Someday aliens will land and all will be fine until we explain our calendar | Hacker News Reader

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

twitter.com

1,514 pointsthunderbong989 comments

I didn't appreciate until recently that the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar.

Like not by some forgotten technocrats incidentally during his time, but Julius Caesar himself as a subject matter expert, as a side-project. With consultation, certainly, but by his initiative, from long-standing engagement with the problem in one of his early jobs from long before he was a main character of the Roman story.

Digestable and entertaining (fragment of a) video on the topic:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fD-R35DSSZY&t=1312s

People mostly remember Caesar as a ruler, however in 63 BC (5 years before the Gallic wars) Caeser managed to get himself elected as Pontifex Maximus (chief high priest).

Adjusting the calendar was as part of the duties of the Pontifex Maximus. They decided public holidays and they decided whether to add an "intercalary month" (at the end of February which used to be the last month).

There are many interesting things to say about this but since this is hacker news I'm going ro focus on one:

Caesar was away campaigning a lot and the Pontifex could adjust the calendar only while physically in Rome. So many years went by without calendar fixes.

After having benefited from the confusion and the edge he had by understanding the calendar (like knowing he could safely cross the Adriatic when his opponent assumed that crossing it that given month was a bad luck) he decided to fix the calendar so that it doesn't require a human in the loop.

In a way, he automated himself out of his job.

And in that calender, February is the last month, which makes it the logical month for adjusting leap years.

> the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar

Pope Gregory has entered the chat

there have been some changes to the calendar since Caesar, especially when people went to bed Thursday 4 October 1582 and woke up on Friday 15 October 1582, and thereafter there were no more leap years on centuries except every 400 years.

https://www.onthisday.com/articles/gregory-conquers-julius-c...

He didn't just throw dice or march in, see what's what and grab the locals by the nadgers.

JC was quite a chap and of course why its called the Julian Calendar. Many other calendars are available. Kalends is the source of the name for calendar and the Roman day of month counting is pretty involved - http://www.polysyllabic.com/?q=calhistory/earlier/roman/kale... Kalends, nones and ides.

JS died on the ides of March ...

I’m unsure how commonly known this is, but also note that July and August are named after Julius Caesar and Emperor Augustus

Well worth the watch, also shows that Ceasar's main character arc was bossted by his calendar knowledge and authority.

I find the implication that aliens are rational and have no subrational concepts due to tradition and habit interesting, as it sort of implies that these kinds of outgrowths are not necessary and can just be done away with. The narrator starts from a position of not wanting to legitimize or historicize beyond reductive statements like "some ancient civilization did XYZ". I'll admit that I skimmed through the last part of the thread, so I might have missed something, but I don't see any mention of the decimal calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar, or why that failed. I get that this is supposed to be funny, but the indirect message of getting rid of whatever doesn't make conscious sense is simplistic, and spoils the fun for me. Humans are stupid, very funny.

The thing that would've brought it around for me is a punchline where the alien says something like "wow, your system is so clean and simple compared to ours".

I do think there's a certain degree of humor when looking back at history. There are plenty of things to laugh at in hindsight. But the thing that rubs me wrong is the undertone that this is somehow a distinctly human trait or inherently a bad thing. That somehow only humanity is subject to the impact of evolution and gradual learning over time.

And to those complaining that we should just have fun with this, I get it. There's some funny stuff in there. But that shouldn't absolve the thread of criticism. It's fair to point out that it's a pretty reductionist take when combined with the implication that humans are uniquely stupid. It's an easy problem to solve with a very slight reframing. $0.02.

At the end of the story they isolate us from them and prevent us from reaching the stars, I don't think the implication is that this is just due to the weird calendar system. I think its more than that, our inability to rid ourselves from our tradition and religious heritage has more profound implications. We don't look at things rationally and make decisions to improve ourselves. The aliens may have gone through similar steps in their evolution of their civilization so they probably know what it *means* if a post-interstellar species still uses a gods birthday to count time.

We aren't making any collective rational decisions yet, we build elaborate structures around tradition that more or less managed to reduce our collective human suffering at least in the northern hemisphere. It took us hundreds of years to rid ourselves from slavery and it will probably take us hundreds more to figure out that murdering billions of animals is bad for example. We might never figure out how to prevent poverty, inequality, racism, imperialism, colonialism and war. We probably make earth uninhabitable way before then anyhow.

I can see why aliens want to isolate and not want to talk to us. Not because of the calendar system we use, but because of what it represents.

[flagged]

> subrational concepts

More like vestigial organs that our society isn't capable enough to excise.

Yeah, often people leap to "aliens" being some higher intelligence than us who will judge our poor sub-optimal decisions. Though to me it seems more likely that any life we encounter is more likely to be less intelligent, if intelligent at all.

I'm also not a fan of the "alien-who-is-really-the-writer has an objectively superior and judgmental perspective" genre, even when it's trying to be funny. Some movies: K-PAX was one, Powder, another.

This gets even more complicated when you introduce dealing with foreign countries that actually don't follow the western calendar system. Such as the standard Persian calendar months and years. Also, did you know that the arabic Islamic calendar dates and the persian calendar dates don't agree? Because the traditional calendar dating back to the maximum geograhpical extent of the Persian empire is solar based, while the standard Islamic calendar is entirely lunar based.

And the persian calendar is solar based and the year resets on Nowruz (new years day) around the spring equinox, but the practiced holidays are based on the lunar islamic months? But also some holidays like Nowruz are observed based on the solar date.

This means you've got Nowruz occuring on approximately the same time in the weather season every year, while relative to the western calendar, notable holidays like Eid al-fitr and Eid al-adha and the start of Ramadan etc move backwards in calendar date approxiamtely 10 or 11 days per year. Some years Ramadan might occur in the middle of winter and much later on it will be in the middle of summer.

This series of tweets doesn't even begin to get into the possible opportunities for confusion when working between three different calendar systems... And western countries where the standard work week is M-F but others where Friday is the day of rest and people work on a 6-day work week on a persian or arabic islamic calendar, but some companies give their employees a two day weekend so they're off on Friday and Saturday, but the local timezone equivalent of Sunday is definitely a normal workday... I could go on.

mmmm wait until you know that Persians' extra day off is not Saturday, it's Thursday.

Also that in Muslim countries that take Sat and Sun off, they all leave at Friday noon to attend the Friday prayer.

Now what if you have a Persian embassy in a foreign country (they are at the verge of extinction though), it will be closed on Friday, Sat, and Sun!, plus all the holidays of Iran and the host country. They almost never work (This sentence was not only about their days off)

If you have a company that has a branch in Iran, no luck for remote meetings on Thursdays all the way to Sundays!

The Qeng Ho in Deepness in the Sky had the right idea. They traveled from planet to planet in STL ships, and counted time purely in seconds. They had to account for relativity, but nothing else.

A short task might take a kilosecond (about 16 minutes), a watch schedule might plan for activities covering a megasecond (close enough to a month for you and me), while a gigasecond is a good chunk of your life (32 years).

"Calendar frippery" was left entirely to the civilations they visited. Since individual civilizations rarely lasted long enough to see repeat visits from the same ship, it wasn't important for the traders to learn the local calendar in any detail. One of the characters opines that you know you have stayed in port too long when your crew start using the local calendar.

Except it would be absolutely impractical to actually use in practice by any species/societies that have to sleep on a regular basis and in general need cycles. If all your "natural cycles" happen to fit well into base-10, well, that's great. Otherwise, you need to base your cycles on something else, which is exactly what calendars do.

And, just by the way, the Gregorian calendar is bad and messy, but the ideas it's built upon are absolutely great and are not results of shower-thinking and twitter-shitposting, but arise from pure practicality. They suit Earth, and humans are earthlings, their cycles are defined by the Earth. A year is a crucial cycle, because it defines weather so much. A day is a crucial cycle, because it defines when it's dark outside. A lunar month is a natural and pretty good cycle, because Moon cycles do actually affect life on Earth, but it isn't crucial, which is exactly the reason, why Gregorian calendar happens to get away with pretty much ignoring this one, unlike a day and a year. Still, it explains why most calendars through history prefer months being close to 27.3 days, and why weeks are 7 days (a quarter of 28). Both cycles also are both long enough and short enough to be useful for practical reasons, like organizing work schedules even without relying on celestial bodies. Furthermore, it even appears they are not enough, which is why the year is divided into "quarters" for business purposes like accounting. And these happen to be fairly close to 30 days, which happens to be a very neat divider of 360, which is close enough to a year on the one side, and a very neat number that naturally divides all small numbers up to 6 on the other side, which makes it easy to work with (unlike base-10, BTW, since that cannot be divided by 3).

