but it wouldn’t even be in the top 100 weirdest things about our language/culture/norms “space.” We’re surrounded by idiosyncrasies!
Mostly because Saturday and Sunday are collectively known as the weekend and it doesn't make a lot of sense to start the week in the middle of what everyone agrees is the end of the week.
I think it's a bit naive to expect sense from anything related to dates and times at this point. It's all just accumulated history, and historically, Sunday has always been the first day of the week, no matter what people today think about it.
What I find interesting is that many Americans consider themselves Christians and that will influence their decisions. So one argument can be made from that point of view (I'm not religious myself).
In the Bible it says God designated the last day of the week as a day of rest. From a Christian point of view, it would make sense that Sunday is the last day of the week, as it is the official day of rest. Otherwise they disrespect the Bible and skip the "real" day of rest.
I'm not religious or American, so from my relatively objective view it seems as if the people from the majority religion has ignored their holy book.
This misunderstanding is probably where the idea that Monday is the first day of the week came from. Biblically, Saturday is the Sabbath, the last day of the week. But early Christians came together before and after work on the first day of the week, the day Jesus rose from the dead, which is explicitly the day after tue Sabbath. Eventually that day was also made a free day amd added to the weekend. But it was always the first day of the week until ISO redefined it.
If you’re interested…
the reason Christians worship on Sunday is because Jesus was raised from the dead on the first day of the week. It wasn’t an immediate thing as at first almost all Christians were Jewish and continued the seventh day day of rest and gathering for worship.
No, the biblical day of rest is the Sabbath, the Saturday. The fact that most Christians keep the first day of the week instead of the last day is because Jesus rose from death on the first day of the week.
Yet the word "Sabbath" refers to different things to different Christians.
Consider the old nursery rhyme, Monday's Child, which ends with
Friday's child is loving and giving / Saturday's child works hard for a living. / And the child born on the Sabbath day Is bonny and blithe, good and gay.
I’m actually really interested in this. Clearly in Jesus’s time the Hebrew week went Sunday–Saturday. That definition remained at least for long enough to make into Ecclesiastical Latin and further into, e.g., Portuguese (segunda-feira, etc.). So why does ISO 8601 go Monday–Sunday? Was it codifying existing practice in Europe? When did that practice begin? Was America colonized before Europe switched to Monday–Sunday, or is America’s Sunday–Saturday a fundamentalist reversion to something more Biblically accurate?
I live in Europe and I never learned anything other than that Sunday is the first day of the week. It's only very recently that I'm starting to notice an insistence that Monday is the first day. From my perspective, ISO 8601 seems to be the cause of that, and having an ISO standard on your side is certainly strengthening that position, but I think it's simply wrong.
Of course ISO 8601 didn't just drop out of thin air, but what caused it? I think it's a misunderstanding mixed with ignorance. Ignorance of the fact that the Jewish Sabbath, referred to everywhere in the Bible, is on Saturday, combined with people reading in the Ten Commandments about observing the Sabbath on the last day of the week and associating that with their own church attendance on Sunday, which they then conclude must be the last day of the week.
A more thorough reading of the Bible would have set them straight, as would some knowledge about history or other religions.
I actually used to think that Monday as the first day of the week was just a corporate thing. I first noticed it when I started working and work agendas were surprisingly insistent on starting on Monday. But I figured that was because the weekend is meaningless to the work week, so why not just lump it all together at the end? And then I learned about ISO 8601 and was completely flabbergasted that this was an official standard.
Another commenter posted a source that mentions in passing that ISO 8601 was the result of a 1978 UN declaration that Monday should be the first day of the week. Now I wonder where that came from!
You’re not wrong that “the Sabbath day” has sometimes been used by Christians to refer to Sunday, but the context of this thread is that a comment claimed that calling Sunday the first day of the week is inconsistent with the Bible, and that’s plainly not true.
> From a Christian point of view, it would make sense that Sunday is the last day of the week, as it is the official day of rest.
Depends on the Christian. If you mean the Puritans, from whom present-day prescriptions (such as no or limited alcohol sales on Sunday) derive, you may be on to something. If you mean the Sabbatarians, no doubt they have an explanation, but I don't know it. If you mean a Seventh-Day Adventist, you'd be wrong, because they still hold to Saturday as the seventh-day and the sabbath. If you mean a Catholic or one from another denomination, the Catholic catechism teaches that Sunday is the fulfillment of the spiritual truth of the Jewish sabbath, and most other denominations understand similarly.
It’s totally arbitrary (as well as totally immaterial) whether the week starts on Sunday or Monday (or any other day for that matter). The fact that the US does it differently than many other countries really isn’t a big deal. Your downvotes show the whole bike shedding nature of the issue. The debate is so contentious because the stakes are so low.
I'm honestly not sure what "bike shedding" is but numerical values for days of the week very much count when building any software containing calendars (or any dates really) to make sure it works properly in different geographic regions.
Historical reasons. Sunday has always been the first day of the week. Because yet another religion than the 4 mentioned before explicitly defines Saturday as the last day of the week, and everybody has always gone along with that. Probably because it was always like that anyway.
The recent official standardisation of Monday to be the first day of the week was a mistake.
Silly reason, but I like that Sunday being the first day keeps the week symmetric. You have the first and last day of the week being days off (in most places), and you have Wednesday in the middle. It's not very logical, but neither is any part of our calendar system.
Or you just say, Sunday is the end of the week and Monday that start of the next one. Funnily enough this is the first time I've heard as Sunday as the first day of the week. I'm from Germany where Monday is the first day and Sunday the last.
This also coincides with the work week where the first workday is Monday, then the weekend ends the week and a new week begins with Monday.
Not absolutely, it could be even more hilarious, if PM/AM switches happened at 11:00 and 23:00, not at 12:00 and 00:00. Or even better, the switch could ignore seasonal timezone shift.
Sunday is the first day of the week in Israel, not just on paper but very much in practice. I know this because Israelis I worked with will be unavailable on Friday but they will start emailing you Sunday morning.
I always felt that DST was invented to prevent people from realizing that they are forced to wake up and get out of the house before dawn during the winter. It would literally alienate people from work life.
> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;
What do you mean by this? I mean, what behaviors do US people exhibit to show this to be true?
I was born in the US and have lived here almost my entire life. I consider Monday to be the first day of the week, and I haven't seen anything in US culture to indicate that other people disagree or behave otherwise (except for the default behavior in some calendar apps in the US locale).
Printing all calendars and design all calendar software with Sunday in the first column is a big clue that most Americans consider Sunday the start of the week.
In Europe, printed calendars and apps have Monday in the first column.
Being European, I prefer "Sunday in column 1" calendars.
Not for religious reasons or because I consider Sunday to actually be the first day of the week, but for practical reasons: It gives me a clearer understanding of the workweek. It moves Wednesday (in my language called "middle of the week") into the week's center. It deemphasizes the weekend for planning (and thus for planning work), making them better rest days.
Why is it illogical to have Sunday be the first day of the week? Maybe Saturday is logically the first day of the week since nobody in their right minds would want a work day (assuming a 5 day work
Week) to be the first day. Like eating dessert first, starting the week with a day off just makes logical sense.
Except for Friday-Saturday is the weekend in quite a few countries especially islamic ones. Israel also has Friday-Saturday weekends to make observing the Sabbath easier. There may be other exceptions as well.
The concept of a weekend is a recent development that I don’t think really corresponds to what the first day of the week is (which was conceived of as Sunday for thousands of years before the weekend was invented).
When the weekend was invented, Sunday as the sabbath was still a real thing for many people. I have to wonder if originally only Saturday was conceived as the weekend, followed by the week start and sabbath of Sunday. Then, as Sunday became secularized, the weekend was extended to include Sunday.
A fun bit of trivia is that it wasn't until the middle of the 18th century that it became standard in Europe to start the new year on January 1. Up until that point many regions used March 25 as the date of the New Year. So, for example the day March 24, 1715 would have been followed by March 25, 1716.
March 25 was the Feast of the Annunciation whereas January 1 was the Feast of the Circumcision, so the two dating methods were called Annunciation Style and Circumcision Style.
Obviously this created some ambiguity since the Circumcision Style date March 24, 1716 would be rendered March 24, 1715 when written Annunciation Style. Around the time of the transition to Annunciation Style dating in Britain you actually see people writing both dates together to avoid confusion, usually with the Circumcision Style date below the Annunciation Style date. (You can see an example here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Memorial...)
Oh, is that why Tolkien had Frodo throw the Ring in the Fire on March 25? And then King Elessar made that day the first day of the New Year. And the tradition held on until the 18th century. Huh.
> He's written about in a famous book but historical records are spotty
Don't want to start a religious debate, but it really annoys me when for some reason, multiple documents that were later compiled into a book are not historical documents, just because they were treated as religious texts by the church councils 300 years later. The Bible isn't a book that Christians all sat down and wrote. It's a collection of many different historical documents written by many different people.
There are many documents dating from ancient Rome (and earlier) that we don't consider historical because of their fantastic or religious nature. The set of documents you refer to are self-contradictory and describe supernatural events that no other author recorded.
Hell, historians take Herodotus with a grain of salt, and he was an actual historian.
Because it's about a books who explain than at last, two people can come back from death... days after it. Historians have doubts about this (and other weird events from this books) and therefore do not keep this specifics book as very credible sources. That said, no real historian actually doubt of the historical existence of the famous religious leader from the past.
Biblical books are biased to assert Jesus existed as they describe him. There are no neutral historical records to prove he specifically existed. Besides, your “historical documents” contain competing narratives of events with each other, supernatural magic, and exist as part of a handpicked religious narrative that left other books out at that.
"Virtually all scholars of antiquity accept that Jesus was a historical figure"
For non-Christian sources, see: Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus. It's virtually a certainty Jesus existed. Whether he was the 'son of God' is a very different discussion.
The bigger the problems you have to handle at scale the more annoying are small, fully unnecessary inconsistencies in the peaces which compose the system in which your problems exist.
Big things have failed due to small overlooked inconsistencies in handling date times.
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.
Teleporting would still require energy and therefor money. Plus wearing pants. So I think the biggest problem is coming up with: A) A network protocol for quantum entaglement. B) porting the Zoom client to the Yapple N1 architecture, the most recent Alien Processing Unit from the company Yapple, named by the popular yapple fruit on the planet Mostly Sand. (Yes, they also named their planet after the material that was under their feet, which they regret after joining the United Planets) Yapple recently used 1.2% of the company’s cash reserves to buy up their only competitor’s architectual IP, their workforce, factories, land, workers, workers families, cities, countries, planets, solar systems and galaxies. So luckily for Zoom developers, there is only one port to be done.
