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Phobophilia posted:look you can still remain an ultra-privileged elite, but you could have even more power and privilege and the title of king of kings if you had the wisdom to invite other people into the privileged pool as they bring in their own provincial resources Look at this guy who wants to let the foreigners have privileges?! 
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Nov 25, 2020 02:10
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Yes, it's like a lava lamp.
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Lol imagine thinking anyone born beyond the next hill is even a human being
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Nov 25, 2020 02:21
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Silver2195 posted:Didn’t someone (Plutarch?) say that Spartan men were OK with their wives banging strapping young men to produce strong children? Maybe, I think I got the Scythians and Spartans confused.
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Nov 25, 2020 02:52
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Silver2195 posted:Didn’t someone (Plutarch?) say that Spartan men were OK with their wives banging strapping young men to produce strong children? Sounds like something you say after the fact.
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Nov 25, 2020 03:52
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Whorelord posted:Anyone know of books that give an introduction to the beliefs and practices of Gnosticism? I missed this post, sorry, but generally the recommendation for that seems to be Elaine Pagels' books, especially. _The Gnostic Gospels_
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Nov 25, 2020 04:24
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Whorelord posted:Anyone know of books that give an introduction to the beliefs and practices of Gnosticism? It's not strictly about Gnosticism but Bart Ehrman's Lost Christianities does a good job of explaining the basics of several different Gnostic strains of thought and why they eventually died out.
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Nov 25, 2020 04:27
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PittTheElder posted:Look at this guy who wants to let the foreigners have privileges?! *laughs mongolishly as conscripted chinese siege engineers launch 300-pound stones at ur walled cities*
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Nov 25, 2020 05:04
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:I missed this post, sorry, but generally the recommendation for that seems to be Elaine Pagels' books, especially. _The Gnostic Gospels_ This is a good one. This is the one my wife recommended to me (my wife studied early church history).
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Nov 25, 2020 05:41
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so over time after the french revolution the entire world pretty much (except for the usa god i loving hate my country) switch to a really good and easy to understand system for spatial measurement (metric) why are we still using ancient systems like 24 hours/60 mins/60 seconds/etc. for time keeping when that's all totally arbitrary
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Nov 25, 2020 12:18
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Kanine posted:so over time after the french revolution the entire world pretty much (except for the usa god i loving hate my country) switch to a really good and easy to understand system for spatial measurement (metric) There actually was metric time and a metric calendar but it didn't stick, even in France My understanding is that the reason metric measurements had such an easy time gaining acceptance was that there were a hundred competing systems, none of which were particularly better than others and thus all really hard to rally around and say "we should all switch to this one." Metric was meaningfully better, so the already-existing impulse to line up measurements across borders now had a rallying point. If nothing else, switching to metric couldn't possibly make the situation worse. With the clock and calendar, everything was already lined up, so if you switch to metric time, you're now in a situation where everybody in the world except for you uses the same clock. That kinda sucks, and the one country that tried (France) soon went back on it in order to line up with the rest of the world. e: I believe the specific values in the clock came from a society--I forget which one--which counted in base twelve. This is less unnatural than it sounds--there's a natural way to count to twelve on your hands by using each finger segment as a count, and placing your thumb on the segment which corresponds to the number you're tracking. Base 12 has a few advantages over base 10 as well, with more factors (2, 3, 4, 6, and 12 vs 2, 5, and 10) meaning that a higher percentage of common math operations have easy-to-remember rules and a higher percentage of common fractions are precisely representable. The original idea behind the clock was that you'd split daytime into 12 equal-length hours and nighttime into 12 equal-length hours, with the length of an hour depending on the season and daytime and nighttime hours only being the same length during equinoxes. This is a pretty natural way to do things when your clock is a sundial. I think the idea of splitting the entire day/night cycle into 24 equal hours only caught on after the invention of the pendulum clock made it easier to measure specific lengths of time than the movement of the sun. 60 is of course 12*5 and thus has even more factors than 12, making it a nicer number than 100 for many operations when you want a largish number. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 12:32 on Nov 25, 2020 |
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Nov 25, 2020 12:23
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Metric also only has big advantages when doing a lot of unit conversions, and yeah sometime you want to know how many hours 187 minutes is and have to do some mental math which a metric clock would avoid, but it's pretty rare in my experience. Certainly more rare than unit conversions of volume measures.
