Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar
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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:
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.
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.
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.
Not just "for most". It has negative connotations (of the kind reffered to here) for all people.
"Legend" connotes "didn't take place".
See for example p.187 of https://ryanfb.github.io/loebolus-data/L333.pdf for a 1st century BC reference to it:
> 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.
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).
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jalali_calendar
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.
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.
In Persian | In English
mädar | mother
barädar | brother
dokhtar | daughter
pedar | father
bad | bad
...Too bad that the country has received such a negative reputation over the past 4 decades due to its (non-Iranian) regime.
This doesn't really work; the first day of Fall differs from place to place according to the specifics of the local climate.
Edit: i take it back.
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.
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.
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?
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?
> [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.
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.
You can't really define seasons with day-precision based on weather or climate.
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].
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/date/perfect-calendar.html [2] https://www.timeanddate.com/calendar/persian-calendar.html
> 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’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.
>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.
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.
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.
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.
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].
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.
JS died on the ides of March ...
The cut and thrust of political discussion was rather more forthright back then.
To be fair, we've chopped off the heads of King Charles hereabouts. I'm sure III has nothing to worry about.
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.
Gaius Julius Caesar
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.
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.
https://www.onthisday.com/articles/gregory-conquers-julius-c...
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.
In a way, he automated himself out of his job.
But are we dumb or is this just a reductionist take at something that actually has some reason behind it?
Things simply stop being funny if you feel like important background is missing, no snobbery needed.
I don't get why this should apply to every story.
> 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.
IAmVerySmart vibes
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.
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.
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.
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.
More like vestigial organs that our society isn't capable enough to excise.
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.
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.
Or they might feel that using merely having gods is an obvious sign that we are unsuitable to be included in galactic community.
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
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.
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!
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.
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…
Doesn’t seem arbitrary to me. Can you explain what you mean by that?
Of course, all number systems are arbitrary in a sense.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
If you can't program it, and the software makes this hard to do, you can use Amazon Turk or something.
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.
> "nah. The end of the second month"
> "WHY WOULD IT BE THE SECOND MONTH?"
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)
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.
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.
Now, do i google, duckduckgo, or bing, what those months were called?
Fifth collumism? Sexism?
No idea if that's true, but sounds appropriate for the ego of an emperor.
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 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.
And they always are end of June or December in UTC time, so locally they can happen on the first of January or first or July.
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.
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??
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!
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".
Also, dividing the day into 24hs is kind of genius. Sure, 10 is nice, but good luck dividing it neatly into 3 parts.
"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."
Me: pats alien on back, "Dude, I feel you."
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.
- 24 hour clock
- days of the week are called "after not working day", "second day", "middle day", "fourth day", "fifth day", "sabbath", "not working day"
- months are mostly named from the agricultural/weather phenomena "wood cutting month", "strong cold month", "Mars month", "flowers month", "Mai month", "red pigment larvae month", "linden trees month", "sickle month", "heather month", "chaff month", "falling leaves month", "frozen ground month"
Dates are written dd-mm-yyyy or yyyy-mm-dd (less often).
The rest is as bad as in USA.
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))
I though marzec came from marznąć meaning "to freeze".
Human: January
A: And why is it called that?
H: It's named for the god Janus.
A: Ah yes, many civilizations name their time divisions after deities, what is he the god of?
H: I don't know, we don't worship him anymore.
A: Ahh so you guys have moved past your need for religion
H: No, no, we still worship gods, just different ones.
A: Okay then, how about February, what god is that month named for?
H: Actually February is named for the festival of februalia.
A: Oh can you tell me a little more about this festival?
H: No, we don't celebrate it.
A: Are there any months that aren't named for gods you don't worship or festivals you don't celebrate?
H: There's July, named for Julius Caesar, a ruler.
A: Oh he must have been one of your best rulers to get a month named after him, what is he so notable for?
H: We stabbed him.
A: ...
H: A lot.
A: ...was he stabbed in July?
H: No, we stabbed him in March.
A: Okay are there any months not named for gods you don't worship, festivals you don't celebrate, or rulers you don't like?
H: Well October just means eight.
A: Finally, something that makes sense! Okay so your eighth month is just eight-
H: Tenth.
A: What?
H: October is our tenth month.
A: Why wouldn't you name your eighth month October?
H: We named that one after a guy.
A: What was his name?
H: Octavian, which coincidentally translates to eighth.
A: Don't tell me you have both an October and an Octover...
H: Don't be silly, no we named it August.