All of which explains, why French Republican calendar is actually a great idea and unfortunately failed (for a fairly stupid reason, IMO), and base-10 day is not so great (although it has merit, since modern digits are base-10) and naturally failed.

Now, these totally imaginary and having nothing to do with reality aliens of yours may not have earth-like and human-like cycles, but they surely have cycles of their own. So it is unlikely that magnitude-1000 time measurement with no cycles in-between can work for them either.

ah yes, "seconds", the "second minúte part of an hour", i.e. 1/60th of 1/60th of 1/24th of the average time it takes the Earth to rotate towards Sol. very sensible default.

> "At the start of the year?"

> "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)

It was the Romans who inserted a leap month inside February between the 23rd and 24th. Since the two consuls ruled on alternating months, adding an extra month after February would give one consul one more ruling month, making it somewhat unfair. Since leap years were handled irregularly back then, they were leap months, not leap days.

The Julian calendar introduced the leap day instead, and maintained it in February as originally, and introduced it every 4 years (except years dividable by 100).

This is also around the same time that July and August were named to their current names (named after Caesar and Augustus). Before that, they had had names equal to fifth and sixth month, respectively, like September comes from seventh.

February, the last month of the year was shorter because the year isn’t long enough to give it 30 days

Originally February had 30 days, along with all the other months. (The 5 or 6 remaining days at various times were either extra days which didn't belong to a month or were omitted until there was a month's worth of them to catch up on.)

February got shorter because (being the last month of the year) it had days removed in order to add them to other months -- what was originally February 30th (the end of the year) became February 23rd (the end of the year, after which the leap day is inserted).

> Because leap day is at the end of the year, but at some time we moved the start of the year two months back (same reason why September through December now are the ninth through twelfth month of the year, not the seventh through tenth)

There is actually no hard evidence that the Romans ever started their calendar in March instead of January. The earliest contemporaneous use of the calendar relies on January 1 as the start of the year, short February, and with intercalation happening after (or maybe within) February.

The primary evidence we use to indicate that the start of the year shifted is... the apparently wrong month names. Some writers did describe a calendar that starts at March and ends in December, with winter basically having no proper calendar--but these are writers describing how their calendar worked several centuries ago, attributing it to mythological figures, and the explanation strikes me as very heavily a "just so" explanation.

If you want my hypothesis, the Roman civil year never started in March. But March would have had some amount of primacy, as it indicates the start of the planting year. Shenanigans in the calendar would have occurred in February to ensure that the equinox is properly timed to happen in March. But the civil year would have started closer to the beginning of winter for other reasons (perhaps taxation? but finding this level of granularity of information on Roman taxation is difficult).

In this hypothesis, the month names were not incorrect because they were never intended to count from the beginning of the year. Note that the first 6 months of the civil year have names, while the last 6 are merely numbered. It makes no sense to me that you'd make up special names for the first 4 and the last 2 months of the year, while skipping everything in the middle.

He didn't mention LEAP-SECONDS which are at THE END OF THE YEAR.

Couldn't this whole thread just be condensed to: we have a thing called culture which is not completely rational or efficient? I'm sure the aliens would get that - they would probably have something similar, albeit with different irrationalities and inefficiencies.

You don't even have to introduce culture. "We built a simple time system a long time ago. Some of its initial assumptions were wrong and we've been patching it up as we go ever since". I'm sure the aliens have a word for "technical debt".

Also, dividing the day into 24hs is kind of genius. Sure, 10 is nice, but good luck dividing it neatly into 3 parts.

That would be significantly less funny and interesting.

Parts of it yes. The day/month/year thing though is fundamenally based on astronomical observations that dont fit into each other with fractions (rotation of earth around sun, orbit of moon around earth, orbit of earth around sun) which is kind of missed here.

yes, but then it'd be dull and not funny. the whole USP of Foone is that they explain things in a fun and engaging way.

"But enough about our calendar, let's hear about yours"

"Well, due to what makes a planet habitable, you won't be surprised that our planets year and day isn't incredibly different from yours..."

"But it took you millions of years to get here, why is your calendar based on a place you haven't been to in so long?"

"Well our species lifespan is about 100 years, so, actually, I was never there"

"But I guess you use that calendar to communicate back home?"

"Well, actually, the planet was swallowed by the star during its first red giant phase..."

"So your clock and calendar is based on a planet your separated from by generations, and which doesn't even exist anymore?"

"It does seem silly when you put it like that..."

"But it must be tiring writing out several digits for the year..."

"Oh, we solved that problem, we generally just write the last few digits, and it only becomes a problem every few generations"

"Cool, we just got rid of a system like that, but I'm sure it'll come back soon. Changing the subject, why do you have so many different computers?"

"Well, this is going to seem a bit silly, but we started using quantum computers a long time ago. Since there were 7 quantum states, each manufacturer had its own idea of which state should come first in memory."

Me: pats alien on back, "Dude, I feel you."

Definitely the best comment I read on this thread.

Not sure if this was the intention, but I read it as both recognizing the original post as funny, and yet recognizing that we (as in humanity) aren't "stupid" for having this complex system, but that's just how things develop.

Having both views live together is the best take on this.

So, for comparison - in Poland we use

- 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.

> "Mars month"

I though marzec came from marznąć meaning "to freeze".

So you have the day before "seventh day" be called "fifth day"?

> "second day"

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))

"Middle day" isn't the middle day?

Looks cute.

Alien: So what is your first month?

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.

Funny! :D the said alien should then talk with Lithuanian because every month name more or less is describes what is happening during that month

For what it's worth, leap day is at the "end" of a year. It's just a year that starts in March—an assumption shared with several other odd properties of this calendar.

This is why September, October, November and December are named after the numbers 7, 8, 9 and 10: they are the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month if you start the year in March, like we used to.

Evidence for this is September October November and December are named as seventh eighth ninth and tenth months which matches with a year starting in March obviously intentionally at the spring equinox but calendar inaccuracies lost that.

Quarters should begin and end with equinoxes and solstices and be equivalent with seasons, major holidays aligned with quarter transitions and solar milestones make sense.

For a few years I lived my life rigorously to the beat of the french revolutionary calendar - i was very enamoured by its consistent month partitioning, and dumping the leap day at the end of the year's festival days. The major downside is that the months were named after French seasonal characteristics, which... doesn't really work.

The French revolutionaries made a whole lot of mistakes, some fatal, because they liked to dictate things top down.

Ooh, that's interesting. Did you use decimal time as well?

Don't tell the aliens about the missing 12 days in 1752: https://www.augustachronicle.com/story/lifestyle/columns/201...

Or the 11 missing days in 1582.

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.

This was harmless compared to the Swedish calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar

It's not just days, there is a whole time period of a bunch of years where its not fully clear if they did exist or where skipped. I just forgot when.

Not to mention that quite a few countries are also missing those 12 days, but in completely different years. Greece did so in 1923, for example.

Or the missing day in samoa in 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16351377

This is absolutely hilarious, and despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well, with each chunk funnier than the last :)

A few notes:

- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

- US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;

- May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off) but I consider omitting the whole DST thing a major missed opportunity. :)

Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have. I believe they still maintain some Internet presence but mostly gave up on promoting it. Good luck breaking 1000+yo habits.

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week

/Officially/ almost everyone has standardized on ISO 8601 where Monday = 1 and Sunday = 7. But unofficially, not really. The week is still popularly understood to start on Sunday in English Canada, and probably some other parts of the English-speaking world.

A quick check of Wikipedia suggests Arabic, Portuguese and Vietnamese, all use number-based systems to name the days of the week, and they are indexed from Sunday = 1. But yes, the other is more common. Most of the Slavic languages, and Chinese, among others, use indexed from Monday = 1.

Then there's Swahili: Saturday = 1 and Friday = 7. Though personally, I believe Sunday is the 0th day of the week.

This is incorrect. The US is hardly the only country where people consider Sunday to be the first day of the week. Anyone with some understanding of the history of our weekdays does so, and that historical understanding is not limited to Americans.