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Nov 25, 2020 12:48
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cheetah7071 posted:There actually was metric time and a metric calendar but it didn't stick, even in France Yeah it's also worth noting that when the Sumerian base-60 system was in use, decimals didn't exist, so arithmetic was largely done using fractions. So the benefits of base 60 in terms of fraction operations were substantial. Also, 60 is a "superior highly composite number", ie one of the best bases to pick for this purpose. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_highly_composite_number IIRC one of the reasons for the failure of metric time was that they tried to institute a ten-day week. I think it had a three-day weekend or something, but people rebelled against working for seven or eight days straight.
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Nov 25, 2020 14:32
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Lead out in cuffs posted:IIRC one of the reasons for the failure of metric time was that they tried to institute a ten-day week. I think it had a three-day weekend or something, but people rebelled against working for seven or eight days straight. It had one and a half days off a week, which is about the same as people had off before....1 day every 7 is about the same as 1.5 days every 10, but, like you said, the sheer length of time worked without a break was unpopular. Another reason it was unpopular was because a 10 day week wasn't compatible with Christianity. This was intentional on the government's part...they were trying to get rid of Christianity in French life, but it wasn't popular.
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Nov 25, 2020 15:28
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Kanine posted:so over time after the french revolution the entire world pretty much (except for the usa god i loving hate my country) switch to a really good and easy to understand system for spatial measurement (metric) At this point, it's mostly legacy. There's a huge amount of data, in records of all sorts, stored in 24 hr time format. Changing that is going to be hugely expensive and difficult and unless a new format has a massive payback it's just not worth it. People generally work in seconds or minutes or hours in whatever they're doing and don't need to convert from one to the other very often, so the current system doesn't really present many obstacles.
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Nov 25, 2020 15:32
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sullat posted:Also one of the first times the Spartan elite went on an extended campaign, they found out that their wives had a bunch of kids waiting for them when they returned that weren't there when they left... Seems like it should have been the husbands cautioning the wives to "return with their shields, or upon them" and not the other way 'round: ammirite?
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Nov 25, 2020 16:14
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I get how unit conversion can be a hassle, especially with some older, even more archaic measurement systems than modern imperial, but if the entire world has already accepted the current calendar and the current time standards, it's not like having to do unit conversion physically hurts you. One neat thing about the revolutionary calendar is how they had to replicate what the church did when they associated every day of the year with a saint, so they devised a way to associate every day with animals, plants, farming tools, and in winter, minerals. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Rural_calendar The Romans had a calendar system where their months didn't particularly match the length of the year, so they just gave the Pontifex maximus the power to fiddle around with the year. They had to change things when some guy got the title of Pontifex maximus and went off to spend his time fighting wars instead of doing his job, and the year drifted until he totally revised the month system after making one year last 445 days to make up for his mistakes.
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Nov 25, 2020 16:23
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SlothfulCobra posted:One neat thing about the revolutionary calendar is how they had to replicate what the church did when they associated every day of the year with a saint, so they devised a way to associate every day with animals, plants, farming tools, and in winter, minerals. If the superior calendar had not been torn down by heartless reactionaries, today would be quintidi 5 Frimaire; celebrating the noble pig.
