6 ms·
In metro, no one (if not many) is carrying cell phones! That is (just one of) something our eyes are not used to. (In Singapore, nearly every one in metro is ho
by LaFolle 11y ago
In metro, no one (if not many) is carrying cell phones! That is (just one of) something our eyes are not used to. (In Singapore, nearly every one in metro is hooked to their phones)
This is too much:
"North Korea doesn’t use the traditional Gregorian calendar, they use the ‘Juche’ calendar, beginning on the date of Kim Il-Sung’s birth, Juche 1. "
- peferron 11y agoI found the calendar thing funny too. Then I remembered we're all counting from the birth of Jesus.
- AlgorithmicTime 11y agoWell, the supposed birth of Jesus. Guess you've got to choose something. Could go back to Ab Urbe Condita, I suppose. Or start a new calendar from 1776 or some other auspicious year. It's not like AD was used until like the 8th Century.
- mcphage 11y ago> we're all counting from the birth of Jesus At some point people realized they got the year wrong for Jesus's supposed birth. But the reaction was, "eh, fuck it", so our calendar isn't really based even on that anymore.
- emodendroket 11y agoI mean, we still call it "the year of our Lord." FWIW Japan uses, in parallel, the Western system, but also a system where the years are counted from the beginning of the reign of the current emperor.
- nommm-nommm 11y ago>I mean, we still call it "the year of our Lord." BC/AD is deprecated for non-religious uses. The international standard is CE/BCE for common era/before common era.
- takno 11y agoI've always found this odd. Declaring the last 2000 years the "Christian Era" seems much more offensive than a couple of letter standing for some fairly arbitrary latin. Added to which, even in countries which could be described as being in a Christian era, it just didn't get going for a couple of hundred years after 0AD
- Mikeb85 11y agoBCE/CE stands for Before Common Era/Common Era.
- jff 11y agoWhat makes it so Common? What great event occurred on the year 1 CE that we decided we should start marking our years from that point? Ovid writing "Metamorphoses"?
- mcphage 11y ago> What great event occurred on the year 1 CE that we decided we should start marking our years from that point? Absolutely nothing. You need to have a starting point, and for historical reasons we ended up with that one. It isn't a meaningful date for anybody, but it turns out having a common reference point is more important than having a significant reference point, so nobody cares.
- jff 11y ago> It isn't a meaningful date for anybody It's actually a very meaningful date to a lot of people on this planet, although I'm not one of them. We used to refer to years past that date using a short phrase in a dead language. However, this short phrase in a dead language referred to a religious figure, which is Not OK. So we decided we'd rename it "Common Era" but keep the numbers the same because that would be a big hassle. As a result, our calendar still counts how many years have passed since the alleged birth of Christ, but because people might be offended by the words "Anno Domini" we've called it something different. If I were in the position to pick a new calendar start date, I'd probably just go with the Unix Epoch... AE, Anno Epocha? We'd now be in the year 46AE :)
- ddeck 11y agoAs do other countries, such as Taiwan, who use the minguo (民國) calendar that counts from the founding of the Republic of China. The local system is the primary one used - it's currently year 105 here.
- emodendroket 11y agoWell Japan's is a bit more baroque since every once in a while the emperor dies and it gets reset (currently it's the Heisei era, which began in 1989).
- IIAOPSW 11y agoThey tried the same thing in the French Revolution. Lookup the French Republican Calendar. Before you deride it as ridiculous, remember that the metric system came about in the exact same way. The only difference is the world kept their space measure but tossed their temporal measure.
- FoeNyx 11y agoThe French republican calendar was tightly related to the French revolution and the French society of that time and was probably never conceived with the purpose of being adopted by other countries. Whereas the metric system's proponents were people like Lavoisier, Laplace, or Condorcet, who tried to base the system on the principles of logic and natural phenomena. Undoubtedly a more 'global' approach. Sadly Jefferson was not persuasive enough at the time with his similar proposal to the congress.
- Freak_NL 11y agoNot too strange though, several countries do this, although usually mixed with the Gregorian calendar. Japan uses both the Gregorian calendar and its own calendar where years are counted from the start of the reign of the reigning emperor. This year 2016 is Heisei 28; the year 1980 was Shōwa 55. This system is often used on formal documents and one's date of birth.
- vvvv 11y agoMaybe there is no signal 110m underground?
- cr1895 11y agoNon-Gregorian calendars aren't terribly uncommon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar#Calendars_in_use https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar#Calendars_in_use
- ThrustVectoring 11y agoNobody is wearing headphones or earbuds, either.
- LaFolle 11y agoYeah, thanks for pointing that out. It triggered curiosity on Music in North Korea. Ain't surprised the way article starts: "Music of North Korea is heavily influenced by the political situation in the country." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_North_Korea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_North_Korea