It's also not true that the US is the only country to use 12h time; many countries do. Including mine. If you need to write time without ambiguity, you use the 24h format, but in everyday use and in cases where context makes it clear what you mean, people use the 12h format.

Legit question. What is a weekend in the US? Is a weekend in the US Friday - Saturday?

Most places consider the week to end with Sunday and the weekend is usually considered to be from after work on Friday(or technically Saturday) until Monday starts.

But when an American says "right over the weekend", do they mean Sunday, since the US week starts on Sunday? Or does the week actually start on Monday as in most places?

I'm from this planet, and even I am confused with all of us, but especially with Americans.

A lot of people have already commented on how Israel and the Middle East consider Sunday to be the first day of the week, but I'd like to add that the week itself seems to originate in Judaism (Wikipedia, "Week"):

"A continuous seven-day cycle that runs throughout history without reference to the phases of the moon was first practiced in Judaism, dated to the 6th century BC at the latest."

In Judaism the week starts from Sunday, so you could argue that it's not completely illogical for it to be the case in the US.

Changing the rest day of the week to Sunday was a change made in Christianity by the Council of Laodicea:

"Christians must not judaize by resting on the Sabbath, but must work on that day, rather honouring the Lord’s Day; and, if they can, resting then as Christians. But if any shall be found to be judaizers, let them be anathema from Christ".

Honestly I didn't find it funny, maybe because it ignores the reasons of the inconsistencies, that by the way are perfectly understandable looking at space.

Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases. Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because Romans used to go to war in the Spring.

Asimov had an excellent chapter on calendar in his divulgative book The Universe, explaining why it's not so easy to design a regular "logical" calendar.

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

It's not the only one. In Portuguese, the names of Monday .. Friday are literally "second .. sixth fair [day]", with Saturday and Sunday being "sábado" (sabbath) and "domingo" (lord's day).

I'm not sure which other countries follow the convention, but it's the numbering used in the Bible so I would be surprised if there aren't others.

In Hebrew the weekdays are named "First", "Second", etc. making "Shabbat" ie Saturday, the last day of the week.

> the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;

Here in Norway we use 24 hours when writing; but we use 12 hour system when speaking - if that makes any sense?

I.e. we would say: "Vi spiser middag klokka fem (5)" [We eat dinner at five o'clock]; but we'd write it with 17 typically. We never use the terms AM/PM but can occasionally specify daytime/nighttime if it's uncertain which of the two we are talking about. I.e. "Jeg kom hjem fra jobb klokka fem (5) om morgenen" [I came home from work at five in the morning].

Both of your first points are factually incorrect - I’d have to imagine some bubble-bias involved, but many countries aside from the US use the 12 hour clock and start their calendars on Sunday.

There was a more significant effort to decimalise time (and the calendar to some extent) after the French Revolution, along with introducing the metric system everywhere. People hated it and they eventually switched back. A bit of related trivia is that France only accepted the Greenwich Meridian on maps/charts on the condition that the international meridian conference (of 1884) also concluded that the convened nations also resolved that decimal time was a good idea and they should work towards it.

>- Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

Does anyone know why? This has always seemed a bit weird to me. I mean the US is a fairly religious country and it's pretty much known to anyone that Sunday is the 7th day in Christianity?

And on the first day God ended His work which He had done, and He rested on the first day from all His work which He had done. Then God blessed the first day and sanctified it, because in it He rested from all His work which God had created and made.

edit: just looked it up. Apparently Sunday = Restday is a catholic thing and Jews / Muslims use Sunday as their first day!

How and why America switched as Christian nation I'm still not sure.

> - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;

For German speaking countries: rather always#. In fact, you don't even say 3 PM. Just "drei". I think everything from 8 AM to 7 PM is considered "business hours" - and everything else needs clarification ("4 in the morning").

And we call 0:00 "12 Uhr Mitternacht" as well, I think nobody says "0 Uhr". But at least writing it down makes sense.

# Nobody I knows really uses "15 Uhr" to say 3 PM (people might sometimes do, but I never hear it, it sounds wrong, maybe "nerdy")

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

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.

> US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;

Maybe this is because I grew up when analog clocks were common, but it would feel extremely weird to say “15 o’clock” in speech instead of “3pm”. Even though it’s written down as 15.

I think you’re right that younger generations that grew up with digital are more likely to answer “fifteen oh seven” when you ask the time whereas I’d be more likely to read the same time and say “ten past three”

(Slovenian background)

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

Not correct, as others have pointed out. Regardless, why is it more or less logical for any particular day to be considered the start of the week? Hell, it seems that even in several countries that use Monday as the first day of the week, the names of the day reflect that Monday is the second day of the week!

I personally like Sunday and Saturday to be the opposite ends of the week. Sunday and Saturday are both considered rest days for the most part, and I think rest days are a good way to both start and finish your week. But I recognize that there's still really no logical basis for this; it's just what I grew up with so it "feels right". Just as those of you who grew up in a Monday-indexed week are used to it, so that "feels right" to you.

Nit: foone uses they/them pronouns and has previously expressed some displeasure with the way they get misgendered when their posts hit hacker news. Queer folks seem to agree that if you aren’t sure what someone’s pronouns are, they/them is a good default (only until they tell you or you find out the correct pronouns).

As a non-binary person myself I always find it interesting when people assume he/him for every random internet commenter. Happens on HN a lot.

> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have.

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].

[1] https://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/48c6d4c3d54cf

[2] https://anoopelias.github.io/tranquility-calendar/

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

No, in Israel Sunday is the first day of the week too, because the weekend is Friday-Saturday (Shabbath). In Hebrew, though, the week days are named rather simply - except for Sabbath, they are just "Day 1" (Sunday), ..., "Day 6" (Friday). OTOH, that's exactly how they were numbered in the Bible, so...

Yes. It should end with “…and this is the best system we’ve found, because all other ones were ditched for being too complicated.”

Sunday is the first day of the week in crontab.

First index in the array, 0.

In Denmark we use 24h, but we call them by their 12h equivalent, e.g. "15:15" is "a quarter past three". However, you could also say: "It's now 21 30" to signify half past nine. Or some people would say: "It's half 10". Okay, having 24h clocks don't make it easier it seems.

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

Just adding to the rest of the responses but Japan also has a very... contrived relationship with what counts as "the beginning of the week" and most people would say Sunday is that day.

> however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;

That happens in Portuguese (brazilian, at least). Digital clocks go through 0-23 hours, but the second half is _sometimes_ named as 1-11 afternoon/night (whatever fits your taste). Hour 0 is never referred to as 12, though: it's always 0 or "half night"

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

There's one other country in particular that firmly designates Saturday as the seventh day of the week: Israel. (Canada, Japan and Brazil also use Sunday as the first day of the week.)

I'm not religious, but I was raised Seventh-day Adventist, which worships on the seventh day, which for the past couple millennia has been Saturday. There is no end to conspiracy theories in the church about the seventh day of the week being designated as Sunday and how this (and particularly the compulsion to worship on Sunday instead of Saturday) is a sign of the end times.

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

I think Israel, and Jews in general consider Sunday the first day of the week.

Hopefully the Aliens will leave the planet before the discussion gets to G11n...

"The Problem with Time & Timezones" - https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internationalization_and_local...

>* - US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used conversationally;*

I think most countries use 12h time casually (conversationally and so on), but most understand 24h time - and it's used officially (e.g. in state communications) in many. It's in the US though that people often need it explained.

In Arabic, Sunday is Ahad (first) Monday is Ithnain (second) and so on until Friday which is Jum’a (gathering) and Sabit (comes from Sabbath I think?) as Saturday.

So the US is not the only country that considers Sunday to be the first day, etymologically speaking. I think the first day in the Middle East is Saturday because people work on that day (on Friday is a day off, unless things changed since the 70s)

…

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

Many Arabic countries have the weekend on Friday and Saturday and work on Sunday. I think they probably all start the week on Sunday for this reason. No idea why the US does too though!

Living in Brazil, I always heard that Sunday is the first day of the week. Accordingly, we do name most of the week days by number, sort of. Monday is ”Segunda-feira”, which a literal translation would be “Second fair”. The “Third fair, Fourth fair, Fifth fair, Sixth-fair”.

just fyi the author's pronouns are they/them ( they're in their twitter bio )

> US (and maybe one or two English-speaking countries) are the only ones using 12h time, the rest of the world uses 24hrs, however 12h _sometimes_ is used

India uses 12h time (except in military talk; & railway timetable display boards) in day to day life. I have never heard in 29 years somebody using 15 as 3, or 20 as 8pm. Even till few years ago, atound 2008, flights times at Delhi Airport too were displayed in 12h, on mechanical card spinner display board (where a card with letter falls & next one comes, on a roll until desired letter comes). Seeing that board as a kid was highlight of my childhood trips to airport.rt.