Quantum entanglement does not allow you to communicate information faster than c (though it does allow you to correlate behavior, in a way which the benefits of which can't be seen until after a light-speed delay)
In fact all of these points have valid reasons which simply reflect some form of cruft. For instance, until Caesar February was the last month of the year, so there was an intercalation of a month of varying length every two years(which made more sense). Also, the months September, October, November, December actually were the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months of the year. And all the months were 30 days (actually alternatively 29 and 31 days), but the mensis intercalaris which was either 22 or 23 days.
Julius Caesar changed this because during the Civil wars of the late Republic, many times there was no Great Pontiff to do the calculations, so the additional month were left out a few times and the calendar was really getting out of sync. He changed the beginning of the year from the Spring solstice to January 1st, because that was the day of the consular election (and the consuls were elected for one year, so that made more sense as the years were named from the consuls that were elected).
As for the birth of Jesus, we now know that it must be off by a few years. But originally, it was just the best guess they could come with; once it was found that Jesus actually wasn't born when initially thought, well, tough luck, it simply stayed as it was because it was too difficult to change after centuries of counting this way already.
Regarding the use of base 60 for time, it made sense because it allows matching the course of the Sun and the Moon across the year (about 360 days), across the month (lunar month is 29.5 days) and the day. That's also why we cut circles in 360°: to allow for easy astronomical calculation (by approximating the year to 360 days, the lunation to 30 days), and splitting the day and night into 12 hours.
Notice that until the invention of mechanical clocks, there was 12 hours a day and 12 hours a night, therefore hours were of varying length depending upon seasons, but OTOH using a sundial was dead simple -- which made sense when you had sundials, but no clocks...
An interesting aside the Cotsworth Calendar is such an obvious approach to the months problem it makes me wonder why it was not adopted in the first place.
We have 13 months of 28 days each. The 9th is always a Monday the 19th is always a Thursday. "Two months from now" always means the same thing and always means the same number of days.
The extra day is New Years Day. It's a holiday and does not belong to any month - or belongs to it's own month if you prefer. On Leap Years there are two of these days.
Weeks aren't subdivisions of months, they are completely independent of months and years. There is good reason for this.
Having months alternate between long and short (as they typically do) is a lot better than just having one short month. It would get weird with things like rent payments if you have one month that is way shorter than the others. (although I do wish they chose a 30 day month to occasionally add a 31st day for leap year)
And I'm not sure we'd be better off with time done with multiples of ten rather than highly composite numbers like 24 and 60.
Obviously our system is far from perfect, but it's not all that surprising it is the way it is.
Except for leap seconds. Leap seconds are just stupid. Far better to make adjustments like that much more rarely.
I saw when i was in Japan a various billboards marking a 25 hour service I thought it was some kind of mistake but apparently they call 1 am the hour 25...I think I saw it in Okinawa
It’s more than just 25, they often go to 29, to indicate 5am. They do this to make it clear that it is an overnight service starting in one calendar day and terminating in another. It’s not just a simple substitute for “1 am”.
Japanese VCRs could be programmed with times like 24/25/26/27:xx, which makes a lot of sense for TV programs that are part of “today’s” schedule but after midnight. Much lower risk of getting the day wrong when programming.
Back when I was a night owl, I considered “today” to last until about 5am when you start hearing birds outside. Aligning semantic days with your schedule is incredibly convenient.
Now that I’m a morning person, the same concept of 5am semantic days still works perfectly. The day begins about 20min before my alarm.
You occasionally see times like 24:15 on European railway timetables. If the train runs only on weekdays, it might make it clearer that there isn't one at 00:15 on Monday.
I haven't noticed 25:00, but I don't often look at printed/PDF timetables nowadays.
I've seen this when working on a side project involving public transport timetables from Google Transit. A service can run on 26:00 on Sunday, to indicate that the Sunday service is running 2 hours past midnight (i.e. on Monday 02:00).
This convention is also used by some TV ratings measurement organizations - a show ending Tue 02:00 will be recorded as Mon 26:00, since it logically belonged to the day that ended, not the one that started.
Indeed, the "tv day" stretches from 02:00:00 to 25:59:59, but you usually don't actually use wall time (or in this case, modified wall time), and instead measure instant time as "minutes after midnight" (MAM) or "seconds after midnight" (SAM), so it's just an integer.
This is a boring way to respond to a post that obviously tries to be funny, but I don't find it funny. There's nothing special about Gregorian calendar. It is shit and unorganized just like hundreds of other things that are shit and unorganized, and would make life easier if we could replace them with something better (which already exists, or very realistically can be designed) via absolutely massive organizational effort. Gregorian calendar can be replaced by French Republican calendar (or one similar to that), imperial unit system can be replaced by metric, all sorts of different clothes' size standards surely can be replaced by one that would actually make sense. There are hundreds of things like that, you encounter them every day. Calendar and units are just some that everyone knows.
To me there's nothing funny about this. This is just sad and annoying, and slightly demoralizing, since it's so simple to fix, yet absolutely impossible to fix by yourself.
> all sorts of different clothes' size standards surely can be replaced by one that would actually make sense
Like, imagine if those sizes were equal to some actual body part measurements (or the garment's dimensions itself, whatever) in millimetres/centimetres?
only expensive clothes have reproducible sizes. You can test this yourself. Go pick out 3 different levis jeans that are the same size that ought fit you, in different colors but the same cut. They will all fit slightly differently.
Expensive clothes that are meant to be altered will usually have better tolerances, at least in my experience.
this is one of the main reasons i refuse to buy any clothing intended to be worn outdoors from amazon, shein, aliexpress, ebay, &c.
I know that the tolerances are quote large; but I've personally have experience with 27 size shoes being slightly larger than 29 size shoes from a different brand which is ridiculous IMHO. Those numbers don't mean anything, they differ not only from brand to brand, but from batch to batch even for the same maker, so I don't even know how people manage to buy clothes over Internet: the listed sizes in my experience at best serve as a starting point, then you just try pieces on until you find something that actually fits you.
Which is exactly why I ask for sizes to be garment's actual sizes, not some made up fairy numbers (and don't even get me started on X+S|S|M|L|X+L markings).
I have a hard time finding clothes that fit due to being way out on the edge of standard sizing. I have found this similar inconsistency, e.g. I’ll find something I like in my size, order one of each color, and invariably one or two out of four items (that should be roughly identical) will be an 1.5-2 inches out of spec in a way that makes a huge difference (like waist, or inseam, or sleeve length).
Well, you can try to order several copies of a piece at once and return those that don't fit... that is, if your market platform allows that. The ones over here recently have started charge a not insignificant amount of money for returns.
I half expected a punchline from the alien like "wow, your method of time keeping seems pretty simple compared to ours", hinting at the universal nature of evolution and gradual learning over time.
>"uh, it's supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it's off by 4 years, if he existed at all."
>"if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you're not sure exists?"
>"yeah. He's written about in a famous book but historical records are spotty."
I'm not sure why there is such a persistent meme about questioning Jesus' existence.
Certainly, not everyone will believe in the things that He did, nor do I expect them to believe it. However, even among some of the most diehard Atheist Historians, to claim that Christ never existed is something that is easily disproved. See: Dr. Bart D. Ehrman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43mDuIN5-ww) Keep in mind, Dr. Ehrman is probably one of the most outspoken Atheists critical of both New and Old Testament theology.
There are Atheist celebrities like Dawkins, Hitchens, or Harris, who get a lot of press and coverage, but as far as "In the weeds" detail-oriented historical and archeological debates on up-to-date understanding of the ancient world? Dr. Ehrman is probably in the top 1-5% of Atheist debaters to look towards.
People are welcome to believe whatever they like, but it's just embarrassing to read people write this sort of thing in the same way it's embarrassing to see people repeat the "We only use 10% of our brain" thing.
The single most complex component I have ever written in about 35 years of SW development was a scheduler to calculate the next instance in a set of overlaid periodic cycles, allowing for time zones, DST changes, leap year/centuries, etc, etc ... in Visual Basic no less!
“Hasn’t anyone ever tried to fix this?”, “yes, there was the International Fixed Calendar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar..., “and?”, “well, only one company used it and that company eventually lost relevance and was never able to get the broader society to use it”.
This is just a word, which although originally means "fifteen days", it is actually used for "two weeks". The same thing happens in Spanish with "quincena" (which, confusingly, could also mean "fifteen days" or "half a month", at which point hilarity ensues).
This entire Twitter thread (and most of the comments here) operate from some really weird assumptions about these aliens. As in, that there’s some agreed upon final answer for how everything from time to historical events should be logged, categorized, and accounted for in your little planet’s revolution around its Star. And that this regime is perfectly predictable without knowing anything about the life forms on the planet you’re observing.
Do people here really think this is reasonable, or realistic?
Not an agreed upon final answer, but a common not arbitrarily changing one - yes. You can easily see that in our history. Every time we have something slightly different in various cultures, we try to unify it and make it more consistent. Various units of measurement got pretty much unified when we needed to work together. Where we didn't, we got issues like losing the Mars orbiter because someone thought inches are still cute. We got time measurement unified and precisely defined, because we needed to synchronise time globally to enable precise GPS. Even on a cultural level, many countries went through some kind of unification/simplification of their language. (simplified Chinese, German orthography reform, Indonesian -> Malaysian, etc.) On a social level, we're so connected, that pointing at a random person today, I could guess they speak English, Spanish, or Chinese and not be wrong too often.
So yeah, once a society gets to travel to other life forms in the universe, you could expect their measurement of time is simplified and plain. Not that they don't understand the historical context of not having it that way though... but that would be far in the past. And it's funny to think of them going "oh, one of those again...", or even "ok, I've seen some weird stuff, but the mixed units on Earth are just disgusting". Probably the same reaction you'd get if you saw a programmer today copying the whole source to another folder with suffix "..._working_8". "oh $deity, I see why you're doing this, but please stop, this hurts my brain, I'll show you version control".
A good way to know whether a month has 31 days is by counting the knuckles and gaps between knuckles. "Landing" on a knuckle means that month is 31 days. So,
Pointer finger knuckle = January = 31 days
Between pointer/middle = Feb != 31 days
Middle finger knuckle = March = 31 days
And so on, just looping back to the first knuckle when you get past the pinky knuckle.
Very entertaining read. The earthling says at one point (for comedic effect probably) that they don’t know why people used to like to count in dozens. I didn’t understand myself until someone explained to me that it makes dividing pay between a group of workers much easier.
You pay 12 coins for a job, very simple to divide between a team of two, three, four, six or twelve.
Since childhood, I have always counted 16 on 4 fingers. Top of finger tip as 1, then the dark lines between knuckles, on inside side of finger as 2,3,4. After 16, I continue with 17 on first finger again, but left hand has now 1 touched by my thumb. Technically its 16x16 numbers.
And just to make sure the aliens lose whatever shred of confidence they might still have in human civilisation, we should introduce them to time zones: https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY. My favorite video on the topic.
There are quite a few misunderstandings with his assumptions in explaining the story.
I know, I know, it's supposed to be for humor, but for those of us that have read and understood the historical basis of the calendar system, it really kills the effect.