A: I'm just gonna go out on a limb here and guess August doesn't mean eight, does it?
H: Nah it means first.
A: Yeah, we're not letting you into our galactic federation.
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.
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.
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…
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.
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 word for Friday seems to be derived from “gathering” (probably due to weekly Islamic mass) and Saturday seems to derived from “sleep” (?).
- In Germany we use the 12h format in day to day conversation
- Swatch time was so cool when I was a teenager
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.)
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.
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!
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.
edit: lol, too slow
The recent official standardisation of Monday to be the first day of the week was a mistake.
This would imply that a Weekend and a Weekbegin could easily coincide.
Not everyone, Israel has has Friday and Saturday off.
http://web.archive.org/web/20190604142831/http://www.unixgui...
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the months are numbered (January = "first month"),
Who are we to argue with the people who have finally gotten an act together to number it properly?[1]
[1]: alright, yes, Sunday is still the odd one out and doesn't have a number.
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.
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.
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"
Minor nit, but probably important since the equivalent vocabule exists in English: "midnight".
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”
(Slovenian background)
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.
Weekend is Friday and Saturday. I suspect many Islamic countries are the same way.
/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.
Animals. Absolutely barbaric.
Everybody knows we should index lists starting at 0. /s
EDIT: got 'monday' and 'sunday' the wrong way round
It looks like Polish is similar except that Sunday is "Not-Doing"
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.
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.
¹ “Fair” as in “a gathering of stalls and amusements for public entertainment”.
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.
> Other related words are ... to sheva (שֶׁבַע) meaning seven, as Shabbat is the seventh day of the week ...
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.
Ref: https://help.salesforce.com/s/articleView?id=000338932&type=...
The entries for Indonesia don't make sense to me.
I once booked a train on the wrong day because the localisation changed part way through my search. (Fortunately I noticed.)
Funny how that works, right?
If you’re in Ontario, you’ll rarely see a paper calendar that isn’t SMTWTFS
Never heard anywhere in canada that don’t have their calendar start on Sunday but I’d be curious to find out otherwise.
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.
Yeah, Staples or a high end paper craft store will have both.
But if you go into one of those popup calendar stores, all the calendars will be SMTWTFS.
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...
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.
If someone says "let's meet the 3rd week of April" and you say "ok, let's do Sunday", do you really mean the Sunday in the 4th calendar row?
And I leave the "market" for someone who still didn't have enough of this rabbit hole.
Monday -> Moon day
Tuesday -> Tiw's day (Norse)
Wednesday -> Woden's day (Norse - Odin - chief god, one eye, two ravens)
Thursday -> Thor's day (Norse - god with a massive hammer) Friday -> Freya's day (Norse, rode a chariot drawn by cats)
Saturday -> Saturn's day (Roman, also: Saturnalia is the winter festival that eventually became Christmas)
Sunday -> Sun day
Spanish and English follow a similar day naming convention.
But the god's name needs to be translated from Norse Mitology to Roman Mitology first [1]
Lunes/Monday -> Moon/Luna
Martes/Tuesday -> Tiw/Mars
Miercoles/Wednesday -> Woden/Mercury
Jueves/Thursday -> Thunraz/Jupiter
Viernes/Friday -> Frig/Venus
Sábado/Saturday -> Saturn/Saturno
Monday = Segunda (second) = понедельник (start of the week)
Tuesday = Terça (third) = вторник (second)
Wednesday = Quarta (fourth) = среда (middle)
Thursday = Quinta (fifth) = Четверг (fourth)
Friday = Sexta (sixth) = пятница (fifth)
So I guess Russians have no doubt as to when the week starts.
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]
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 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.
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).
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.
You can get any calendar from a Portuguese speaking country to see they do.
How can the first day of the week happen in the middle of the weekend!?!
Why would you expect the week start day to be any different?
One is the starting weekend, and the other the ending weekend.
To instead think of "end" in the word "weekend" as the opposite of "start" is to use a completely different definition of the word "end".
I wonder if "weekend" therefore has two definitions, given the split dependency.
<stack of bricks> <book> <book> <book> <book> <book> <stack of bricks>
or do you do:
<book> <book> <book> <book> <book> <stack of bricks> <stack of bricks>
"How was your weekend?"
Or do you ask:
"How were your weekends?"
- https://www.iflscience.com/stressed-out-snake-eats-itself-24...
Interesting. How does software (e.g. Google Calendar) display weeks when in en_CA localization?
"Of course."
"And Sunday is the 7th day, the day of rest?"
"Yeah, that's what they preach at my church."