Israel (where I spend several months/year) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week. The workweek is Sunday through Thursday.

Weekend is Friday and Saturday. I suspect many Islamic countries are the same way.

> Also, for those interested, look up Swatch time invented in late 90s and touted as more logical replacement of the mess that we have.

Swatch Time is just a rebranding of French Revolutionary decimal time displaying the hour number next to the minute. It was introduced a bit before the metric system in 1793 but was made optional in 1795 and finally dropped in 1806. Swatch has always been extremely good at marketing but I don’t like crediting a corporation for something they didn’t invent.

- Sunday is the first day of the week (even by name, literally the first day) in Israel/Hebrew.

- In Germany we use the 12h format in day to day conversation

- Swatch time was so cool when I was a teenager

Over here in Sri Lanka:

1) I've seen calendars with both starting days (Sunday/Monday). Anecdotally, calendars with Sunday as the first day seemed to be more popular when I was a kid; now, calendars with Monday as the first day seem to be more common.

2) The 12-hour system is far more popular here than the 24-hour system. Not that we don't use it, but in my experience, 24-hour tends to be mainly used in professional settings; 12-hour is used essentially everywhere else.

Colloquially, lot of places use 12h - it's always "we're going to the restaurant at 8", never "at 20" or "at 20:00", at least in the countries I've lived or visited. But officially it's still 24h - which may be more confusing or less confusing, depending on your point of view.

And times (with timezones, and leap seconds, and DST, and so on) add another level of fun to it.

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

In Brazil, I think most people consider Sunday the first the of the week, in Portuguese the days of the week sound like ordinal numbers, Monday sounds like 2nd, Tuesday sounds 3rd, and so on. So it's pretty logical to consider Sunday the first day of the week.

I don't know that we necessarily consider Sunday first in any way except in the default / traditional presentation of weeks in calendars -- which is to say, it's a visual thing but not something that seems to impact work or life in any meaningful sense. I think pretty much all calendaring programs can show Monday as the first day if you prefer.

The Swatch time is a variation on the fractional day. Astronomers use it, with .00 being noon and .50 being midnight. You can extend it to any precision you like, 1/100,000th of a day makes for a good 'decimal second.'

I like knowing what percentage of the day is over, a friend of mine says it'd drive her crazy knowing exactly how much time gets wasted.

> May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off)

Reading through to the last bits I was foreseeing the launch of a specific space faring vehicle except it would have failed in some way because of non-metric units (purposefully not saying of which kind) thus closing by leaving a loose thread up another level of insanity.

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

In a few EU countries people have started implying Sunday could somehow be the start (even though they are protestant societies! Makes no sense), so I think the US is leaking lunacy to the rest of the world.

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

Where I live we are taught that Monday is the first day of the week, yet most calendars start on Sunday. It's the sort of question you ask your teachers at school and nobody knows how to answer.

What is the advantage of adopting any of those, other than being a bit more in sync with other countries? None of them imply anything other than semantic difference, there is very little advantage and a lot of pain if we were to adopt those "standards".

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

First day of the working week is Sunday in Nepal. I assume they consider Sunday the start of the week, but I'm not Nepalese. This is just a random fact I remember from visiting.

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be 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.

Israel also starts the week on Sunday, in keeping with Saturday being the Jewish end of week sabbath.

In Hebrew the days of the week don't really have names. They are simply called (direct translation here) "first day" "second day" etc. Except for Saturday which is called "Shabbat" instead of "seventh day".

All of Christianity puts Sunday as the first day, as does the calendar of Judaism.

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.

The US, Canada, China, Japan and most of South America. Oh. And the Phillipines consider Sunday the beginning of the week. And someone just shouted at me that Israel considers Sunday the beginning of the week, but that seems unlikely to me.

I'd love to hear the logic of why Monday should be the first day of the week.

> This is absolutely hilarious

Not absolutely, it could be even more hilarious, if PM/AM switches happened at 11:00 and 23:00, not at 12:00 and 00:00. Or even better, the switch could ignore seasonal timezone shift.

Sunday is the first day of the week in Israel, not just on paper but very much in practice. I know this because Israelis I worked with will be unavailable on Friday but they will start emailing you Sunday morning.

Perhaps you mean 24h _sometimes_ is used conversationally!

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!

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

Japan does too; I blame the American occupation (and plenty of other illogical things).

> DST

I always felt that DST was invented to prevent people from realizing that they are forced to wake up and get out of the house before dawn during the winter. It would literally alienate people from work life.

> - Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

I assume Israel must too since shabbat, the seventh day of rest, is Saturday.

>despite being long form, fits Twitter format very well

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 picked 3 random countries and 2/3 of them had calendars starting with Sunday.

Calendars starting with Sunday: Nambia, Trinidad and Tobago. Calendars starting with Monday: Benin.

>Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week

Sunday is the first day of the week in much of the middle east

I had a hell of a time trying to find a pill planner that didn't start on Sunday. I was ready to 3D print one when I found one that's circular.

> Per my knowledge US is the only country which stubbornly (and illogically) considers Sunday to be the first day of the week;

What do you mean by this? I mean, what behaviors do US people exhibit to show this to be true?

I was born in the US and have lived here almost my entire life. I consider Monday to be the first day of the week, and I haven't seen anything in US culture to indicate that other people disagree or behave otherwise (except for the default behavior in some calendar apps in the US locale).

Sunday is also the first day of the week in Canada (actually a separate country from the US despite appearances).

at Swatch

https://www.swatch.com/en-en/internet-time.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

Why is it illogical to have Sunday be the first day of the week? Maybe Saturday is logically the first day of the week since nobody in their right minds would want a work day (assuming a 5 day work Week) to be the first day. Like eating dessert first, starting the week with a day off just makes logical sense.

I saw someone wearing a Swatch Time t-shirt today!

just think if he had to explain how the date for easter is calculated

> May be the author got tired (or whatever he took started to wear off)

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.

A fun bit of trivia is that it wasn't until the middle of the 18th century that it became standard in Europe to start the new year on January 1. Up until that point many regions used March 25 as the date of the New Year. So, for example the day March 24, 1715 would have been followed by March 25, 1716.

March 25 was the Feast of the Annunciation whereas January 1 was the Feast of the Circumcision, so the two dating methods were called Annunciation Style and Circumcision Style.

Obviously this created some ambiguity since the Circumcision Style date March 24, 1716 would be rendered March 24, 1715 when written Annunciation Style. Around the time of the transition to Annunciation Style dating in Britain you actually see people writing both dates together to avoid confusion, usually with the Circumcision Style date below the Annunciation Style date. (You can see an example here: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3b/Memorial...)

Oh, is that why Tolkien had Frodo throw the Ring in the Fire on March 25? And then King Elessar made that day the first day of the New Year. And the tradition held on until the 18th century. Huh.

> He's written about in a famous book but historical records are spotty

Don't want to start a religious debate, but it really annoys me when for some reason, multiple documents that were later compiled into a book are not historical documents, just because they were treated as religious texts by the church councils 300 years later. The Bible isn't a book that Christians all sat down and wrote. It's a collection of many different historical documents written by many different people.

There are many documents dating from ancient Rome (and earlier) that we don't consider historical because of their fantastic or religious nature. The set of documents you refer to are self-contradictory and describe supernatural events that no other author recorded.

Hell, historians take Herodotus with a grain of salt, and he was an actual historian.

Because it's about a books who explain than at last, two people can come back from death... days after it. Historians have doubts about this (and other weird events from this books) and therefore do not keep this specifics book as very credible sources. That said, no real historian actually doubt of the historical existence of the famous religious leader from the past.

Biblical books are biased to assert Jesus existed as they describe him. There are no neutral historical records to prove he specifically existed. Besides, your “historical documents” contain competing narratives of events with each other, supernatural magic, and exist as part of a handpicked religious narrative that left other books out at that.

Reminds me of Dave Allen's sketch about teaching kids to tell the time:

“and the third hand is the second hand…”

----

update: found it: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=0QVPUIRGthI

Consistency is for small minds. I expect aliens to have much broader issues with time keeping.