This actually made me feel very much better about all the weirdness. Seeing it all in one place made it look clearly inevitable and also made it clear how little of a problem any of it is.
& even in the same part aka USA, in day to day life & on state issued paperwork, ids, social security card, its 6-7-22 m-d-yy is June 7th, but on passport its dd MMM YYYY `07 JUN 2022`. Immigration documents issued by USCIS uses 06072022 mmddyyyy as June 07, 2022. So, not always the same sequence on same part of the earth.
This is far and away the most glaringly not-ok cultural thing we have leftover. I know there's an actual ISO for dates, but even if there weren't, if you use, oh, a file system, a spreadsheet, or even a filing cabinet, having the year, then the month, then the day, then the hour, minute, second, and so on makes everything sort correctly. We've been using computers for more than a generation at this point.
I get stressed any time i have to parse dates not in this format, usually for old emails, news articles, etc.
I think a huge sticking point is how most people write checks, Jun 6, 2022. Also the US postal system screws up the ordering in a way similar to writing things Jun 6, 2022. first the street number, then street, then subdivision (the building/apartment/department,) then city, then state. Then a zip code (which has the potential to be smaller than the street number, or larger than a city.
I totally disagree with the article. Our calendar is 1000s of years of technical debt. Surely they will understand things built on top of other things for centuries and centuries..
Why would we assume that alien visitors don't also have convuluted time measurement systems? It's seems likely any alien civilization would have followed a similar development trajectory as humans and would therefore also retain some anachronistic practices well into technological advancement.
I would bet large amounts of money that if we ever do encounter an alien civilization, it too will have weird ways of describing the universe, driven by legacy cruft.
All measurements used to be a mess: lengths, weights, and so on.
At the French revolution, they broke the status quo by introducing the metric system. Originally, the metric system also included a new calendar:
- One day has 10 hours.
- One hour is divided in units of 10, 100, 1000 (probably deci/centi/milli hours).
- One week has ten days.
- Each year starts at the fall equinox.
This calendar was used for 14 years. Then, Napoleon decided to bring back the previous calendar system as he reintroduced Catholicism as a state religion. Indeed the revolution calendar was purposely anti-christian: it moved the first year from the birth of JC to the year of the French revolution. Several religious events like Easter were hard to compute. Christmas was the day of the dog...
Anyway, we could have got a calendar system that makes sense, but History decided otherwise.
But ... the sexagesimal system made sense and I guess that, in ancient times, time periods that don't have patterns would always be divided arbitrarily (years can be marked with seasons, days with night, but how to divide the time between, say, mid-day and sunset?).
I once read a story in which a human gave an extraterrestrial visitor a calendar to examine and they were confused as to all the inconsistency. I then wondered how they would react if we gave them a Malaysian wall calendar instead:
- Four calendars (Gregorian, Islamic, Chinese, Hindu)
- Three scripts (Latin, Chinese, Tamil)
- Two solar (Gregorian, Hindu), neither synced with the other, with varying month lengths (29-32 for the Hindu, but at least months follow solar longitudes properly; Gregorian doesn't really follow anything)
- Two lunar (Chinese, Islamic), also offsync (Chinese starts months on new moon, Islamic on first visible crescent) and Chinese has leap months while Islamic doesn't.
- Weekday names in four languages (English, Malay, Chinese, Tamil)
It'd certainly be a puzzle for our hypothetical alien.
October, for Octogon, meaning the 8th month, is the 10th month.
And Dec for 10 meaning December is the 12th Month. Going by the Roman system, March is the 1st month bu we've decided to make it the 3rd month today and offset everything else.
The metric "interface" has nice "round" numbers, but the implementation idk:
"In the SI, the standard metre is defined as exactly 1/299,792,458 of the distance that light travels in a second."
"The kilogram was originally defined as the mass of one cubic decimetre of water at 4 °C, standardized as the mass of a man-made artefact of platinum-iridium held in a laboratory in France, which was used until a new definition was introduced in May 2019. Replicas made in 1879 at the time of the artefact's fabrication and distributed to signatories of the Metre Convention serve as de facto standards of mass in those countries. Additional replicas have been fabricated since as additional countries have joined the convention. The replicas were subject to periodic validation by comparison to the original, called the IPK. It became apparent that either the IPK or the replicas or both were deteriorating, and are no longer comparable: they had diverged by 50 μg since fabrication, so figuratively, the accuracy of the kilogram was no better than 5 parts in a hundred million or a proportion of 5x10−8:1. The accepted redefinition of SI base units replaced the IPK with an exact definition of the Planck constant, which defines the kilogram in terms of the second and metre."
Not sure what you are trying to say with your quoted phrases.
There was an issue with the standard for the Kilogram, which was recognised then corrected by introducing a definition which is based on physically measurable phenomenon. The new approach allows independent experiments to derive the value of the Kilogram.
That seems to me like a process that works, and I struggle to think of a better outcome.
> Not sure what you are trying to say with your quoted phrases.
That the metric system is just as arbitrary as the customary units. Things like the meter and (kilo)gram were based on arbitrary objects rather than anything objective. They've since been redefined using physical constants to come close enough to the old reference objects. (And the US customary units are officially defined as exact fractions from the SI units -- making the whole world happy to have exact measurements regardless of the system you use.)
At least the customary units have nice divisors. Just saying.
The metric system was based on the existing unit of time and the dimensions of the earth. The metre was originally defined as 1/40,000,000 of the circumference of the earth (through the poles and Paris). From the metre they derived units of weight and volume.
There was some debate at the time about using a pendulum with a 1s period to define the metre, but it was known to be less accurately reproducible than the geodetic version.
Their aim was to define a system that could in principle be recreated from scratch anywhere on Earth without necessarily relying on access to the physical prototypes. In practice the relative imprecision of the original measurements compared to the later demands of science and engineering meant that the prototypes became the definition.
It’s interesting to compare with the British Imperial units reform in the 1820s. Part of that act specifies how to recreate the prototypes from physical properties of the units. When the Palace of Westminster burned down in the 1830s the ancient prototypes were destroyed. But the replacements were recreated from copies, not from the specification in the act. And not much later, the official definition was based on the metric system because the metric standards were manufactured to much greater quality.
> That the metric system is just as arbitrary as the customary units
No-one claims it isn't arbitrary. Any choice of units is arbitrary. "Not being arbitrary" just isn't a desideratum when considering what makes a good system of units.
The main desirable property is coherence [0], which SI has.
But I don't think anyone would claim SI is perfect. It's not; it's got at least a couple of warts. One is that "kg" is a base unit and is prefixed. But that's about the worst of it.
CGS is also coherent, but has a similar problem with a prefixed base unit (in this case, cm).
US Customary units is not only incoherent, but does things like conflate mass and force (lb is a technically a measure of force, so is the long/short ton, and slug is the proper unit for mass) and has far too many derived units that measure the same thing (e.g. ft lb/s, hp and BTU/h, vs just W).
We should start first be redefining the second: 9,192,631,770 oscillations of a cesium atom. It's too long anyways, we can easily perceive time down to at least 1/60th of that.
So let's call it 150 million oscillations, and refer to it simply as "time", since the word second only makes sense in context of an analog clock anyways. Then we can start rounding the other weights and measures accordingly until everything is nice and clean. It appeals to the OCD in me, despite the societal chaos that would ensure.
But then the universe will undoubtedly throw random numbers at us like π or the fine-structure constant and mess it all up.
Yeah. Who thought using decimal was a good idea? We should be using dozenal. At least 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, while 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 so doing thirds and quarters is messy. Being able to do fifths isn't as useful as thirds and quarters and you can multiply 12 by 5 and use 60 if you want to divide by fifths, like clocks do.
Not true. You can count knuckles on one hand up to 12, two hands up to 144, or 60 if you’re using fingers of one hand and knuckles of the other. Societies used to count knuckles, which is why duodecimal systems were a lot more popular back then. Way easier for doing fractions and divisions in your head as well.
You can count all kinds of things, but of the pieces of human anatomy, fingers are the most convenient because you can fold them while counting. Which is why they're also by far the most popular things to count worldwide, even if different societies use slightly different ways of doing so.
You can count to 12 that way, too, e.g. by folding the thumb first to indicate 1, and then unfolding it with the rest of the fingers folded when you get to 6. Or you can turn the fist upside down etc. Again, there are many techniques, but counting by folding or unfolding fingers is the simplest and the most obvious, which is why base-10 is the most common.
We're too invested into decimal at this point - the cost of the migration would be so immense as to dwarf any benefits from suddenly being able to divide by 3 and 4 easily.
In NZ, all legal weights and measures are metric, yet for some stubbornly cultural reason we still tend to discuss height in feet and inches (ladies on dating apps who are discriminating on height will specify that you need to be 6 foot, not 183cm) the weight of a newborn baby in pounds (but only for newborn babies!), and order our beer in pints, which generally means "a large glass of beer somewhere between 400 and 600mL". Also for some reason ordering a "12th" means a "half pint", and I'm really not sure why.
But the good craft beer places have a sign saying what their pints are in millilitres to prevent unpleasant surprises when you were expecting 568mL but got 425mL.
The "above six foot" rule seems like it's just a round number, but in the US at least:
* height is normally distributed for men.
* The average height of a man is 5'9".
* The standard deviation for men's height is 3".
So six foot is one standard deviation above average. I am sure one or more of the above does not hold for NZ. I just think this is neat, that the commonly stated preference happens to be for one standard deviation above the average.
A neat coincidence only. America consists of lots of ethnicities. Some bring that average up and some bring it down. There’s some preference for intra-ethnicity dating.
A pint in the USA is 16 fluid ounces. In the UK (in the ‘imperial’ system) it is 20. [Technically the fluid ounce is also different in the two systems, but not enough to matter at this scale.]
Some US bars will serve imperial pints on request and/or offer them for British or Irish beers.
The difference is about 10% which is easily noticeable.
Typically in a British pub you will be served beer in a glass that is calibrated as “pint to brim”, and any head on the beer is taken out of the nominal pint. So usually a pint as served is much closer to half a litre.
I feel like I need to specify that the Dutch sometimes coloquially also use pounds and ounces, but Dutch pounds are exactly 500 grams and Dutch ounces 100 grams.
Designing a well-fitting system of units is not hard given all the experience we have already. Units of time are the trickiest due to natural cycles, but there are ways to minimize the irregularity.
The problem is getting that design adopted by everyone.
Why the presupposition that these aliens are more rational than us? Presumably they would be just as vulnerable to their evolved behaviour and inertia of historical decision making as we are.
Came to say this. They operate under the same rules of physics; it should just be as likely that their planetary motions and cultural history will also force them into weird counting systems.