"What about your workplace?"
"Everybody knows the standard workweek is Mon-Fri. What's your point?"
"Ok, so we're agreed the weekends include Sunday, your Bible says Sunday is the 7th day, and the workweek starts on Monday."
"Yep."
"So printed calendars and day-planners and calendar software should treat weeks as starting on Monday, right?"
"..."
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.)
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).
https://www.catholic.com/magazine/print-edition/the-lords-da...
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.
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!
It's called a bookEND only if it's to the right of the row of books. If it's to the left (for books in an RTL language), we call it a bookSTART
If your church preaches differently, they should read their Bible more carefully.
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.)
The cron way, where both 0 and 7 means sunday
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Out of curiosity, if you have a calendar app on your computer, does it start with Sunday or Monday?
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.
First index in the array, 0.
Last index in the array, 7.
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.
It used to be numbers earlier, Quintilis and Sextilis were renamed for them.
Apparently the Romans did not find hard naming even persons - they just went by numbers, as in Secundus, Quintus, Sextus, Septimus, Octavius, etc.
I'm also making a comical absurdity just fyi. Do people like this exist? I don't know
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.
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.
May is named after Maia, the goddess who oversees the growth of plants.
Compare what Ovid wrote about the name of May:
> 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].
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.)
Curiosity should be rewarded!
"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!)
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.
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.
When was the last time you planned a holiday for the waning phase of the moon?
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?
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.
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.
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:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
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.
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.
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.
No. I don't want to change the week at all. I'm just saying that "the week is 7 days so it's a quarter month" is broken as hell.
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.
Monday through Friday is the workweek.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The days in Hebrew are simply numbered, First day, Second day etc. except for Shabbat
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 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.
Edit: also on a Friday, you can say next week and mean Monday (3 days later)
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.
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. :)
If I say "next Wednesday" on Thursday, I mean the Wednesday of next week, not "this Wednesday" which was yesterday.
"Next Weekday" of a weekday that's yet to happen, means one week after that day within this week.
"Next Weekday" of a weekday that already happened, means the very next instance of that day in the calendar, "This Weekday" refers to the past.
"Hey, this Tuesday was your presentation right? How did it go?"
"We rescheduled for next Monday actually". <- this is obviously the Monday after the coming weekend.
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...
Interesting to see so many people here who do interpret it that way.
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".
Same with days, of course.
It drives me crazy!
“Next week” on a Sunday is ambiguous because some people consider the new week to have started while others consider it to start the next day.
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.
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".
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”
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.
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.
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.
1: https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phe...
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 concept of Sunday as the first day of the week dates back thousands of years.
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.
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.
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.
Sunday is the first day of the week in much of the middle east
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.
And times (with timezones, and leap seconds, and DST, and so on) add another level of fun to it.
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.
Japan does too; I blame the American occupation (and plenty of other illogical things).
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...
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.
The author uses they/them pronouns. And more likely their ADHD episode started to wear down, rather than something they took started to wear off.
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.
And for what its worth, the name for Wednesday, keskiviiko, means midweek.
We might say beers at 5, but I haven’t seen “5.00p” rather than 1700 in written form for decades outside of the US
"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".
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).
In Europe, printed calendars and apps have Monday in the first column.
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.
YMMV.
Saturday as the Jewish Sabbath, Sunday as the ‘the Lord’s day” in Christianity.
Matthew 28:1
The Resurrection
[1] Now after the Sabbath, toward the dawn of the first day of the week, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary went to see the tomb.
So, no, not all Christianity.
The current date order is still from 1940, when the state was opposed to Christianity.
https://www.rbth.com/history/335241-week-in-russia-began-sun...
> 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?
"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.
"... 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th ..." should read "... 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 5th..."
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.
It actually reminded me of, and made me sad for the days of the old internet. I don't think this should be on twitter but it's own site
I think Israel, and Jews in general consider Sunday the first day of the week.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I assume Israel must too since shabbat, the seventh day of rest, is Saturday.
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.
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.
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.
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)
…
Calendars starting with Sunday: Nambia, Trinidad and Tobago. Calendars starting with Monday: Benin.
My devices all show 12h too.
The thing is most people know if it means the evening or morning.
But when programming, and dealing with times from all over the shop - please show me 24h clocks!
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 religiously the first day of the week (the Lord rises on “the first day of the week…” (John)).
It has become the “last day” only because people rest after their jobs (i.e. at the end of the “week”).
But conceptually, it is still the first day. It is indeed the First day of the new creation (Redemption).