Rotations of different galaxies? Weird alien rulers imposing their names like "X Æ A-12" for 3rd rotation even if 12 is in the name.

Having video calls scheduling is hard between Earth time zones - good luck scheduling video call between two galaxies.

The bigger the problems you have to handle at scale the more annoying are small, fully unnecessary inconsistencies in the peaces which compose the system in which your problems exist.

Big things have failed due to small overlooked inconsistencies in handling date times.

The lag would be enormous between galaxies, unless we invent quantum entanglement, in which case the lag is also irrelevant because you can teleport yourself.

I'm a little bit surprised nobody pointed out the obvious.

When we first communicate with aliens about our time system we will start by explaining unix epoch.

Only than will we break out the spaghetti code required to map dates and zones and the uncertainty of some historical jumps.

Well, unix timestamps are still tied to UTC, which has leap seconds for some reason...

I would prefer if we had a few seconds of an offset with Zulu "GMT" Time (pardon the double acronym).

In fact all of these points have valid reasons which simply reflect some form of cruft. For instance, until Caesar February was the last month of the year, so there was an intercalation of a month of varying length every two years(which made more sense). Also, the months September, October, November, December actually were the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months of the year. And all the months were 30 days (actually alternatively 29 and 31 days), but the mensis intercalaris which was either 22 or 23 days.

Julius Caesar changed this because during the Civil wars of the late Republic, many times there was no Great Pontiff to do the calculations, so the additional month were left out a few times and the calendar was really getting out of sync. He changed the beginning of the year from the Spring solstice to January 1st, because that was the day of the consular election (and the consuls were elected for one year, so that made more sense as the years were named from the consuls that were elected).

As for the birth of Jesus, we now know that it must be off by a few years. But originally, it was just the best guess they could come with; once it was found that Jesus actually wasn't born when initially thought, well, tough luck, it simply stayed as it was because it was too difficult to change after centuries of counting this way already.

Regarding the use of base 60 for time, it made sense because it allows matching the course of the Sun and the Moon across the year (about 360 days), across the month (lunar month is 29.5 days) and the day. That's also why we cut circles in 360°: to allow for easy astronomical calculation (by approximating the year to 360 days, the lunation to 30 days), and splitting the day and night into 12 hours.

Notice that until the invention of mechanical clocks, there was 12 hours a day and 12 hours a night, therefore hours were of varying length depending upon seasons, but OTOH using a sundial was dead simple -- which made sense when you had sundials, but no clocks...

An interesting aside the Cotsworth Calendar is such an obvious approach to the months problem it makes me wonder why it was not adopted in the first place.

We have 13 months of 28 days each. The 9th is always a Monday the 19th is always a Thursday. "Two months from now" always means the same thing and always means the same number of days.

The extra day is New Years Day. It's a holiday and does not belong to any month - or belongs to it's own month if you prefer. On Leap Years there are two of these days.

13 is prime and thus quarterly planning gets complicated. Quarterly planning is there because of the seasons and agriculture.

Weeks aren't subdivisions of months, they are completely independent of months and years. There is good reason for this.

Having months alternate between long and short (as they typically do) is a lot better than just having one short month. It would get weird with things like rent payments if you have one month that is way shorter than the others. (although I do wish they chose a 30 day month to occasionally add a 31st day for leap year)

And I'm not sure we'd be better off with time done with multiples of ten rather than highly composite numbers like 24 and 60.

Obviously our system is far from perfect, but it's not all that surprising it is the way it is.

Except for leap seconds. Leap seconds are just stupid. Far better to make adjustments like that much more rarely.

A week is a quarter of a lunar month, we kept them around after months stopped being lunar, because they are kind of nice.

I saw when i was in Japan a various billboards marking a 25 hour service I thought it was some kind of mistake but apparently they call 1 am the hour 25...I think I saw it in Okinawa

It’s more than just 25, they often go to 29, to indicate 5am. They do this to make it clear that it is an overnight service starting in one calendar day and terminating in another. It’s not just a simple substitute for “1 am”.

It's called 30-hour clock.

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.

In Japan, clubs will announce opening times like "Friday 22:00〜27:00" meaning 10PM to 3AM the following day

As far as I know, that's actually used, when something starts in the "old" day and continues into the "new" day.

Hour 25 is 1 am on the next day, which is 25 hours from midnight of the reference day.

This is a boring way to respond to a post that obviously tries to be funny, but I don't find it funny. There's nothing special about Gregorian calendar. It is shit and unorganized just like hundreds of other things that are shit and unorganized, and would make life easier if we could replace them with something better (which already exists, or very realistically can be designed) via absolutely massive organizational effort. Gregorian calendar can be replaced by French Republican calendar (or one similar to that), imperial unit system can be replaced by metric, all sorts of different clothes' size standards surely can be replaced by one that would actually make sense. There are hundreds of things like that, you encounter them every day. Calendar and units are just some that everyone knows.

To me there's nothing funny about this. This is just sad and annoying, and slightly demoralizing, since it's so simple to fix, yet absolutely impossible to fix by yourself.

> all sorts of different clothes' size standards surely can be replaced by one that would actually make sense

Like, imagine if those sizes were equal to some actual body part measurements (or the garment's dimensions itself, whatever) in millimetres/centimetres?

This is what bothered me a bit too.

I half expected a punchline from the alien like "wow, your method of time keeping seems pretty simple compared to ours", hinting at the universal nature of evolution and gradual learning over time.

>"uh, it's supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it's off by 4 years, if he existed at all."

>"if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you're not sure exists?"

>"yeah. He's written about in a famous book but historical records are spotty."

I'm not sure why there is such a persistent meme about questioning Jesus' existence.

Certainly, not everyone will believe in the things that He did, nor do I expect them to believe it. However, even among some of the most diehard Atheist Historians, to claim that Christ never existed is something that is easily disproved. See: Dr. Bart D. Ehrman (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=43mDuIN5-ww) Keep in mind, Dr. Ehrman is probably one of the most outspoken Atheists critical of both New and Old Testament theology.

There are Atheist celebrities like Dawkins, Hitchens, or Harris, who get a lot of press and coverage, but as far as "In the weeds" detail-oriented historical and archeological debates on up-to-date understanding of the ancient world? Dr. Ehrman is probably in the top 1-5% of Atheist debaters to look towards.

People are welcome to believe whatever they like, but it's just embarrassing to read people write this sort of thing in the same way it's embarrassing to see people repeat the "We only use 10% of our brain" thing.

The single most complex component I have ever written in about 35 years of SW development was a scheduler to calculate the next instance in a set of overlaid periodic cycles, allowing for time zones, DST changes, leap year/centuries, etc, etc ... in Visual Basic no less!

“Hasn’t anyone ever tried to fix this?”, “yes, there was the International Fixed Calendar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar..., “and?”, “well, only one company used it and that company eventually lost relevance and was never able to get the broader society to use it”.

At least we all agree that as one week is 7 days, when we say we'll meet in two weeks, that'll be in 14 days. Right, guys? Oh no...

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quinze_jours

This entire Twitter thread (and most of the comments here) operate from some really weird assumptions about these aliens. As in, that there’s some agreed upon final answer for how everything from time to historical events should be logged, categorized, and accounted for in your little planet’s revolution around its Star. And that this regime is perfectly predictable without knowing anything about the life forms on the planet you’re observing.

Do people here really think this is reasonable, or realistic?

A good way to know whether a month has 31 days is by counting the knuckles and gaps between knuckles. "Landing" on a knuckle means that month is 31 days. So,

Pointer finger knuckle = January = 31 days

Between pointer/middle = Feb != 31 days

Middle finger knuckle = March = 31 days

And so on, just looping back to the first knuckle when you get past the pinky knuckle.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1572260363764400129.html

Very entertaining read. The earthling says at one point (for comedic effect probably) that they don’t know why people used to like to count in dozens. I didn’t understand myself until someone explained to me that it makes dividing pay between a group of workers much easier.

You pay 12 coins for a job, very simple to divide between a team of two, three, four, six or twelve.

And just to make sure the aliens lose whatever shred of confidence they might still have in human civilisation, we should introduce them to time zones: https://youtu.be/-5wpm-gesOY. My favorite video on the topic.

everything looks ok, except for Jesus is not being historical part, he just need to read more books

These aliens must be either software developers or economists. Nobody else just assumes the world is logical and freaks out when it isn't...

