[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 26 points 3 months ago

The start of the calendar has to be arbitrary, there's no way around that as it's not feasible to measure the time since the beginning of the universe with good enough accuracy.

As others commented, the Julian Day is a time measure that is actually used in astronomy, and Unix time is a time stamp standard (not really a calendar, although it could be if we got used to it) that is mostly a way to store time points, not really to consume them before converting to a more readable form.

But as a scientist who is wholly irreligious, I'm not overly bothered by using the Gregorian calendar, even though it has Christian (and a lot of pre-Christian) elements. Its annoyances (different numbers of days in each month, weeks not aligning with years, leap years etc.) are due to the fact that we decided to measure time in these arbitrary units. At least it's universal in the modern era (often in conjunction with another calendar), and everywhere you go people understand what "August 5, 2024" means (although August might have to be translated to the target language, since the names of the months are not universal).

That's more than you can say about non-time units of measurement (I'm looking at you, imperial and US customary units!!)

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 36 points 4 months ago

There's an argument to be made that "no binario" is the more correct. Latin has a neutral grammatical gender ("bīnārium") that has been mostly assimilated into the masculine gender in Spanish.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 43 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

It's exaggerated but yes, this map really reminds me of many large Chinese cities. It's probably true every major city has a People's Square. I think the map is based on Beijing.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 34 points 5 months ago

A guy came from the future, using time travel technology, and the achievement he touts is simply going to the moon?

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 27 points 7 months ago

Hydrogen was made approximately 400,000 after the big bang in a process called recombination, as the universe cooled down enough for stable neutral atoms to exist.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 33 points 7 months ago

Is it actually running snap or just unpacking its content and running it as a normal flatpak?

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 26 points 7 months ago

吃鸡 literally means "eat chicken" but it's just an expression and here it refers to gaming. Like "eat crow" is an English idiom that makes no sense if translated literally to other languages.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 28 points 7 months ago

Borg for backup. I'm really surprised it's not more widely known. It's an incredible piece of software.

Also, not really lesser known software, but a lesser known feature of file systems including the ones we use in FOSS operating systems: extended file attributes - useful to add metadata to files without modifying them.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 40 points 8 months ago

Somebody should tell him decibels go into the negative numbers

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 29 points 1 year ago

I've heard this trope before but I'm skeptic. I'm not a C expert but I can't believe memory bugs in that language are so much more benign than in C++.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 40 points 1 year ago

Nothing wrong with that... Most people don't need to reinvent the wheel, and choosing a filename extension meaningful to the particular use case is better then leaving it as .zip or .db or whatever.

[-] observantTrapezium@lemmy.ca 33 points 1 year ago

Majel Barrett played both Nurse Chapel and Number One in the original series, but these two actresses in SNW look nothing alike.

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observantTrapezium

joined 1 year ago