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I disagree with you. Basing a calendar on the rotation of the earth and as it applies to the sun is extremely rational, at least until the whole space colony thing. In the future when we have colonies elsewhere it may make sense, but changing the number of days in a year doesnt work well for our sedentary culture, because I don't wanna have to effing remember which winter it was last.
The weather cycles affect you more than you think... It gets hot it gets cold it gets hot it gets cold, snow falls snow melts... Also, you can only get certain foods at certain times of the year either because of supply (crop only grows well at a certain time) or demand (how often do you buy egg nog?). Not to mention we all need to recalculate our ages... 1000 days between birthdays is probably better on the wallet for mom and dad, but that means 1/3 the amount of toys and birthday celebrations...
The current calendar isn't necessarily universal... but its universal enough because everybody uses it, and as long as i'm on this ball of dirt, the current way seems to make the most sense.
oh yeah, and think of what you would do to the religious world (speaking of the impractical) if you were to make those kinds of changes to the calendar.
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You are displaying a disturbing temperate-centric view on the world. Where you live, yes, perhaps the seasonal changes are important to you. Significant areas of the world have no effective seasonal climatic changes. So why should you impose your provincial little concerns upon those who care little for them?
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I am saying the seasons are just a small part of our use of the time measurement, when it used to be absolutely everything ("the winter is coming, we need to have grain reserves or we're going to die" - so, really important). Now it's just relatively important.
When you are discussing the matter of creating a measuring units, what you need is something that is absolutely universal. And the rotation of the planet around the sun has lost its importante on this matter.
Few people still care about when it's the season of the fruits or vegetables. I go to the market, check the tomatoes, if they seem good and cheap, I buy. That's really all I need to know, the rest is logistics.
I guess you'd receive thrice as more gifts when it's your b-day!
As a developer, I need to disagree. Dates as they exists now are a true pain in the arse (next time I'll argue on how every address in the world should be expressed by its sole geographical coordinates).
I'm not sure their opinion counts, but you gave yourself a counter-argument: Islam uses a monthly calendar, and Jewish, Chinese and Japanese calendars, thus year based, each start at a different time of the year. So that's kind of an argument for a neutral normalization.
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Erratum: read "Islam uses an moon-based calendar".
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Not my family... they are cheap.
So now I'm curious... how is using the rotation of the earth to the sun and the rotation of the earth around the sun, which are universal constants, to calculate days and years, not rational? I mean ignoring everything else (crop cycles, moon cycles, tide cycles... any other cycles... notice a pattern), at least knowing what time it is based on the location of the earth around the sun still seems logical and rational to me.
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But they're not universal constants. Their value is changing all the time.
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To use it as a measure unit is an approximation. Talk about a universal constant, even we make it change its value every 4 occurences. Plus, astronomically, every year is different in duration. So, in the end, we are using a unit which is not constant to define time measurement. It feels comfortable but it's the kind of details that scientifically you have to care about one day or another, because evil lies within!
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*devil
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How do you figure? The whole point in a leap year is to take all those extra minutes that add up over 4 years and give us an extra day to make up for the fact that there should be an extra day over the course of 4 years. So if we have it figured out that it takes 365.25 days to get the earth around the sun, then we can calculate where the earth should be on any given day, and calculate the day based on the location of the earth to the sun. The math is all there. Its been that way for eons. Thats long enough to make it a constant in my book... or at least long enough to be a javascript constant...
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I don't need that knowledge! I don't need to know that there's a leap year every 4 years except every 100 years unless it's au multiple of 400, and even then you still need to correct it sometimes because there's no rational (in the mathematical and usual meaning of the word) relation between the time earth rotates on itself and the time it rotates around its star. I just want to make base-10 time calculations, how's that so compicated?! This is a just a bloody useless historical weight.
I don't want to have to know which month has 31 days and have to explain it to kids, and show on their hands how they can do to master irrational logics. If someone is interested in the revolutions of earth, let that person look it up and read books about it. With the system we have now, everybody needs to understand some flawed system related to astrophysics when they want to know which day of the week is the 1st of January 2013.
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Why would people who don't have such concerns be unwilling to concede some conveniences to those who do? Because they're dicks?
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One advantage to the complexity of the current system is precisely because of the fact that you have to explain it to kids. Children are much more likely to be able to pick up non-base-10 arithmetic if they have a practical example to work on. Pre-decimal coinage and non-metric measurements have the same beneficial side-effect.
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i'm french (no one can be perfect) and in french 'help' is said 'A l'aide'
so when i read 'A e'AIjDE' somewhere it seems like a french guy trying to send discretrly a message
quick, to the WTVcave (na na na na na na ... WTF !!!)
captcha : oppeto http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/oppeto
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At least in the UK the post office will ask the recipiant to pay if someone sends a letter/parcel without postage or with insufficiant postage.
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