“And once a year we have a 23 hour day and half a year later we have 25 hour day, but not all of us.”

This actually made me feel very much better about all the weirdness. Seeing it all in one place made it look clearly inevitable and also made it clear how little of a problem any of it is.

Alien: so how do you write the date? year-month-day?

"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"

Actually, it would be like:

- Why is this so weird?

- Eh, historical reasons. Legacy framework retained due to inertia, don't think too much about it.

- Yeah, makes sense.

I totally disagree with the article. Our calendar is 1000s of years of technical debt. Surely they will understand things built on top of other things for centuries and centuries..

Why would we assume that alien visitors don't also have convuluted time measurement systems? It's seems likely any alien civilization would have followed a similar development trajectory as humans and would therefore also retain some anachronistic practices well into technological advancement.

I would bet large amounts of money that if we ever do encounter an alien civilization, it too will have weird ways of describing the universe, driven by legacy cruft.

All measurements used to be a mess: lengths, weights, and so on. At the French revolution, they broke the status quo by introducing the metric system. Originally, the metric system also included a new calendar:

- One day has 10 hours.

- One hour is divided in units of 10, 100, 1000 (probably deci/centi/milli hours).

- One week has ten days.

- Each year starts at the fall equinox.

This calendar was used for 14 years. Then, Napoleon decided to bring back the previous calendar system as he reintroduced Catholicism as a state religion. Indeed the revolution calendar was purposely anti-christian: it moved the first year from the birth of JC to the year of the French revolution. Several religious events like Easter were hard to compute. Christmas was the day of the dog...

Anyway, we could have got a calendar system that makes sense, but History decided otherwise.

That's a very funny dialog.

But ... the sexagesimal system made sense and I guess that, in ancient times, time periods that don't have patterns would always be divided arbitrarily (years can be marked with seasons, days with night, but how to divide the time between, say, mid-day and sunset?).

I once read a story in which a human gave an extraterrestrial visitor a calendar to examine and they were confused as to all the inconsistency. I then wondered how they would react if we gave them a Malaysian wall calendar instead:

- Four calendars (Gregorian, Islamic, Chinese, Hindu)

- Three scripts (Latin, Chinese, Tamil)

- Two solar (Gregorian, Hindu), neither synced with the other, with varying month lengths (29-32 for the Hindu, but at least months follow solar longitudes properly; Gregorian doesn't really follow anything)

- Two lunar (Chinese, Islamic), also offsync (Chinese starts months on new moon, Islamic on first visible crescent) and Chinese has leap months while Islamic doesn't.

- Weekday names in four languages (English, Malay, Chinese, Tamil)

It'd certainly be a puzzle for our hypothetical alien.

I think most people forget the most important aspect of calendars: farming.

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.

October, for Octogon, meaning the 8th month, is the 10th month.

And Dec for 10 meaning December is the 12th Month. Going by the Roman system, March is the 1st month bu we've decided to make it the 3rd month today and offset everything else.

I'll bet the aliens have something similar that is based on historical changes and habits and isn't purely logical.

Don't even go to those idiots over there who uses these weird units for measuring temperature, distance, weight and ugh volume...

When we actually have this well designed system where everything fits beautifully together...

Why the presupposition that these aliens are more rational than us? Presumably they would be just as vulnerable to their evolved behaviour and inertia of historical decision making as we are.

I recently learned that in West the weekdays are named after Roman gods, but in English it's done by the way of Germanic gods. It's just that Romans, when visiting German tribes, interpreted local gods as Roman ones, simply with different names—as they did everywhere else too. So they brought the calendar with them, and explained that Odin is the same as Mercury, etc, and thus where Romance languages have ‘mercredi’ and such, English has wōdnesdæġ.

‘History of the English language’ is a splendid podcast.

This is how a 12 year old internet atheist sees the world. Advanced alien species is just a stand-in for the know-it-all author. Grow up. These things all have good historical reasons. And you don't turn society upside down just to get some nice parsimony in the calendar. We have a system that works and is remarkably accurate. Changing it would upset millions of social customs, accounting systems, computer systems, etc. The cost is unfathomable really. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

"There's 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds" - except sometimes when there are 25 hours, or 23! Because it's too hard to ask people to change their schedules, so we change the time instead. And of course we don't add or remove those hours at the beginning or end of the day, so we never actually have an hour 25, we just repeat one of the middle hours instead. And then, independently, sometimes there are 61 seconds, or 59. And don't get me started on time zones...

I think I pieced this together from Wikipedia at one point, but don't have the exact ref: The strangeness that December sounds like it should be month ten comes from the fact that in Roman times, it was the tenth and last month. After that there was just.. not much going on until the new year started and in fact it was actually a political question as to which day March started on! Does anyone know this more precisely and/or have a link?

> "nah, we call them AM and PM"

Not a human-universal practice.

I always thought it would make sense to have 52 weeks (364 days) and then a special New Years day and then repeat 52 weeks.

This way every year is the same. It's always the same day of the week on April's 13th. No moving holidays. Easier to plan. No adjusting schedules. No problem with leap seconds/days (just as them to the special day whenever).

It just seems like a simple and superior solution. What were those guys thinking...

All these things have a historical basis. Are we assuming aliens don’t have cultural things from their own history?

> 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.

Much more readable and lighter link for those who are on mobile without the twitter app or just don’t enjoy twitters UI: https://nitter.net/foone/status/1572260363764400129

Dealing with calendars can be pretty difficult. Since I recently wrote a script in Lua to be my personal assistant, processing calendars, todo lists, mailing lists, etc., here’s a Lua form of the code to calculate the day of week. This is accurate for any Georgian date:

  -- Calculate the day of the week
  -- Input: year, month, day (e.g. 2022,9,16)
  -- Output: day of week (0 = Sunday, 6 = Saturday)
  function dayOfWeek(year, month, day)
    -- Tomohiko Sakamoto algorithm
    local monthX = {0, 3, 2, 5, 0, 3, 5, 1, 4, 6, 2, 4}
    if month < 3 then year = year - 1 end
    local yearX = (year + math.floor(year / 4) - math.floor(year / 100) +
                   math.floor(year / 400))
    local out = yearX + monthX[month] + day
    out = out % 7
    return out
  end

Our calendar and timekeeping is what you get when you keep a system continuously operational and backwards capable over tens of thousands of years.

At least New Year’s Day no longer falls on 25th March.

I get that it's about being funny, but the roman calender is not completely universal either, there is at least Iran, my home country and afghanestan which has the solar hijri calender as it's first official calender which is very much logical and accurate. You can visit https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_Hijri_calendar For more info

Also in Iran the week starts with saturday.

If you look from an american or a british person these are all valid points and I got the fun and laughed but couldn't help my self not saying all these And I'm sure Iran is just an instance

Base 60 and 12/24 make sense, because these are https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number .

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.

So the moral of the story is that having history and cultures is… bad somehow? Or at least weird?

The way I see it, a realistic alien would be more likely to answer

  "You think that's complicated? Our own calendar has to track our lifecycle according to the orbit of a planet that doesn't exist any more!"

Or maybe:

  "Ah, of course, you tend to use base-10 because you have ten fingers. I keep forgetting about those."

…while apologetically waving a mass of tentacles in the air :D

Incidentally, I wonder where this trope of aliens as hyperrational observers came from? Because it does not match at all the one instance of a space-going species that we know about (us).

If there are aliens out there who don’t have a strong concept of “historical reasons”, they’re not worth knowing, and likely not socially complex enough to present a threat to humans.

Honestly, even our DNA is full of historical reasons; why shouldn’t our society too?

I'd be curious to know what countries don't start the year January 1st and where the origin of their chosen day comes from.

I know China's new year is different by a ~3 weeks?

Also, I only know a little USA and Japanese culture but it's interesting various calendar related things like where I grew up, SoCal, elementary, middle, and high school school started 2nd week in September. College also started around the same time. In Japan it starts first week of April and so do new jobs for college grads (Japan generally makes a distinction between no-experience college grads and experienced employees and job listing will often say which one the job is for)

Actual alien: yeah this is quite common with calendars. They tend to have a lot of accumulated rules like that.