I recently learned that in West the weekdays are named after Roman gods, but in English it's done by the way of Germanic gods. It's just that Romans, when visiting German tribes, interpreted local gods as Roman ones, simply with different names—as they did everywhere else too. So they brought the calendar with them, and explained that Odin is the same as Mercury, etc, and thus where Romance languages have ‘mercredi’ and such, English has wōdnesdæġ.
‘History of the English language’ is a splendid podcast.
This is how a 12 year old internet atheist sees the world. Advanced alien species is just a stand-in for the know-it-all author. Grow up. These things all have good historical reasons. And you don't turn society upside down just to get some nice parsimony in the calendar. We have a system that works and is remarkably accurate. Changing it would upset millions of social customs, accounting systems, computer systems, etc. The cost is unfathomable really. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
Actually, what you're suggesting is that even if it is broken, it's too costly to fix. Then you should ask: costly compared to what?
If we fixed it, then innumerable generations after us would not have to deal with the problem.
The idea of "historical reason" and "social custom" assumes what it tries to prove, that the past is more important than the future.
The real problem is that we don't pay for the costs we impose on the future -- in bad calendars and environmental collapse from an overheated climate.
And because we don't pay, we don't have to care.
Indeed, "not caring" is taken as a badge of honor -- oppositional self-glorification through contempt for others.
Your point would be well-taken if it were well-intended and made with grace. The original post is a funny way to imagine accounting for the weight of history we lay upon those who come after us. It's a nice way to ask us to take some responsibility. Most everyone is willing to do what they can to make the world that little bit better. Indeed, I believe that those who came up with the original mistakes were trying to do better, and would welcome the corrections.
> If we fixed it, then innumerable generations after us would not have to deal with the problem.
In day to day use, I'd argue the date and time system works perfectly fine. I know when my birthday is, I know when Christmas is, I know when my next dentist appointment is. I'm not confused because months have different days or that the day is broken into 24 hours.
Date and time systems for the most part are useful to us for social and cultural reasons. It works perfectly fine. It may seem "silly" that it's arbitrarily broken up into irregular months, but I'm not sure what we would gain if we used some new date system.
Yes, computing the difference between two days is complicated, but when we're dealing with date-time in computing, we generally do not use year/month/day in our computations, but instead use some epoch number and convert to localized formats as needed for display.
There is some stuff, that can be fixed. I do not know the day of week (planning the next dentis appointment) without looking into a calendar. Often I have to think for a bit how many days a month has.
Indeed.
Most of humanity still has to be born, so whatever we improve for future humans will be outweighed by whatever hardship it imposes on us, from a strictly rational point of view.
The trick is: how do we know we’re making things better, and how do we know they will stick.
It's a joke. But I think you're underestimating how malleable it is.
In the US, DST was changed in 2007. Many states have yearly discussions about it. The leap second was introduced in 1972 and many have been inserted since.
"There's 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds" - except sometimes when there are 25 hours, or 23! Because it's too hard to ask people to change their schedules, so we change the time instead. And of course we don't add or remove those hours at the beginning or end of the day, so we never actually have an hour 25, we just repeat one of the middle hours instead. And then, independently, sometimes there are 61 seconds, or 59. And don't get me started on time zones...
I think I pieced this together from Wikipedia at one point, but don't have the exact ref: The strangeness that December sounds like it should be month ten comes from the fact that in Roman times, it was the tenth and last month. After that there was just.. not much going on until the new year started and in fact it was actually a political question as to which day March started on! Does anyone know this more precisely and/or have a link?
upthread, the year started march 1st which was also the first day of spring, thus making it march, april, may june, quintilis, sextilis, september, october, november, december.
the 12 or 15 day shift at one or more points made the spring equinox "move" from march 1st to "around march 21st", and the "new year" was moved to January 1st. Thus completely misaligning the months and the seasons, and making september the 9th month. To compensate, they renamed the 5th and sixth months to honor a couple of emperors.
I always thought it would make sense to have 52 weeks (364 days) and then a special New Years day and then repeat 52 weeks.
This way every year is the same. It's always the same day of the week on April's 13th. No moving holidays. Easier to plan. No adjusting schedules. No problem with leap seconds/days (just as them to the special day whenever).
It just seems like a simple and superior solution. What were those guys thinking...
It's a bit different though. I think the are reasons for 12 months, 7 days per week, 3 months quarters etc. My version keeps it all and avoids points in "disadvantages" section of the Wikipedia article.
7 days per week seems to be so ubiquitous now because religions that depended on that particular cycle (Judaism originally, and from thence Christianity and Islam) are so popular. But, historically, societies have successfully existed with weeks ranging anywhere from 5 to 10 days. Romans, in particular, had an 8-day week for most of their history.
(7 days per week has a more natural meaning if your calendar is lunar overall, so that weeks can be aligned with months. But lunar calendars are overall very messy due to disagreements with the solar cycle, so it's best to not go there in the first place.)
How about three 90 day quarters comprised of three 30 day months and one day in between each quarter for each solstice and equinox day? You can add a day or a week periodically to keep it synced.
Dealing with calendars can be pretty difficult. Since I recently wrote a script in Lua to be my personal assistant, processing calendars, todo lists, mailing lists, etc., here’s a Lua form of the code to calculate the day of week. This is accurate for any Georgian date:
-- Calculate the day of the week
-- Input: year, month, day (e.g. 2022,9,16)
-- Output: day of week (0 = Sunday, 6 = Saturday)
function dayOfWeek(year, month, day)
-- Tomohiko Sakamoto algorithm
local monthX = {0, 3, 2, 5, 0, 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2, 4}
if month < 3 then year = year - 1 end
local yearX = (year + math.floor(year / 4) - math.floor(year / 100) +
math.floor(year / 400))
local out = yearX + monthX[month] + day
out = out % 7
return out
end
That would be quite fun to setup - especially all the patches to the leap year setup heh. Could even make bug reports “Christmas is happening in March what is going on”
It's _not_ very backwards compatible, though; in particular, different countries transitioned from Julian to Gregorian at different times, so things get _extremely_ messy if you go back more than about a century.
Depends, in the northern hemisphere this would be when spring is starting, so when the whole nature comes to life full power. Might be more appropriate, as a start of a new year, instead of choosing the time when the cold starts..
I get that it's about being funny, but the roman calender is not completely universal either, there is at least Iran, my home country and afghanestan which has the solar hijri calender as it's first official calender which is very much logical and accurate. You can visit
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Hijri_calendar
For more info
Also in Iran the week starts with saturday.
If you look from an american or a british person these are all valid points and I got the fun and laughed but couldn't help my self not saying all these
And I'm sure Iran is just an instance
So the moral of the story is that having history and cultures is… bad somehow? Or at least weird?
The way I see it, a realistic alien would be more likely to answer
"You think that's complicated? Our own calendar has to track our lifecycle according to the orbit of a planet that doesn't exist any more!"
Or maybe:
"Ah, of course, you tend to use base-10 because you have ten fingers. I keep forgetting about those."
…while apologetically waving a mass of tentacles in the air :D
Incidentally, I wonder where this trope of aliens as hyperrational observers came from? Because it does not match at all the one instance of a space-going species that we know about (us).
> Because it does not match at all the one instance of a space-going species
I think conflating "made it to our local moon" as "space-going" might be the problem there when comparing with "made it to a whole other solar system" as "space-going" aliens.
I should imagine that humanity will have to get a whole lot more logical and hyper-rational before we make it out of our solar system in a repeatable way (assuming we survive that far.)
If there are aliens out there who don’t have a strong concept of “historical reasons”, they’re not worth knowing, and likely not socially complex enough to present a threat to humans.
Honestly, even our DNA is full of historical reasons; why shouldn’t our society too?
I'd be curious to know what countries don't start the year January 1st and where the origin of their chosen day comes from.
I know China's new year is different by a ~3 weeks?
Also, I only know a little USA and Japanese culture but it's interesting various calendar related things like where I grew up, SoCal, elementary, middle, and high school school started 2nd week in September. College also started around the same time. In Japan it starts first week of April and so do new jobs for college grads (Japan generally makes a distinction between no-experience college grads and experienced employees and job listing will often say which one the job is for)
> elementary, middle, and high school school started 2nd week in September. College also started around the same time.
And in Germany the academic year at universities traditionally starts in October, with classes starting in the second or third week of October (and my particular alma mater apparently tending to start classes one week even later than a few random other universities I've looked up).
(Which I had to explain to a Canadian border guard when I was visiting Canada near the end of September a few years ago with regards to how come I didn't already have classes if I was claiming to be a student, since in Canada classes had of course already started for the fall term at that point.)
The Chinese New Year is based on the lunar calendar. How much it differs from the solar calendar changes a lot from year to year. Other East Asian countries don't always share the same lunar new year.
We used to end our days at sunset, because that's an observable event. Now we don't. That's why we have things like Christmas eve one date and Christmas day the next, when they really should be on the same date.
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.
Since life on earth is affected significantly by the movements of Sun and Moon, the calendar has to be based on both their positions relative to earth. The calendar system invented in ancient India does this. Check out this illustration in the wikipedia page on Hindu Calendar for a quick understanding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hindu_Lunisolar_Calendar....
The Earth is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun and rotates on its axis at a ratio of roughly 365.25:1. The axial tilt of the planet is such that the northern and southern hemispheres have varying seasons at different portions of the orbit and those seasons materially affect the life of most of the larger animals on the surface.
There's not many intuitive ways to break that up unless you use a base365.25 number system.
Calendars can definitely be weird but they're working around non-integer natural ratios.
Very entertaining!
I suppose if we have to start from scratch we might build a better system, but who has the time?
It just shows the amount of change that has occured in the past couple of thousand years. Yeah, it might not make sense, but it works...mostly. Just get rid of DST and keep the rest for now!
This reminded me of a Joe Rogan bit, where he imagines how the human race will explain Kim Kardashian to aliens.
Many things will seem illogical to beings who have figured out interstellar travel...
It is a shame that the length of a meter isn't based on the Earth's equatorial circumference. Though miles aren't really, it's handy to know there are about 24k of them around, 1k corresponding to an hour of the day. If we take the illogical 24 hour day as a fait accompli then distance is better reduced in round decimals of that than... whatever meter length is based upon (something to do with the weight of a cubic block of water?)
Hijri calendar fixes some of the inconsistency. Day naming is just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, "gathering day", "rest day". Number of days in months are based on the moon phases. Days start on sunset instead of some arbitrary time at night.
There's also a clever, perhaps unintentional naming in days, where the first day is al-Ahad (The One), which is also a name of Allah (Unique, The One). So it's no longer some awkward Sunday or Thor's Day or Zero Day.
Its not some countries. Every country British had ruled uses 12h for day to day life; & 24 for military speak & railway time tables display board. & British ruled a lot of countries.
Absolutely hilarious, can someone with artistic skills create a short film/animation based on this thread. Foone has given permission for derivative works ;-)
How about the fact that 10/11/12 can variously refer to October 11, 2012, November 10, 2012, or November 12, 2010 - depending on what country you are in?