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Nov 25, 2020 16:38
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Deteriorata posted:At this point, it's mostly legacy. There's a huge amount of data, in records of all sorts, stored in 24 hr time format. Changing that is going to be hugely expensive and difficult and unless a new format has a massive payback it's just not worth it. I mean technically most of that data that isn't in directly human readable form is actually stored in 'seconds since midnight January 1st 1970, UTC' 
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Nov 25, 2020 16:56
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JustaDamnFool posted:If the superior calendar had not been torn down by heartless reactionaries, today would be quintidi 5 Frimaire; celebrating the noble pig. https://twitter.com/sansculotides/status/1331372039760855041?s=20
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Nov 25, 2020 17:02
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feedmegin posted:I mean technically most of that data that isn't in directly human readable form is actually stored in 'seconds since midnight January 1st 1970, UTC' Yeah but once you accept the length of a second you're like 90% of the way to the current system anyway e: the within-a-day part of it anyway, nothing stopping you from starting a new revolutionary calendar dated from the beginning of the Unix epoch
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Nov 25, 2020 17:03
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Yeah but once you accept the length of a second you're like 90% of the way to the current system anyway I second the motion for a second second.
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Nov 25, 2020 17:05
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There's a reason most of asia, even the uncolonized countries, switched to using a western calendar. Life is just easier when you're coordinated with the rest of the world by default, and don't have any silly mistakes of missing meeting due to getting days wrong (on either side)
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Nov 25, 2020 17:18
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:Yeah but once you accept the length of a second you're like 90% of the way to the current system anyway Not really. You could resegment into, i dunno, 50 hour days or whatever you liked; it's seconds from that single point in time, not from midnight on a given day. 
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Nov 25, 2020 17:32
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feedmegin posted:Not really. You could resegment into, i dunno, 50 hour days or whatever you liked; it's seconds from that single point in time, not from midnight on a given day. Fixing the length of the second means you're stuck with 60 * 60 * 24 seconds in a day (because we care about days matching the day-night cycle for independent reasons). Obviously you can split those seconds up in different ways (that's why I said 90% not 100%) but you can't do it in any of the "better" ways people might like (you can't decimalise, you can't even split it up so that seconds in a minute = minutes in an hour = hours in a day). With that number of seconds the current division is about as elegant as you're gonna get
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Nov 25, 2020 18:00
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Jeb Bush 2012 posted:, you can't even split it up so that seconds in a minute = minutes in an hour = hours in a day) My 37.94 minute per 37.94 hour per day system begs to differ!
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Nov 25, 2020 19:17
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There's also just plain not a consistent length of the day or a consistent length of a year compared to the length of a day, and if you want to maintain accuracy, there's weird physics stuff where time itself is relative and inconsistent, so building your new standard of metric time will be somehow unsatisfactory for fixing whatever you think is wrong with current time. And on a more immediate basis, the way that everybody deals with time is really weird because everybody around the world tinkers with their time zones for their own reasons between daylight savings and time zones, and there is no way to redesign all of that to make everybody happier than before. Throughout history days or even months will be skipped (some people think that years or centuries were skipped, but they're probably crazy  ). Even unix time has issues, some systems have trouble with dealing with the beginning of Unix time on January 1st, 1970, some systems will bug out when they have to deal with going past January 19th, 2038.Honestly it would probably be easier to get everybody to adopt a base 12 number system instead, because there's no particular reason we need to be base 10 instead of 12 or 20 or 16 or whatever. But then that would throw off the original metric system. JustaDamnFool posted:If the superior calendar had not been torn down by heartless reactionaries, today would be quintidi 5 Frimaire; celebrating the noble pig. That's another point against the revolutionary calendar. I don't wanna spend a day honoring cops.