Wow it really hasn't stuck. I stand corrected.
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?
There is Tranquility Calendar[1] that was proposed sometime back:
- Starts at the time when man landed on Moon. (Tranquility base)
- 1 year = 13 months each of 28 days (13*4 = 364) + 1 Armstrong day
- Exactly 4 week months.
Back in 2019, (50th year of moon landing) I happened to build a web representation of the same[2].
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.
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!
"The Problem with Time & Timezones" - https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...
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.
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 guess it depends on where you live exactly in D/A/CH shrug
I haven't used "Die Party geht bis..."# for almost a decade now, that might be a hint.
#and my "parties" never ended before midnight for more than 2 decades now.
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].
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.
Brazil does the same as seemingly do Grece and Japan.
Also, in Portuguese, Monday is _segunda-feira_ which roughly translates as second-day.
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...)
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
"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.
Hell, historians take Herodotus with a grain of salt, and he was an actual historian.
“and the third hand is the second hand…”
----
update: found it: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI
Rotations of different galaxies? Weird alien rulers imposing their names like "X Æ A-12" for 3rd rotation even if 12 is in the name.
Having video calls scheduling is hard between Earth time zones - good luck scheduling video call between two galaxies.
Big things have failed due to small overlooked inconsistencies in handling date times.
When we first communicate with aliens about our time system we will start by explaining unix epoch.
Only than will we break out the spaghetti code required to map dates and zones and the uncertainty of some historical jumps.
I would prefer if we had a few seconds of an offset with Zulu "GMT" Time (pardon the double acronym).
I sure as heck hope it is, at least...
Ever heard of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_week_number_rollover ?
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...
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.
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 haven't noticed 25:00, but I don't often look at printed/PDF timetables nowadays.
If a coffee shop opens at 5am, they say that. They never say 29.
If a bar stays open UNTIL 5am, they say 29.
Your return flight leaves at 2 and arrives at 11. (2 AM to 11 AM that same day)
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.
https://developers.google.com/transit/gtfs/reference#stop_ti...
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.
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.
Like, imagine if those sizes were equal to some actual body part measurements (or the garment's dimensions itself, whatever) in millimetres/centimetres?
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.
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 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.
>"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.
Do people here really think this is reasonable, or realistic?
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".
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.
You pay 12 coins for a job, very simple to divide between a team of two, three, four, six or twelve.
*but i do now understand the use of a thru'ppenny bit.
With two hands, you can use this method to count up to 144 (a "gross" in English): one hand counts individual items, the other counts dozens.
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.
"nope, there are several variations but most popular are monthnumber-day-year and day-monthnumber-year. For example - 6-6-2022
"oh so you do use numbers for months."
"yeah sometimes"
"so in your example how do you know which one is day and which one is the month"
"depends upon which part of the earth you are standing on"
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.
- Why is this so weird?
- Eh, historical reasons. Legacy framework retained due to inertia, don't think too much about it.
- Yeah, makes sense.
- 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?).
- 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.
Harvest and plant cycles are stable in this "sun oriented" calendar design.
Every year x type of seed is planted in the same month, and harvested in another. So every year, same months can be planned beforehand.
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.
When we actually have this well designed system where everything fits beautifully together...
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.
They'll probably tell you if they know it's not a true pint, but I expect most bartenders have no idea.
Some US bars will serve imperial pints on request and/or offer them for British or Irish beers.
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.
The German system where there's a line on the glass that needs to be reached by beer under penalty of law puts a smile on my face.
* 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.
"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."
But at least we still have horsepower! My PSU is a 3/4-horse unit. My toaster oven is a full horsepower.
I like it.
My 70kWh battery holds only 95 horsepower-hours. But I use the British Thermal Unit when talking about energy.
My BEV has 240 kilo-BTUs stored in it.
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.
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.
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.
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).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherence_(units_of_measuremen...
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.
Except nobody remembers what a 'pottle' is.
Decimal is a system best suited for written math.
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.
The problem is getting that design adopted by everyone.
‘History of the English language’ is a splendid podcast.
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.
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.
The trick is: how do we know we’re making things better, and how do we know they will stick.
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.
In Taiwan, years are often counted from the establishment of the ROC. https://www.todaytourism.com/travel-guides/Taiwanese-calenda...
It IS kind of broke and people are trying to "fix" it pretty often.
Isn't one of those still just a theoretical possibility? I think all leap seconds so far have been in the same direction.
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.
Don't cite me.
Not a human-universal practice.