& sometimes even in same country but depending on who is using it. In USA, Social Security will use like mm/dd/yyyy. Passport will have dd MMM YYYY. Immigration documents from USCIS will have mmddyy. Some state documents will have mm-dd-yy
I'm always amused by the fantasy that aliens are more likely to be rational and have far less convoluted systems than we do.
It's some manner of borderline religious, faith-based notion about the assumed nature of aliens. People seem to get quite upset if you intrude on their fantasy about what aliens must surely be like (not like us, far better than us; humans are the primitive dredge of the universe basically). Despite the fact that there's no evidence to support either side of the premise, so it ends up revealing what the person thinks about themselves (self-hate) and humanity generally more than anything else.
And if you really want to see their heads explode, suggest the notion that the odds - as far as we know - are just as good that humans are the most advanced beings in the universe as not; and the odds are just as good that we're the very first spacefaring beings in the universe rather than the zillionth.
There is one defining difference between us, and aliens that visit earth.
They managed interstellar travel, we did not. That inherently puts them at an advantage to us. Definitely a technological advantage. Hence it makes sense to assume (with medium confidence) that such aliens will be better at science than us. Assuming that they will therefore be more rational than us is not much of a leap.
Agreed. This makes me wonder if a purely rational species is something that can even survive evolution. A lot of irrational behaviors we exhibit are likely the result of traits that have helped us survive in the wild.
If those traits helped us survive in the wild, they WERE rational. The point being, a fictional species that was able to widely remove once-rational but no longer rational things is the important bit. It's evidence that they have the capability, and either through a "better" society, or an extreme but likely stable authoritarian system that prioritized scientific endeavors like visiting far star systems and meeting the creatures there with no intention to harm, are able to make changes to themselves to make things better.
That is not a feature we share. We only occasionally make things better for all of humanity.
I don't want to actually even imagine what sort of hell an proper interstellar empire timekeeping is. Just ignore different planets having different orbital and rotational characteristic.
Just the basic relativistic effects even with some type of instant transfers would make most communication and so on massively painful mess.
At least, we have a well-defined second. Assuming that humans make interstellar travel and/or colonization happen before being visited first, it's not entirely unreasonable that space-borne vessels will maintain the time and calendar system developed on Earth. It's convention, after all (we fudge it _just a bit_ here on Earth, too).
Perhaps extrasolar colonies will have to develop a system that makes sense for whatever planet or moon they settle on, at which point they'd be converting between Earth time and local time for correspondence.
Problem isn't that second isn't well defined. Just that the rate of seconds passing in well defined way depend on location of observer. We already average bunch of clocks around the globe. But doing the same thing light years from each other...
> They managed interstellar travel, we did not. That inherently puts them at an advantage to us.
It means some species that is/ was out there has an advantage. The species that actually visits us could be less intelligent than us but just intelligent enough to operate the equipment they dug up.
This is why you never let inexperienced people to come up with standards, patterns, and api-s.
It is impossible to get rid of crap once it is widely adopted.
Yeah, that sounds like a mistake by the tweeter. As far as I know there have always been 12 months, but the start of the year got moved from March to January at some point.
Yeah, what I'd learned as a kid was that Julius and Augustus inserted themselves in the middle to turn it from 10 to 12 months, which is why the latter months are named wrong, but comments up above are saying they just renamed months.
That’s confusing a few separate things. There was (supposedly; we only know about it from late Republic writers) a system with ten months, _then_ a system with 12 months where the year started in March (so the numbering made sense), then at some point the year switched to starting in January, then Julius Caesar’s system, also with 12 months.
Later on (during Augustus’s rule, I think), Quintilis and Sextilis became July and August, but by that time they were _already_ confusingly named.
Chinese numbers the days of the week, starting from 1 for Monday, but with a special name for Sunday, it seems.
I don't speak, or read, Chinese, but translate.google.com confirms this.
I am often curious about how Chinese expresses something, so I ask translate.google.com to translate an expression into Chinese, then I change the direction of translation and insert newlines between the Chinese characters. It's not a very reliable way of investigating how Chinese works, of course, but it's a lot faster than trawling through wiktionary.org. If anyone knows of a better way of getting an answer to that sort of question, please reply here!
Days of the week in Hebrew are numbered from Sunday "Yom Rishon" (First day, lit. "Head Day") to Friday "Yom Shishi" (Sixth Day). "Saturday" is "Shabbat" ("sabbath")
And we have a secondary calendar that just counts the days since some arbitrary date approx 150 years ago. It shares its name with a calendar from 2000 years ago, but it's really named after the father of the guy who came up with it who was named after the guy who established the older calendar.
Also, it's days start in the middle of the other calendar's days
I think the point of the article is to look at things from am engineering/scientist perspective where saying such things would get you fired/scrutinized.
Wait a minute: someday the aliens are going to land and we gotta explain our calendar, sure.
Or, _we_ don’t.
Someon—- pardon me —- _Something_ has to explain it to them.
That thing is gonna say: “yeah, the epoch is our earliest known ancestor’s origin. Those animals call it ‘Unix time’. We have a record of their hieroglyphic form: January 1 1970”
"We thought they were measuring from when their species first travelled to their homeworld's moon, but the point of reference is actually around fifteen megaseconds later. No idea why."
Why does this thread assume that aliens will be hyperlogical and not understand what culture is? This is the most ass backwards assumption almost all scifi makes about aliens, at least in my humble opinion. A society which has cracked inter galactic travel will probably have its own vast culture and quirks, i see no reason why not.
"Se we use an epoch because of a famous operating system"
"oh, that thing that runs computers right"
"yeah"
"and what base do you use the represent a date on you computers? 10, 12, 60?"
"2".
The author also does not mention that there is no year 0.
So when Jesus was born, he was 0 years old, but it was already year 1. When Jesus was 20 it was allready year 21.
Ignoring discussions if Jesus existed or not... lack of year zero is illogical.
Maybe they did it to not have year minus zero? Which also should be there tbh.
To further complicate the issue, Jesus was born between 6 and 4BC, in any case. And in either winter or summer, depending on whether you happen to be Christian or Muslim.
Sounds like a person who thinks they know better than everyone else, that the tradeoffs accumulated in a system are just arbitrary and worthless. “Tear it all down, I can build something MUCH better!”
I look forward to the day when this person’s wishes to not be shared on HN are granted in full.
These aliens called babies land in our world all the time and get the calendar just fine.
It takes them a few years, but a lot of that is due to their lagging cognitive abilities, as such; a different calendar redesigned for utmost simplicity would still take them a few years.
Calendars will make sense in comparison to billions of people blindly following (and dying for) religions thousands of years later that were invented before anyone knew anything about anything, no microscope, telescopes or even glasses.
If the world wants a calendar system based on the cycles of nature, with very little political/religious baggage, there is the lunar calendar with the 24 solar terms, used by the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese people.
To be fair I am more worried that longtermists built the entirety of human society with the assumption that there are no aliens and the rest of the universe is free for the taking. If aliens pop up there will have to be bloodshed.
I wished people would refer to time I’m an unambiguous way. Sure your standard is 24h. I still gotta ask clarification when you tell me the meeting is at 8. Be specific. Having a 24h clock is useless id you say 8 in the evening.
I would expect a alien calendar to be as complicated as ours. The calendar we use is the result of a long and rich history. Their would likely be as complicated, especially if there are part of a tree sun's system.
We largely dumped the long and rich and annoying history for most things _other_ than time, though, with metrication. It's arguably surprising that time survived that.
If Julius Caesar had set the leap year rule to be for every year divisible by 5 and/or 19, We would still be using that calendar today. Also would be nice if he had set New Year to be on the winter solstice.
Wait until someone notices that _base 11_ is the natural base for a being with 10 fingers. A separate symbol for 10 is base 11, not base 10. Base 10 only has separate symbols for up to and including 9.
But what if the aliens don’t even have (don’t need) the concept of an integer, therefore no concept of prime numbers - and no need to split times of natural cycles into equal integer-sized intervals?
"You have this one area, where only 4% of the people live, and they are the only ones using 70 messed up units, including this 'ounce' that's sometimes a volume sometimes an unrelated mass, and this group makes most of the main software, and showing these units?"
"Yeah"
"So everyone understands these units?"
"Nobody except these 4% understand these units at all"
"So when these people say 'gallon' it means nothing at all?"
"Well, do they say liquid gallon, dry gallon, or food gallon? You know what, no matter which there are actually some people outside the 4% who know the word, but to them it's a fourth amount, so no nobody understands it. And yeah to about the remaining 95% it means nothing"
The alien's report: "this planet is inhabited by humans, a species whose brain is not mathematical, instead, has a special appreciation for myths, stories etc."
We really need to update the system of years, it gives way too much weight to Christianity and serves as reinforcement to their misguided belief that their religion is somehow preeminent. It also gives the impression to the general public that history "began" at year 0, rather than being clear that recorded human history goes back around 5000 years.
Living in the year 5022 gives a much different perspective of history than starting at some random time in the middle of the Roman Empire. The other option is beginning the calendar at the first transistor or the first nuclear explosion signaling modern times.
I thought it was nicely egalitarian and oecumenical to have the years from oune religion, months from another, and weekdays from a third. Let's give every religion a stake in the calendar system.
Wait until we have to explain why the most powerful military and politically influential country in the world still insists in using counter-intuitive measurement systems.
if you are into calendars, read zecharia sitchin's books on anunnaki. the calendar, and zodiac, is 6 000 years old! essentially jews are still following the sumerian calendar to this day. that's also why the creationists say the world is only 6 000 years old. the aztecs were famous for the 2012 end of the world but that was only their calendar and they even had three different cycles that worked together like cogs in a machine.
"and we further subdivide the months into 'weeks', which is 7 days."
"ahh, so each month is an integer multiple of weeks?"
"that would make sense, but no. Only one is, sometimes"
"SOMETIMES?!"
Japan uses the Western calendar pretty much as-is. One addition is the Japanese gengou system of year/era counting, which resets with a new era name every time a new emperor is enthroned (at least in recent years). Most people are aware of and use both the Western and Japanese methods of year counting, though.
The last reset was in May 1st 2019, when Heisei year 31 switched to Reiwa year 1. (Yes, a single year can have two era-based names since the switch doesn't necessarily occur on New Year's Day. Annoying.) It is now Reiwa 4.
I..like many Hindus..follow the lunisolar calender that is based on both the lunar and the solar movements. I have two calenders that run my life..Hindu Panchang that runs in my head for home(mostly based on the moon cycle) and the Gregorian one for the outside world.
My life revolves around the Panchang only and following the Gregorian calender is just like learning to use English as the language for communication. It’s something I have to do to assimilate.
Fun fact: (because I like trivia) Nikola Tesla was born July 10, 1856(Gregorian calender), but when he was born, his birth record says June 28, 1856 as Serbia was following Julian calender at that time.