Twitter guy: oh damn, I was planning to do a humorous thread about how a super-rational alien civilisation would be surprised by it. :(

We used to end our days at sunset, because that's an observable event. Now we don't. That's why we have things like Christmas eve one date and Christmas day the next, when they really should be on the same date.

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

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

Since life on earth is affected significantly by the movements of Sun and Moon, the calendar has to be based on both their positions relative to earth. The calendar system invented in ancient India does this. Check out this illustration in the wikipedia page on Hindu Calendar for a quick understanding. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hindu_Lunisolar_Calendar....

The Earth is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun and rotates on its axis at a ratio of roughly 365.25:1. The axial tilt of the planet is such that the northern and southern hemispheres have varying seasons at different portions of the orbit and those seasons materially affect the life of most of the larger animals on the surface.

There's not many intuitive ways to break that up unless you use a base365.25 number system.

Calendars can definitely be weird but they're working around non-integer natural ratios.

Very entertaining! I suppose if we have to start from scratch we might build a better system, but who has the time? It just shows the amount of change that has occured in the past couple of thousand years. Yeah, it might not make sense, but it works...mostly. Just get rid of DST and keep the rest for now!

This reminded me of a Joe Rogan bit, where he imagines how the human race will explain Kim Kardashian to aliens.

Many things will seem illogical to beings who have figured out interstellar travel...

It is a shame that the length of a meter isn't based on the Earth's equatorial circumference. Though miles aren't really, it's handy to know there are about 24k of them around, 1k corresponding to an hour of the day. If we take the illogical 24 hour day as a fait accompli then distance is better reduced in round decimals of that than... whatever meter length is based upon (something to do with the weight of a cubic block of water?)

Hijri calendar fixes some of the inconsistency. Day naming is just 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, "gathering day", "rest day". Number of days in months are based on the moon phases. Days start on sunset instead of some arbitrary time at night.

There's also a clever, perhaps unintentional naming in days, where the first day is al-Ahad (The One), which is also a name of Allah (Unique, The One). So it's no longer some awkward Sunday or Thor's Day or Zero Day.

They forgot summer- and wintertime, and leap seconds.

Oh and afaik only some english speaking countries use AM/PM, the rest of the world uses the 24h based system doesn't it?

Absolutely hilarious, can someone with artistic skills create a short film/animation based on this thread. Foone has given permission for derivative works ;-)

How about the fact that 10/11/12 can variously refer to October 11, 2012, November 10, 2012, or November 12, 2010 - depending on what country you are in?

Isn't it also about as likely that the aliens will have an even more convoluted calendar, and may even consider ours simple?

This is why you never let inexperienced people to come up with standards, patterns, and api-s. It is impossible to get rid of crap once it is widely adopted.

Aliens: "yeah we know, our calendar system sucks too. we're really here for your species' best cable management pictures"

My reply: https://twitter.com/gregmozart/status/1574139558102716416?s=...

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!

In Portuguese, Monday-Friday are numbered (2a-feira - 6a-feira).

I wonder if are there other languages also presenting this feature. I believe there are.

This is so brilliant! Reminds me of William Burroughs five rules for a revolution in "The Revised Boy Scout Manual":

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!

And we have a secondary calendar that just counts the days since some arbitrary date approx 150 years ago. It shares its name with a calendar from 2000 years ago, but it's really named after the father of the guy who came up with it who was named after the guy who established the older calendar.

Also, it's days start in the middle of the other calendar's days

What is wrong with saying everything is an approximation and is made as a means for convenience that is not supposed to be perfect.

Wait a minute: someday the aliens are going to land and we gotta explain our calendar, sure.

Or, _we_ don’t.

  Someon—- pardon me —- _Something_ has to explain it to them.

 That thing is gonna say: “yeah, the epoch is our earliest known ancestor’s origin. Those animals call it ‘Unix time’.  We have a record of their hieroglyphic form: January 1 1970”

Tonally, this thread reminds me a lot of the short story "With Friends Like These..." by Alan Dean Foster: https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/35128.With_Friends_Li...

wrt calendars there is one curious rational alternative.

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

Why does this thread assume that aliens will be hyperlogical and not understand what culture is? This is the most ass backwards assumption almost all scifi makes about aliens, at least in my humble opinion. A society which has cracked inter galactic travel will probably have its own vast culture and quirks, i see no reason why not.

Poor foone does not like to be posted here.

Wait until we explain the year 2038 problem:

  "Se we use an epoch because of a famous operating system"
  "oh, that thing that runs computers right"
  "yeah"
  "and what base do you use the represent a date on you computers? 10, 12, 60?"
  "2".

The author also does not mention that there is no year 0.

So when Jesus was born, he was 0 years old, but it was already year 1. When Jesus was 20 it was allready year 21. Ignoring discussions if Jesus existed or not... lack of year zero is illogical.

Maybe they did it to not have year minus zero? Which also should be there tbh.

The 6*6*10 calendar is regular as possible. It has 6 months per year, 6 weeks per month, 10 days per week.

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

Every month ends with a blank day (60), with the exception of the last month in non-leap years.

Interesting nit: The moon's _sidereal_ period is 27 days. But the _synodic_ period is 29.5 days, and that means there are 12.4 lunar months in a year.

(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.)

Sounds like a person who thinks they know better than everyone else, that the tradeoffs accumulated in a system are just arbitrary and worthless. “Tear it all down, I can build something MUCH better!”

I look forward to the day when this person’s wishes to not be shared on HN are granted in full.

This reminds me of the Numberphile video on date and timezones. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

I sometimes wonder how the code to handle all this would look like.

These aliens called babies land in our world all the time and get the calendar just fine.

It takes them a few years, but a lot of that is due to their lagging cognitive abilities, as such; a different calendar redesigned for utmost simplicity would still take them a few years.

Theyre made out of meat.

https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...

Calendars will make sense in comparison to billions of people blindly following (and dying for) religions thousands of years later that were invented before anyone knew anything about anything, no microscope, telescopes or even glasses.

If the world wants a calendar system based on the cycles of nature, with very little political/religious baggage, there is the lunar calendar with the 24 solar terms, used by the Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Vietnamese people.

To be fair I am more worried that longtermists built the entirety of human society with the assumption that there are no aliens and the rest of the universe is free for the taking. If aliens pop up there will have to be bloodshed.

I wished people would refer to time I’m an unambiguous way. Sure your standard is 24h. I still gotta ask clarification when you tell me the meeting is at 8. Be specific. Having a 24h clock is useless id you say 8 in the evening.

I would expect a alien calendar to be as complicated as ours. The calendar we use is the result of a long and rich history. Their would likely be as complicated, especially if there are part of a tree sun's system.

If Julius Caesar had set the leap year rule to be for every year divisible by 5 and/or 19, We would still be using that calendar today. Also would be nice if he had set New Year to be on the winter solstice.

No mention of Australia? Blew my mind.

https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1444829700480593920

Wait until someone notices that _base 11_ is the natural base for a being with 10 fingers. A separate symbol for 10 is base 11, not base 10. Base 10 only has separate symbols for up to and including 9.

But what if the aliens don’t even have (don’t need) the concept of an integer, therefore no concept of prime numbers - and no need to split times of natural cycles into equal integer-sized intervals?

Just wait till they hear about other metrics.

"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"

https://nitter.net/foone/status/1572260363764400129

Chaldeans, Caesars, Christians. That about sums it up.

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. :)

The alien's report: "this planet is inhabited by humans, a species whose brain is not mathematical, instead, has a special appreciation for myths, stories etc."

We really need to update the system of years, it gives way too much weight to Christianity and serves as reinforcement to their misguided belief that their religion is somehow preeminent. It also gives the impression to the general public that history "began" at year 0, rather than being clear that recorded human history goes back around 5000 years.

Living in the year 5022 gives a much different perspective of history than starting at some random time in the middle of the Roman Empire. The other option is beginning the calendar at the first transistor or the first nuclear explosion signaling modern times.

The we could fix the months and be done with it.

Wait until we have to explain why the most powerful military and politically influential country in the world still insists in using counter-intuitive measurement systems.

if you are into calendars, read zecharia sitchin's books on anunnaki. the calendar, and zodiac, is 6 000 years old! essentially jews are still following the sumerian calendar to this day. that's also why the creationists say the world is only 6 000 years old. the aztecs were famous for the 2012 end of the world but that was only their calendar and they even had three different cycles that worked together like cogs in a machine.