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Nov 25, 2020 19:31
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365 has annoyingly few factors--73*5. So if you want to break down the year in an intelligent way you need like 5 months of 73 days each. Or maybe 73 5-day weeks and don't bother with months at all. And that's not even touching on leap year.SlothfulCobra posted:Honestly it would probably be easier to get everybody to adopt a base 12 number system instead, because there's no particular reason we need to be base 10 instead of 12 or 20 or 16 or whatever. But then that would throw off the original metric system. At this point we've been using base 10 for so long that every major language has base-10 number words and as much as I love 12 a switch probably ain't happening. That said, many languages show linguistic remnants of a previous base-20 system, meaning that the language can adapt. It'd just be a giant pain. cheetah7071 fucked around with this message at 19:45 on Nov 25, 2020 |
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Nov 25, 2020 19:42
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quote:Honestly it would probably be easier to get everybody to adopt a base 12 number system instead, because there's no particular reason we need to be base 10 instead of 12 or 20 or 16 or whatever. Its a lot easier to divide by 10 than it is by 12. I think anyway
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Nov 25, 2020 19:44
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Dalael posted:Its a lot easier to divide by 10 than it is by 12. I think anyway If you're using base 12, dividing by 10 is actually dividing by 12.
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Nov 25, 2020 19:46
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Dalael posted:Its a lot easier to divide by 10 than it is by 12. I think anyway Ee have a system of writing numbers that makes it trivial to divide by 10. It's due to how we write numbers, not some intrinsic property of the number 10.
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Nov 25, 2020 19:46
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It's harder to teach kids to count in base 12 cause humans have got ten fingers.
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Nov 25, 2020 19:46
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Dalael posted:Its a lot easier to divide by 10 than it is by 12. I think anyway Only in base 10. Gaius Marius posted:It's harder to teach kids to count in base 12 cause humans have got ten fingers. There are other counting methods - we have 12 knuckle bones, which is an old way of counting to 12 on one hand.
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Nov 25, 2020 19:48
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Gaius Marius posted:It's harder to teach kids to count in base 12 cause humans have got ten fingers. As I said earlier, there's an easy way to count to 12 on your fingers (and you even get to keep a free hand while doing it, unlike the ten system where you need both hands to make it to 10). Each segment of your fingers represents a number. Place your thumb on the spot corresponding to the number you're keeping track of. You have 12 segments on your non-thumb fingers, so this gets you to 12. This isn't some idea that would never work in the real world, either, real world cultures have used this method. Counting to 10 by extending the relevant number of fingers is cultural.
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Nov 25, 2020 19:49
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cheetah7071 posted:As I said earlier, there's an easy way to count to 12 on your fingers (and you even get to keep a free hand while doing it, unlike the ten system where you need both hands to make it to 10). Each segment of your fingers represents a number. Place your thumb on the spot corresponding to the number you're keeping track of. You have 12 segments on your non-thumb fingers, so this gets you to 12. This isn't some idea that would never work in the real world, either, real world cultures have used this method. Counting to 10 by extending the relevant number of fingers is cultural. if you use joints instead you can count in hex!
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Nov 25, 2020 19:52
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It's a lot easier to divide by 12 than to divide by 10.
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Nov 25, 2020 19:57
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Someone will have to teach me how dividing by 12 is suposedly easier because I don't get it  But to be fair, i never learned any other way
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Nov 25, 2020 20:01
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Dalael posted:Someone will have to teach me how dividing by 12 is suposedly easier because I don't get it In base-twelve, the twelfth number is written as 10. The tenth and eleventh numbers would receive new symbols--usually A and B when just talking about it. In any base dividing by the number represented as 10 is very easy--just move the decimal point to the left. This is getting a bit more mathy than the ancient history thread really wants, but basically we have a method we use to associate symbols with numbers. That system is semi-arbitrary and there's other ways we could have done it. The system we use makes it very easy to work with 2s, 5s, and 10s, but that's a property of the notation, not of the numbers themselves.
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Nov 25, 2020 20:05
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If we're switching bases it should be 16 not 12. Hundreds of thousands of nerds already know hexadecimal.
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Nov 25, 2020 20:08
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16 is even worse than 10 if you're not a computer
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Nov 25, 2020 20:09
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Dalael posted:Someone will have to teach me how dividing by 12 is suposedly easier because I don't get it 100/10 = 10 regardless of what base you're using.
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Nov 25, 2020 20:10
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