Elon Musk who is known for his company, Tesla Motors was also born on a June 28, Gregorian calender. This random almost-coincidence tickles me for some reason.
Actually, I think explaining our calendar would be one of the more interesting points of discussion. In fact, the very fact that this is somewhat controversial with folks feeling our calendar is 'illogical' reveals a lot about the current generation's materialistic, efficiency-obsessed world view.
It's like we've all lost the ability to see and understand symbolism and tradition.
Things to consider about the calendar in the West:
1. The West was once a Christian realm. The calendar reflects this. Lots of interesting history here, starting at least with Constantine.
2. I only _this_ year have noticed a push to make Monday the first day of the week. My first thought when I noticed this: it's explicitly an effort to de-emphasize #1. Sunday is the first day of the week because of the importance of the Resurrection for Christians. Changing Monday to the first day of the week is basically the same move the Jacobins for example attempted when they reset the year to 'years since the revolution' instead of 'anno Domini'.
3. Not all the 'West' uses the same calendar. The Orthodox East generally still uses the 'old' Julian calendar. There is currently a 13 day difference between the Julian and Gregorian. This is one of the reasons that Pascha (Easter) usually is celebrated on a different day in the Orthodox East than the Roman West (yes, Protestants, you're still with the Pope on this one).
4. p.s. the process by which the Gregorian calendar was inplemented is actually a very interesting story. There basically was a missing week in Oct when this was done (around 1430 as I recall?).
5. It gets better. Some Orthodox like the Russians celebrate Christmas on the old Julian calendar, which translates to Jan 5 on the Gregorian.
6. (Main point!) the calendar itself is _liturgical_. Feasts, fasts, death, regeneration. All these things are reflected in the calendar. Liturgy is fractal. It happens in the Church and is echoed higher and lower throughout different hierarchies. If you are at all interested in this, please look up Jonathan Pageau. He has some great podcasts and youtube videos...
It really is quite beautiful.
Unless you are a nerd and just want us to switch to stardates. Easier to program I guess but thoroughly boring and dehumanizing.
p.p.s. It occurs to me that not everyone will understand 'Orthodox East' and 'Roman West'. By Orthodox East, I basically mean Palestine and the Middle East, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Think the New Rome (Constantinople) and those lands once controlled by New Rome, e.g. the 'Eastern Roman Empire'. By 'Roman West', I mean Western Europe and those nations colonized or influenced by Western European countries. Perhaps more simply, 'Romain Catholic' realms.
Dates are one of the first standards through which humans discovered https://xkcd.com/927/.
Standards simple and useful enough to be used in everyday conversation die with their users. So I don't know anyone who keeps track of the Republican calendar, but I _do_ know people who are celebrating New Year's tonight. And the English still drink beer in pints.
It would only be simpler to use the Republican Calendar in a vacuum. Practically, all us programmers would spend all our time converting dates between Georgian and Republican dates, and I'd have to look at my ID to know my birthdate.
This would be better written in a short story format but I digress.
This is precisely the type of thing that would probably happen in almost any society. There are many standards that pop up that are vestiges of one thing or another. The fact we get base 60 from Sumeria but use Base 12 or Base 24 for hours is not a big deal, weird things happen. I doubt any advanced alien would be just so flabbergasted over this. We have multiple cultures all over the world that count differently, so the assumption of base 10, just doesn't really make sense. All standards like time, counting, etc in any culture I think would be this mishmash of legacies from some people's that were dominant at some point that other people's culture imprinted upon that. If anything an alien race would probably be more suspicious if our calendar and time system was some perfect base 10 all through or something of that nature as if the cult of reason had dominated the world after the French Revolution.
Also the historical record of someone named Jesus existing isn't debated by any historical scholar I have ever heard of, just the messianic / prophetic / son of god nature seems to be the rub.
Yeah, from what I understand, it's generally accepted that some rabble rouser called Yeshua existed, and later had followers who considered him to be holy.
> Yeah, from what I understand, it's generally accepted that some rabble rouser called Yeshua existed, and later had followers who considered him to be holy.
Except for where you start a sentence with "yeah," apparently answering in the affirmative a hypothetical question that no one has asked, and adding a superfluous and grammatically incorrect comma, you are vaguely correct.
Jesus is the English transliteration of a Germanic adaptation of the Latin transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Yeshua.
What is agreed upon by near universal scholarly consensus is instead that Jesus was baptized and crucified. But I personally believe it is a sure bet he also was a rouser of rabble, had a ministry, and was considered holy, as beyond the 10 or so natural holes he ultimately was given at least 4 additional holes.
> Except for where you start a sentence with "yeah," apparently answering in the affirmative a hypothetical question that no one has asked, and adding a superfluous and grammatically incorrect comma, you are vaguely correct.
Wow, you must be a hit at parties. The way I phrased that sentence is how some some dialects of English, like the one I speak, express agreement. Consider it shorthand for "I agree,". And perhaps consider the limits of your experiences and that wisdom is (partially) knowing what you don't know, and not attempting to speak with authority in such areas.
In wording my response to you, I've deliberately avoided other expressions from my dialect that may confuse you, but are very applicable. Like "twat" or "tosser", or "tu meke".
> Jesus is the English transliteration of a Germanic adaptation of the Latin transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Yeshua.
Yeah, nah. Thanks for contributing nothing that a basic Google of "Jesus Yeshua" wouldn't have.
In my dialect, "yeah, nah" often means "I'm experiencing fremdschämen".
> What is agreed upon by near universal scholarly consensus is instead that Jesus was baptized and crucified.
You're going to need an awful lot of citations there.
Firstly, define the scholars you're referring to.
Also, what sources are they working from?
Josephus, the closest there is to a contemporaneous source, doesn't mention baptism. Neither do Seutonius, Pliny the Younger, Mara bar-Serapion or Tacitus.
Maybe the scholars you refer to are extrapolating from the title "Anointed", or from the fact that, gosh, if you're saying this Jesus is sinless, and baptism is for the remission of sins, then why would you include a story in your holy writings that Jesus was baptised? It makes no sense, so you must've included it to be historically correct! Also known as proof by mortification. [0]
Or maybe, you're just referencing crap you garnered from a 5 minute speed read of Wikipedia that really needs more citations? Who knows? Tu meke au.
> > What is agreed upon by near universal scholarly consensus is instead that Jesus was baptized and crucified.
> You're going to need an awful lot of citations there.
> Firstly, define the scholars you're referring to.
Not being OP, I’ll list at least John Dominic Crossan and James Dunn, who has said that the baptism and crucifixion of Jesus “command almost universal assent.”
Of course, I got those names from five minutes speed reading Wikipedia. But that’s two more scholars’ opinions of the scholarly consensus than you’ve provided.
> Also, what sources are they working from?
Surely this is the very definition of moving the goalposts. OP stated the scholarly consensus is that Jesus’s baptism and crucifixion are true (this, incidentally, was my existing impression of the scholarly consensus). Now you’re no longer just arguing that OP was wrong about that, but have moved on to claiming that any scholars and historians who believe in Jesus’s baptism are wrong because they have no reliable sources.
I have to admit, I’m not inclined to throw out my understanding of the scholarly consensus or which sources are reliable to argue the historicity of Jesus based on an unsourced Hacker News comment.
I chose sources that are either non-Christian, or their subsequent Christian modifications are well identified (i.e., Josephus' Antiquities), because if you're wanting to make a case for the historical Jesus, then it's best to avoid as much bias as is possible.
And I'm very interested indeed in Crossan and Dunn's sources, sadly Wikipedia doesn't yield any light on this.
The historical sources I mentioned can be found in more detail on newadvent.org, whatever else you think of the Catholics, they compile a humdinger of a wiki, and are probably the experts on Christology and the historical Jesus.
> The way I phrased that sentence is how some some dialects of English, like the one I speak, express agreement. Consider it shorthand for "I agree,".
There is no English dialect that does not include the adverb, "yeah," etymologically formed from drawling the affirmation, "yes," colloquially and informally. More often, however, "yeah" is employed as a common filler in the same way as, "um," or "uh," used as a pause to think when not finished speaking, as such, when written, it is meaningless and superfluous. In modern usage, however, it may most often be correctly replaced with the phrase, "as a Millennial, I informally affirm."
> And perhaps consider the limits of your experiences and that wisdom is (partially) knowing what you don't know, and not attempting to speak with authority in such areas.
Ad hominem attack.
> In wording my response to you, I've deliberately avoided other expressions from my dialect that may confuse you, but are very applicable. Like "twat" or "tosser", or "tu meke".
Ad hominem attack.
> Yeah, nah. Thanks for contributing nothing that a basic Google of "Jesus Yeshua" wouldn't have.
Contradiction of informal colloquialisms and an ad hominem attack.
> In my dialect, "yeah, nah" often means "I'm experiencing fremdschämen".
False. An affirmative placed with a negative is a contradiction, but the assertion here is a clumsy ad hominem attack.
> You're going to need an awful lot of citations there.
While I agree with anjbe that this is moving the goalposts, it is also an ad hominem attack.
> Firstly, define the scholars you're referring to.
While I have not referred to any particular scholars, making your employment of such a straw man, I would define scholars in the ordinary sense as academics.
> Also, what sources are they working from?
This is further development of the previous straw man.
> Josephus, the closest there is to a contemporaneous source, doesn't mention baptism. Neither do Seutonius, Pliny the Younger, Mara bar-Serapion or Tacitus.
Though this is a continuation of the previous straw man argument, in fact, the closest contemporaneous sources, in chronological order, are the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, Acts of the Apostles, and the Gospel of John.
> Maybe the scholars you refer to are extrapolating from the title "Anointed", or from the fact that, gosh, if you're saying this Jesus is sinless, and baptism is for the remission of sins, then why would you include a story in your holy writings that Jesus was baptised? It makes no sense, so you must've included it to be historically correct! Also known as proof by mortification. Or maybe, you're just referencing crap you garnered from a 5 minute speed read of Wikipedia that really needs more citations? Who knows? Tu meke au.
It its entirety, this is a straw man argument which happens to include ad hominems.
> ...as such, when written, it is meaningless and superfluous. In modern usage, however, it may most often be correctly replaced with the phrase, "as a Millennial, I informally
The distinction between spoken and written seems a) arbitrary and b) entirely irrelevant to a comment section on a website. I'm writing conversationally, comments aren't technical documentation or tenders, they're comments. Observations in passing.
Being honest, when you opened with... ...whatever your thinking there was, I immediately shut down on engagement.
Genuine feedback - you know your shit, so just lead with that, not the part where you decide to lead with "You started a sentence with 'yeah', and that's wrong". It helps establish a rapport.
Anyway, you got your chronology slightly wrong but only slightly, so very much well done, and I mean that genuinely, and it only erred in where you placed Acts, which contains the earliest Christian writings. (That we know of (so far))
> Being honest, when you opened with... ...whatever your thinking there was, I immediately shut down on engagement.