-- Well, sometimes the last minute of the year (or of the 6th month) has 61 seconds. Or 60 ever-so-slightly-longer "seconds". We haven't agreed yet.

I’m pretty sure the alien calendar will be even weirder. ;)

If Aliens land in New Jersey and find out they're not using the metric system there, they'll leave immediately, no time for talking about calendars.

Expecting aliens to behave like logical automaton vulcans and not have any cultural artifacts in their way of living is a bit simple minded IMO

During the French revolution, they changed the calendar to be "more scientific". Worked about as well as can be imagined.

This would make for fantastic radio drama. For some reason I can imagine the voice of John Cleese as either the Alien or the Human.

I feel like they missed an opportunity to get into date formats (big-endian vs little-endian vs American middle-endian)

He forgot to mention people also don't agree on the hour in the day and have oddly shaped "time zones".

Epic! reminds me of the conversation I have with every new hire, trying to explain our 20 year old system.

This is what I'm going to use when the next time someone asks me to explain what tech debt is.

This thread is filled with "So what!?" imo.

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?!"

What does it matter?

Aliens have different rotation cycles, why will they bother to know about calendar?

They are after beer.

Isn't there also additional calendars in at least Japanese and Chinese culture?

The 12 makes sense for being divisible by 3 and 4. 60 does the same but also for 5.

The rest is chaos.

And they reply with theirs... Calendars do not trend towards simplicity over time.

You are very welcome to use Chinese Luna calendar instead, which is purely logical

If you want to explain someone why tech debt is bad show him this Twitter thread.

I expected the thread to end thusly:

Aliens: "FOR ALL THIS YOU MUST DIE."

Humans: "Fair enough"

> we further subdivide the months into 'weeks'

Nope, we they are divided into days

I feel dumb because at some point I was extremely lost reading this thread.

Just gonna leave this here: https://theinternetsaysitstrue.com/2022/03/28/13-months-the-...

I..like many Hindus..follow the lunisolar calender that is based on both the lunar and the solar movements. I have two calenders that run my life..Hindu Panchang that runs in my head for home(mostly based on the moon cycle) and the Gregorian one for the outside world.

My life revolves around the Panchang only and following the Gregorian calender is just like learning to use English as the language for communication. It’s something I have to do to assimilate.

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.

Why is this guy posting absolute tosh when the world is about to end?

It could be worse. We might have to explain standard music notation.

The “religious leader not existing” argument is slightly comical lol.

It’s a near tie between the anal probe and explaining our calendar

And we know our first reaction will be to cut interest rates.

Were a species that prioritises backwards compatibility.

Then there are timezones and daylight savings time...

Hopefully no one tells them about java.util.Date.

How do you explain this one?

365 = 10^2 + 11^2 + 12^2 = 13^2 + 14^2

Reminds me of the imperial measurements debate.

Please do not link to foone here

show hn: the clockchain and xpayz time - a proposal for an L1 style chain for time and time tracking.

https://www.seanmcdonald.xyz/p/the-clockchain-protocol-the-l...

Obligatory link to Falsehoods programmers believe about time: https://gist.github.com/timvisee/fcda9bbdff88d45cc9061606b4b...

Some call it a "tradition".

Some call it "backwards compatibility".

Actually, I think explaining our calendar would be one of the more interesting points of discussion. In fact, the very fact that this is somewhat controversial with folks feeling our calendar is 'illogical' reveals a lot about the current generation's materialistic, efficiency-obsessed world view.

It's like we've all lost the ability to see and understand symbolism and tradition.

Things to consider about the calendar in the West: 1. The West was once a Christian realm. The calendar reflects this. Lots of interesting history here, starting at least with Constantine. 2. I only _this_ year have noticed a push to make Monday the first day of the week. My first thought when I noticed this: it's explicitly an effort to de-emphasize #1. Sunday is the first day of the week because of the importance of the Resurrection for Christians. Changing Monday to the first day of the week is basically the same move the Jacobins for example attempted when they reset the year to 'years since the revolution' instead of 'anno Domini'. 3. Not all the 'West' uses the same calendar. The Orthodox East generally still uses the 'old' Julian calendar. There is currently a 13 day difference between the Julian and Gregorian. This is one of the reasons that Pascha (Easter) usually is celebrated on a different day in the Orthodox East than the Roman West (yes, Protestants, you're still with the Pope on this one). 4. p.s. the process by which the Gregorian calendar was inplemented is actually a very interesting story. There basically was a missing week in Oct when this was done (around 1430 as I recall?). 5. It gets better. Some Orthodox like the Russians celebrate Christmas on the old Julian calendar, which translates to Jan 5 on the Gregorian. 6. (Main point!) the calendar itself is _liturgical_. Feasts, fasts, death, regeneration. All these things are reflected in the calendar. Liturgy is fractal. It happens in the Church and is echoed higher and lower throughout different hierarchies. If you are at all interested in this, please look up Jonathan Pageau. He has some great podcasts and youtube videos...

It really is quite beautiful.

Unless you are a nerd and just want us to switch to stardates. Easier to program I guess but thoroughly boring and dehumanizing.

p.p.s. It occurs to me that not everyone will understand 'Orthodox East' and 'Roman West'. By Orthodox East, I basically mean Palestine and the Middle East, Egypt, Ethiopia, Greece, Eastern Europe, and Russia. Think the New Rome (Constantinople) and those lands once controlled by New Rome, e.g. the 'Eastern Roman Empire'. By 'Roman West', I mean Western Europe and those nations colonized or influenced by Western European countries. Perhaps more simply, 'Romain Catholic' realms.

Dates are one of the first standards through which humans discovered https://xkcd.com/927/.

Standards simple and useful enough to be used in everyday conversation die with their users. So I don't know anyone who keeps track of the Republican calendar, but I _do_ know people who are celebrating New Year's tonight. And the English still drink beer in pints.

It would only be simpler to use the Republican Calendar in a vacuum. Practically, all us programmers would spend all our time converting dates between Georgian and Republican dates, and I'd have to look at my ID to know my birthdate.

before we get through "daylight savings time" they will just step on us

haha

This would be better written in a short story format but I digress.

This is precisely the type of thing that would probably happen in almost any society. There are many standards that pop up that are vestiges of one thing or another. The fact we get base 60 from Sumeria but use Base 12 or Base 24 for hours is not a big deal, weird things happen. I doubt any advanced alien would be just so flabbergasted over this. We have multiple cultures all over the world that count differently, so the assumption of base 10, just doesn't really make sense. All standards like time, counting, etc in any culture I think would be this mishmash of legacies from some people's that were dominant at some point that other people's culture imprinted upon that. If anything an alien race would probably be more suspicious if our calendar and time system was some perfect base 10 all through or something of that nature as if the cult of reason had dominated the world after the French Revolution.

Also the historical record of someone named Jesus existing isn't debated by any historical scholar I have ever heard of, just the messianic / prophetic / son of god nature seems to be the rub.

>"YOUR CALENDAR IS BASED ON A RELIGIOUS LEADER THAT NOT EVERYONE BELIEVES IN?"

Instead of taking the opportunity to make a holier-than-thou twitter rant the would-be probee would do better to reply to this by explaining that almost every religion and many cultures have one or more of their own.

> "uh, it's supposed to be the birth of a religious leader, but they got the math wrong so it's off by 4 years, if he existed at all."

> "if? You based your calendar off the birth date of someone you're not sure exists?"

I find it quite offensive. Not all scholars agree that Jesus was raised from dead, but the existence of Jesus is accepted even by non-Christian scholars.

> Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed.[7][8][30] Historian Michael Grant asserts that if conventional standards of historical textual criticism are applied to the New Testament, "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned."[31] There is no indication that writers in antiquity who opposed Christianity questioned the existence of Jesus.[32][33]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

This person hates it so much whenever there is a link to their content on this site, they go on huge massive rants about it with threads spamming as much as the OP, it's hilarious.

This is mainly tailored toward the Gregorian/Solar calendar. We don't have leap years in Hijri.

If aliens tried to quarantine us from the rest of the universe for having an idiosyncratic time keeping system, and keep us ghettoized, it would say more about them than us.

Uh, they will nuke us the moment they get on facebook

Why would an alien assume we use base 10?

Since when do we assume everyone uses the same calendar?

Not looking forward to telling them that we named our home planet planet dirt

shit like this is too good and entertaining to be on twitter

Reply on news.ycombinator.com