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...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
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.)
> I'm not sure, really.
This right here. All of these things have reasons that made logical sense at the time. The speaker is just ignorant of history.
> so you switch to base-10 at last
At last? Are we assuming the aliens have ten fingers?
> Your months are named, not numbered?
Why would aliens not name things?
> yeah, it's Monday or Sunday.
Or Friday.
The human should explain lunar calendars next.
-- 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 dow(m,d,y) { y-=m<3; return(y+y/4-y/100+y/400+"-bed=pen+mad."[m]+d)%7; }March 1st would make sense in terms of Sep/Oct/Nov/Dec having the right names for their place in the year.
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
The rest is so bad, that it needed one of the best mathematicians who ever lived on our planet to compute the date of our highest religious festival: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Date_of_Easter#Gauss's_Easter_...
We even named our electric calculation machines computer after the act of calculating the day of Easter: Computus.
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!"
"Ah, of course, you tend to use base-10 because you have ten fingers. I keep forgetting about those."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).
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.)
Honestly, even our DNA is full of historical reasons; why shouldn’t our society too?
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)
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.)
Twitter guy: oh damn, I was planning to do a humorous thread about how a super-rational alien civilisation would be surprised by it. :(
But yes, any advanced civilization would have stacks upon stacks of rules which contradict and complicate things. There's just no way around it.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Oh and afaik only some english speaking countries use AM/PM, the rest of the world uses the 24h based system doesn't it?
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.
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.
Just the basic relativistic effects even with some type of instant transfers would make most communication and so on massively painful mess.
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.
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.
That is not a feature we share. We only occasionally make things better for all of humanity.
Previously there were 10?
The Hebrew calendar always used 12 months I think. What are you referring to, and where is your evidence? Happy Rosh HaShana!
Later on (during Augustus’s rule, I think), Quintilis and Sextilis became July and August, but by that time they were _already_ confusingly named.
I wonder if are there other languages also presenting this feature. I believe there are.
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!
1. Proclaim a new era and set up a new calendar.
2. Replace alien language.
3. Destroy or neutralise alien gods.
4. Destroy alien machinery of government and Control.
5. Take land and wealth from individual aliens. Time to forget a dead empire and build a living republic.
It was even the first rule to destroy the calendar. He was a genius!
Also, it's days start in the middle of the other calendar's days
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."
13 months, 28 days each. Year day in the end not belonging to any month, leap day every leap year in the middle of the summer.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
"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".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.
One month:
00 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09
10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39
40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49
50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59
60
Every month ends with a blank day (60), with the exception of the last month in non-leap years.
(If the moon were somehow stationary relative to the earth, it would still go through a full cycle of phases, giving us one lunar month for free.)
I look forward to the day when this person’s wishes to not be shared on HN are granted in full.
I sometimes wonder how the code to handle all this would look like.
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.
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
"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"
But then again if the Aliens land out in Central America they may believe our calendar has already ended and gift us a more logical one. :)
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.
The we could fix the months and be done with it.
Like this part:
"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?!"
They are after beer.
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.
The rest is chaos.
Aliens: "FOR ALL THIS YOU MUST DIE."
Humans: "Fair enough"
Nope, we they are divided into days
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hindu_calendar
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.
365 = 10^2 + 11^2 + 12^2 = 13^2 + 14^2
https://www.seanmcdonald.xyz/p/the-clockchain-protocol-the-l...
Some call it "backwards compatibility".
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.
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 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.
It doesn't look more or less nice to me than the base 10 version. Can you describe what is supposed to make it look nicer, especially to aliens?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
Ad hominem attack.
> 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.
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))
Anyhoo, I'm a big fan of this book if you've not read it yet: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-New-Testament-Pheme-Perkins/d...
But I suspect you may have.
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]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_the_Apostles#Title,_un...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark#Authorship,_dat...
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_the_Galatians#Date
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_Philemon#Compositio...
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_the_Philippians#Com...
[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source
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.
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.
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.
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.
I believe the next version of ISO 8601 is expected to support different calendar & time systems.
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.
> "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]
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.
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".
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.
Try to roll past it with a head shake.
Are there any scholars that do agree to this?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scientific observations can be repeated. Religion teachings are, almost by definition, the exact opposite.
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.
So, we usually say, 8 o clock in third pair means PM, or 8 o clock in 1st pair means AM.
(I'd also avoid terminology like bi-monthly and semi-monthly as it's a predictable point of confusion.)
We are confused when TSA staff in the US talk about quart bags.
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.
>> 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?