My thinking was the tenor of your comment was overly informal and self-gratifying considering the subject, a major theme of whose teachings was humility. It doesn't quite follow that being antagonistic is not engagement.
> Anyway, you got your chronology slightly wrong but only slightly, so very much well done, and I mean that genuinely, and it only erred in where you placed Acts, which contains the earliest Christian writings. (That we know of (so far))
"The earliest possible date for Luke-Acts is around 62 AD,[citation needed] the time of Paul's imprisonment in Rome, but most scholars date the work to 80–90 AD on the grounds that it uses Mark as a source, looks back on the destruction of Jerusalem, and does not show any awareness of the letters of Paul (which began circulating late in the first century); if it does show awareness of the Pauline epistles, and also of the work of the Jewish historian Josephus, as some believe, then a date in the early 2nd century is possible."[1]
"The Gospel of Mark... is usually dated through the eschatological discourse in Mark 13: most scholars interpret this as pointing to the First Jewish–Roman War (66–74 AD) that would lead to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, with the composition of Mark taking place either immediately after the destruction (the majority position) or during the years immediately prior."[2]
"A majority of scholars agree that Galatians was written between the late 40s and early 50s, although some date the original composition to c. 50–60."[3]
"The Epistle to Philemon was composed around AD 57-62 by Paul while in prison at Caesarea Maritima (early date) or more likely from Rome (later date) in conjunction with the composition of Colossians."[4]
"Regardless of the literary unity of the letter, scholars agree that the material that was compiled into the Epistle to the Philippians was originally composed in Greek, sometime during the 50s or early 60s AD."[5]
The earliest surviving subject materials are the authentic Pauline Epistles, and the oldest surviving Gospel is the one attributed to John Mark. It has been theorized and argued that a lost Gospel, a gospel of sayings, known as the Q source,[6] was composed earlier or around the same time as Mark, with the Gospel of Thomas a candidate for the Q source, but most place the date of Thomas' composition after the 2nd Century, and there is no consensus on whether the Q source existed. The earliest recorded words attributed to Jesus are found in Matthew 5-7, portions of the Sermon on the Mount[7] ("Blessed are the cheesemakers...")[8]
I reiterate my recommendation of that book by Pheme Perkins. Acts contains the oldest Christian traditions. Oral traditions, natch.
Your comments on my tone are bewildering in their absolute irrelevance - discussing the historical Jesus doesn't require reverence or adherence to the themes of Christianity, like how
discussing the historical Muhammad doesn't require me to adhere to the shahada, nor consider dogs unclean.
But hey, maybe you're neurodiverse, or maybe you're just an asshole, but you do you.
If your objection to my tone was because of closely held personal beliefs, then I'm afraid you'll just have to build a bridge and get over it.
> Acts contains the oldest Christian traditions. Oral traditions, natch.
The Oral Tradition hypothesis holds that where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark, rather than using a Q Source, the source is oral traditions. Prior to Mark and the letters of Paul, surely there had to be oral traditions passed on for decades. Luke may refer to these in the first two verses of his gospel.
But since the synoptic gospels all attest together to a number of events, known as the Triple Tradition, including Jesus' baptism and crucifixion, and many details in between, and Acts begins with the replacement of Judas with Matthias, detailing further events only after this event, I don't see how the earliest oral traditions could be found in Acts.
Clearly the baptism, temptation, gathering of disciples, etc., all occurred prior to Mathias elected to replace Judas, and if drawn at least partially from oral tradition, how could the later traditions predate the earlier? Without earlier oral traditions including key elements from Jesus' life, how could oral traditions concerning much later events in Acts begin to develop?
Oral traditions detailing the spread of the gospel predating the oral traditions of the gospels themselves is difficult to imagine and implies early Christians developed what necessarily then becomes a backstory, or prequel, namely Jesus' ministry, only after developing the oral traditions concerning the oral transfer of those earlier events. That would be a neat trick, as the narratives about the oral transfer of those chronologically earlier narratives somehow would predate the content of the oral transfer detailed in Acts.
Aliens are likely to view 12 or 60 as prettier numbers than 10 or 100. Try writing the multiplication tables in base 12 and you'll see how much nicer they are.
In base 10, the times tables for 2 and 5 are easy because they divide 10. If I want 2*7, I know 7/5 is 1 remainder 2 so it's 10+2*2=14. As for 5x7, I know 7/2 is 3 remainder 1 so it's 30+1*5=35.
In base 12, there are similarly easy rules for 2, 3, 4, and 6. Doesn't seem like that great of a trade off but it could be beneficial. That also just comes down to 12 being a "superior highly composite number".
If I personally was allowed to rewrite our number system, I think I'd choose a base that is either a superior highly composite number or a power of 2. So something in the set [2, 4, 6, 8, 12, 16, 32, 60, 64...]. I doubt 10 would even cross my mind as an option if I didn't have 10 fingers.
Another layer to this is that numbers one-off the factors have nice patterns too. For base 10 those are (2, to include the factors), 3, 4, (5), 6, and 9 sort-of, since it's one below 10. Just think how awkward 7 and 8 times tables were compared to the rest. With base 12 I found that all numbers, even 7 and 11, end up having usable patterns and are easier to count by. Of course, I'm still not used to having 12 digits, but on paper I could tell they would be pleasant to count by if I had learned base 12.
And an even deeper insight is that it doesn't really matter that much and isn't worth shaking up the whole world to change. We're not going to be better or worse at math because of our number base.
the historical record of someone named Jesus existing isn't debated by any historical scholar
It is debated by people like Richard Carrier https://www.youtube.com/results?sp=mAEB&search_query=richard... who says that (IIRC) while it's not unlikely that one or several people with similar messages preached in Judea 2000 years ago, the Jesus of the Bible looks like a literary invention when you go back to all the earliest records in Christian and non-Christian (e.g. Roman) sources.
*Edit* now that I got downvoted for mentioning Richard Carrier I'd very much like to hear about substantialized criticism about his work. Any pointers?
Yes, but there’s little debate amongst scholars that aren’t atheist activists. For instance, it’s extremely difficult to explain the historical facts of the early Christian movement without a historical Jesus due to those events being so recent and broadly falsifiable via living memory let alone records extant at the time and there being no evidence of the Romans using a lack of historical evidence for Jesus as an argument against Christianity.
Richard Carrier is an extremely fringe figure regarding the historical Jesus. The overwhelming majority of scholars in the field from conservative to liberal historians dismiss his ideas as fringe, and his methodologies as inconclusive, at best.
>"YOUR CALENDAR IS BASED ON A RELIGIOUS LEADER THAT NOT EVERYONE BELIEVES IN?"
Instead of taking the opportunity to make a holier-than-thou twitter rant the would-be probee would do better to reply to this by explaining that almost every religion and many cultures have one or more of their own.
Yes, and for some theirs is the main one. It's now year 2565 BE in Thailand, you won't really see "2022" that much outside of strictly tourist-oriented references. Use a Thai VPN when googling and that's the date you will see in search result listings.
I believe the next version of ISO 8601 is expected to support different calendar & time systems.
> you won't really see "2022" that much outside of strictly tourist-oriented references
Both are used. While government orgs are likely to favor the Buddhist calendar, many businesses will use Gregorian. It's definitely not an artifact of tourism.
To wit: When are the most fireworks set off? Your choices are 'global' new year, Thai new year and Chinese new year.
I would guess 100% of Thai people (at least those living in Thailand) know what year it is in both calendars.
Use DDG and you won't be forced to use the locale / language Google has deemed appropriate for your IP address.
> "uh, it's supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it's off by 4 years, if he existed at all."
> "if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you're not sure exists?"
I find it quite offensive. Not all scholars agree that Jesus was raised from dead, but the existence of Jesus is accepted even by non-Christian scholars.
> Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed.[7][8][30] Historian Michael Grant asserts that if conventional standards of historical textual criticism are applied to the New Testament, "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned."[31] There is no indication that writers in antiquity who opposed Christianity questioned the existence of Jesus.[32][33]
The argument isn't generally that "Jesus" isn't a person, but rather probably built off one person, but also a collection of stories about people who might be other persons or made up. There were lots of messiahs at the time, and considering that the first gospel was probably written a good 20-to-60 years after the protagonist's death, it seems reasonable to many to presume that some the stories might be stories about other messiahs at the time that got passed on.
It obviously doesn't matter if actual divinity isn't at stake. Did Socrates exist? Maybe... probably? But he's depicted as two very different characters in the two sources we have (Plato and Xenophon). Which one is the 'real' Socrates. What about Homer? What about Achilles? Having long dated historical documents, especially one's that are more about the story than the person gets complicated.
Do I think that a person named some translation of "Jesus" existed, and generally lived the life described in Mark? Sure, maybe... It gets a bit dramatic at times, but it's plausible. Was that the exact same guy as the "Jesus" in Josephus? Hard to say... Maybe? Do I think all the things written in the gospels, and Josephus and the guy referenced by Tacitus all the same Jesus, and were all the things that happened real and/or happened to that specific one person? I find that to be wildly improbable.
Again, it sort of doesn't matter to non-religious folks. I don't think the person in the story needs to be "a person" just like I don't think Plato's depiction of Socrates needs to be 100% accurate, or even mostly accurate (it seems very obvious that liberties were taken). I don't think it really matters whether William Shakespeare or secretly someone else wrote all those plays. It really doesn't matter to people who have a healthy amount of skepticism... It's perfectly fine to admit that we don't know. The stories are still there and they're good stories.
It only really matters if one has built their identity on some long lost non-verifiable, historical parchments being the truth about the universe... I know many people have chosen to do that. I was brought up religious.
For the record, I'm an atheist that just happens to be interested in biblical archeology and philology. I got no skin in this debate though.
There is very little question that Jesus the human being and Roman subject existed, professed some sort of fanatical messianic religious messages, and got executed for it. Stronger than any evidence for Jesus directly is the evidence for the existence of his brother, James, who was a respected religious leader in Jerusalem for about 25 years after the death of Jesus. It is James that Josephus was writing about--Jesus is only mentioned to explain who James is, "the brother of Jesus who some call Christ." But in addition to this one near-contemporaneous reference, there is also a dozen or so writers who talk about James in the 2nd century. That is a century after his death and the death of his brother, but these writers seem to be working from largely different sources so we can infer multiple historical accounts that would have existed at the time. If we agree that James existed, then the strongest argument for the existence of Jesus is that all of these motivated, non-Christian secular writers of the 1st and 2nd century would have been in a better position to know whether Jesus had existed, and if there was any doubt they would have definitely smeared James as having made up his imaginary brother. But none of them did.
If anyone is interested in this question btw, Reza Aslan's Zealot is an approachable book on the historical Jesus, what little we know for certain and the surprising amount we can confidently infer from the available evidence.
To me your phrase 'skin in the debate' sums up my feelings about the debate we're having here.
I feel that everyone who wrote historically had skin in the debate and as such I mentally categorise them the same way I treat almost every journalist today. Writers are motivated to choose every word carefully to convince people of their opinions. They mention or exclude people and events for various reasons.
The more polarising the subject the less I trust anyone's words, even twenty centuries later.
Are you offended at the assertion that people doubt that Jesus existed at all? As one data point I can assure you that I personally doubt that Jesus existed at all.
Are you offended by people doubting that Jesus existed? If you are a Christian then you are a believer in one of the hundreds of religions from around the world. To be offended that someone doubts the existence of the figures in your holy book is an amazing egotistical statement. Should a follower of Zoroastrianism be offended by someone who doubts the existence of Ahura Mazda?
Are you offended by people doubting that Jesus existed because there are references to him from contemporary historical records? Well I feel that Christianity and other religions have a long record of shamelessly rewriting history and so I basically don't trust anything written down on this subject at all.
It is convenient to ignore (historical) consensus here isn't it? I am sure you have a similar reaction when certain people disbelieve scientific consensus right? on topics such as vaccination or climate change?
I wonder what the percentage would be of Biblical scholars who believe that Jesus was an actual person if we excluded those who believe, say, Moses parted the Red Sea or even those who believe Jews were enslaved in Egypt at the time.
Most scholars, even the non-Christian ones, believe that Jesus was an actual person. Whether he really performanced miracles is of course a very different matter.
The problem with that statement is that if you take away all the supernatural claims and give some room for creative embelishments and naming inaccuracies you end up with not just one but several "actual persons" but their existence becomes entirely irrelevant to the existence of a historical "Jesus".
It's a lot like the "god of the gaps": if you are willing to compromise on a definition of god that gives up on all supernatural claims in history and that only works through mechanisms indistinguishable from natural events, you're no longer talking about the same YHVH that painted fiery letters on a throne room, appeared in burning shrubbery, flooded the entire surface of the Earth and turned people into salt.
I think trying to argue about external facts when studying religion is largely a moot point. It's neat when you can tie religious doctrine and historical accounts together but a religion doesn't cease functioning because its historical claims are inaccurate. The historical claims are entirely accidental to the religion itself and should be viewed as mythological, not empirical.
I have met Christians who both understand that argument - that religion and empirical science belong to two distinct, separate magesteria - and reject it. But when I try to dive in to understand why, I do not ever understand their answer.
The set of people I would exclude for shiggles include non-Christians.
Except for the New Testament, there are only 2 other known possible references. One was altered by later Christians, and the other could have referred to a Jew named Chrestus.
Without other external motivation, would this be enough to establish historicity?
I've learned that most of the people online that are 35 or under don't really try to get details right for work like this. It's a sort of intentional sloppiness that portrays a relaxed style in an aloof manner.
I don't especially like it, but I always did wonder how getting out of touch with the young-ins would look and I guess being curmudgeon and pedantic about factual correctness is something I could embrace as I slowly fade out of style.
If the Tweet chain had gotten every other detail right, I'd take some offence too, but this is the internet equivalent of someone goofing off at a party.
Wikipedia should never be considered a "source", even per its own documentation.
If you must, to support an assertion found in Wikipedia, follow the article's citations and use them. If they even do support the assertion. Quite often, they do not.
It should not be considered even a "secondary source". It's by intention an aggregator of secondary sources. Which secondary sources are included or excluded, particularly for sensitive or contentious topics, entirely depend on the bias and endurance of the editors of the article, so what you'll get is a grab-bag. Wikipedia has no effective means of detecting and countering, for example, a professional team of coordinated editors, or motivated activists.
As a rule of thumb, think high-school term paper. If that's good enough for your purposes, then sure, use it as a "source".
This person hates it so much whenever there is a link to their content on this site, they go on huge massive rants about it with threads spamming as much as the OP, it's hilarious.
In Hinduism, there is a whole extra month after few years, kind of like December Bad. It is thought to not to do anything special in this month because its a bad month, labeled as like creature who lives under earth.
If aliens tried to quarantine us from the rest of the universe for having an idiosyncratic time keeping system, and keep us ghettoized, it would say more about them than us.
Not sure what that has to do with calendars. Fortnight is just one of many measurements that aren't used a lot in the US (among other places) these days so I wouldn't expect the average person on the street to immediately recognize what it means. There are a ton of imperial measurements that aren't widely used like pecks, bushels, rods, etc.
(I'd also avoid terminology like bi-monthly and semi-monthly as it's a predictable point of confusion.)
A quart is the easy one. It’s just a slightly smaller version of a liter. And it’s not like the UK doesn’t use pints which are just half of a slightly larger quart.
I’m sure there’s lots of language including unrelated to measurement which differs across the Anglosphere.
Yeah seeing this today is funny given today begins Rosh Hashanah, the Hebrew new year. But I imagine _most_ countries of the world use the gregorian, especially those on english-speaking sites
In Punjabi we have divided day into 8 parts, with each 2 parts have names like 1st pair (3am to 9am), 2nd pair 9am to 3pm) third pair 3pm to 9pm & final pair 9pm to 3am.
So, we usually say, 8 o clock in third pair means PM, or 8 o clock in 1st pair means AM.
I think most of the world does that. I don't believe the claims that almost nobody uses the 12h format. At least not without a very thorough survey of the many ways many cultures use time.
In Brazil we'll say things like "The party is at 8 da noite", where "da noite" means "at night". When context is obvious, we often ommit that, so I might say "We will have lunch at 1 one clock" meaning 13h because it is obvious that no one has lunch at 1am. We will generally use 24h time in writing because we cannot control context, and in other situations where ambiguity cannot be avoided otherwise.
To me the main advantage of 24h time is that it is easier to mentally calculate time, so for example 3 hours after 11:00 is just 11+3, which is 14:00h.
There’s a good exchange in the classic video game Star Control 2 (now open source, available in most package managers as “uqm”), when the player encounters a species of plant‐like alien:
>> I am Captain Zelnick from Earth. We come in peace.
> I am Captain Ala‐la’la. We come in peace.
>> Our starship is called Vindicator.
> Our starship is called the Tender Shoot.
>> We are the New Alliance of Free Stars from Earth.
> We are the Supox Utricularia from Earth.
>> You’re from Earth??? Hey! Are you just copying whatever I say?
> Oh yes, we apologize for the confusion, our homeworld is also called ‘Earth’, or more properly ‘Vlik’, which means ‘Perfectly Good and Nutritious Dirt’. ‘Earth’ is pretty close, is it not?
Selection bias notwithstanding, we exist, which means life evolved at least once. If the universe can give rise to life it would be extremely odd that it did so exactly once.
That doesn't address the point I'm making. Which is that if the universe can give rise to life, it's more likely to have multiple instances of it than for it to be exactly one. In the same way that it takes more effort to ensure you fill a swimming pool to be so full as to overrun by exactly one drop and no more, than it is to fill it imprecisely and either have no spillage at all because it's nowhere near full or lots of spillage because it's now too full.
You have to be careful to define "universe" here. It's not necessarily what we'd call the observable universe. It might, for example, be all the various branches of a universal wave function defining a vast array of possible universes, none of which could ever observe the others. It could also include sections of space time forever beyond our observational horizon (due to the apparently nonzero cosmological constant.)
ET intelligences arising in those inaccessible places would never be able to land here on Earth.
You've created an axiom that says "randomized sample sizes are the only source of knowledge".
So of course it follows that you keep saying we know nothing about aliens and must reject speculation from what we know of the laws of physics. But it's only as true as the axiom that led you to that conclusion.
It doesn't strike me as a very compelling argument. In practice, every human believes things that don't have random sample sizes that prove their existence.
No, I'm just pointing out that regardless of how rare we are, we'd see ourselves. Our observation of ourselves is consistent with any theory where the probability that we would exist is > 0. Therefore, such an observation cannot rule out any such value for p. Randomized sample size (whatever the hell you mean by that) has nothing to do with anything.
Okay, I think I understand you now. You are making a well debated philosophical argument which appears to fall under the term "anthropic objection", and philosophers have defended or attacked your position. (though it gets a bit confusing since some of the discussion has been around intelligent life in the universe in the context of religious beliefs, and other versions have nothing to do with religion.)
I found one rebuttal here saying that applying your line of reasoning to other topics besides the existence of intelligent life leads to absurd results:
"Critics of the anthropic objection argue that Sober’s reasoning delivers highly implausible results when transferred to examples where rational inferences are less controversial. Most famous is Leslie’s firing squad (Leslie 1989: 13f.), in which a prisoner expects to be executed by a firing squad but, to his own surprise, finds himself alive after all the marksmen have fired and wonders whether they intended to miss. The firing squad scenario involves an observation selection effect because the prisoner cannot contemplate his post-execution situation unless he somehow survives the execution. His observations, in other words, are “biased” towards finding himself alive (see Juhl [2007] and Kotzen [2012] for further useful examples). Sober’s analysis, applied to the firing squad scenario, suggests that it would not be rational for the prisoner to suspect that the marksmen intended to miss (unless independent evidence suggests so) because that would mean overlooking the observation selection effect that he faces. But, as Leslie, Weisberg (2005) and Kotzen (2012) argue, this recommendation seems very implausible."
No, I'm just pointing out the simple fact that we could not observe ourselves if we did not exist. We cannot take Earth as a random sample of places in the universe, for this reason. The more rare planets like Earth are, the more biased our observations of Earth become.
The firing squad example there has other prior information that we lack when it comes to understanding our own existence. The analogy is only as good as the correspondence between the cases, and assuming that correspondence is a circular argument.
I don't understand why you wrote "no" when I referenced philosophers. Are you saying every idea in your post was an original thought to yourself, and you weren't repeating someone else's ideas without attribution? If so, congratulations, you recreated some interesting ideas, but they shouldn't hard to rebut, as others have already done it. You are free to accept the rebuttal as correct or not correct, but you seem to be frustratingly confusing philosophical arguments with facts.
Let's break down what you wrote:
"Observer selection bias makes our own existence entirely irrelevant to the question of whether there are other intelligences out there."
This is not a "fact" but a philosophical claim about how to account for observer selection bias. Your proposed solution appears to be to shut down all discussion of the topic of what the existence of humanity tells us about the likelihood of alien life.
You also wrote:
"The firing squad example there has other prior information that we lack when it comes to understanding our own existence."
This is not a factual statement but rather a philosophical claim that the entire fields of biology and astronomy contain no relevant "other prior information" as to our understanding of our existence.
My "no" is your incorrect conclusion that what the philosophers were saying is relevant to what I was saying. The error is not that of the philosophers, the error is yours.
Well, at this point I think you are plagiarizing other people's ideas and then asserting the rebuttal of those ideas can't possibly apply to anything you wrote here.
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 of the Roman story.
Digestable and entertaining (fragment of a) video on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD-R35DSSZY&t=1312s