But lunar cycles are 29.5 days, not 28.

We don’t.

Writing was invented in the range of 3300-3400BCE and the earliest coherent texts of any kind we have are from 2600BCE at the earliest. We only have archaeological evidence of anything that happened before that, and there’s nothing special about 4241BCE in that record. (The nature of archaeology makes dating prehistoric things with that level of precision risible anyway.)

There’s a small problem in that blog: it has some grotesque inaccuracies.

The part that stood out for me, though, was this:

The fourth part of my system is the seven-day work week. Different cultures around the world have had a different number of days of a week. The ancient Chinese had eight for example. The Aztecs had weeks defined as having five days. I technically go by six. It’s just easier. You will find it easier too, I guarantee that. Whose idea was it to have a prime number as the number of week days?

The ancient Chinese had a bewildering number of calendar systems with highly variable lengths of week-equivalents. They had 10-day weeks, 12-day weeks, 7-day weeks, 9-day weeks, indeed practically every number you can conceive of has been a week length in ancient Chinese calendar systems except—ironically enough—8-day weeks.

Incidentally, time systems in China are also horrifically complicated with divisions of the day into 15 “hours” (but only divided such during daytime hours) in very ancient times. Later a bizarre system that had daytime divisions of 10(更), 12(时), 60(点), 100(刻), 6000(!)(分), and even 600,000(!!)(秒) all being used at once was in play. (There’s a few more but i can’t be arsed to pull out my reference books; they’re used in marginal cases.)

Why so many units of time? Isn’t it irrational? Not really, no. Because differing activities had more useful divisions of the day for units. It turns out that consistency is very much the hobgoblin of small minds. It’s like how we use different speed measurements today internationally: km/h mostly, but also “nautical miles per hour” in the aircraft industry (alongside Mach numbers), and a few others.

And that is in the end the point here. You use divisions that are useful, not that match someone’s sense of aesthetics. The same applies to time zones (though those get a bit obnoxious when politics interferes: all of China is a single time zone, for example, which is utterly ludicrous). Months are easy to keep track of when they match the moon’s phases. In pre-industrial times in specific that is very valuable for timing key things like planting and harvests. Only 29.5 days is the approximate length of the moon’s cycle, and the year is approximately 365.25 days long. So systems had to become entrenched that either used intercalary features (e.g. the Chinese solilunar calendar), that ignored the issue (e.g. various Arab calendars), or that disconnected the moon from timings (the Western approach). What is obviously not going to work, however, is to just pick arbitrary numbers like “six day weeks” from thin air (hint: 365.25 ÷ 6 = ?), or, even worse, “14 months of 26 days with one or two intercalary days” (what’s 26 ÷ 6 again, and what’s the impact of intercalary days on sliding across months?).

And to tie this back into your selection of 4241BC as the first year of recorded history … recorded how!? Writing was itself only only invented in 3300-3400BCE and the first coherent texts we have stem from about 2600BCE. So how are you picking 4241BC as the first year of recorded history when the absolute earliest actual records we have come from over 1500 years after that point?

Which highlights the danger of using “scientific” and “rational” starting points: they are neither. The BCE/CE system was based on the purported year of Christ’s birth which has two problems: 1. The historicity of Jesus Christ is very much in doubt, and 2. even if he did exist, that year is wrong according to later scholarship: if Christ were actually real, the reported fact that Herod was alive at his birth and that the Romans were doing a census puts his date of birth at 4BCE at the latest. (It could be as early as 7BCE.) Picking some arbitrary starting point based on purported scientific/historic “facts” will (not may, will) fall apart when (and not if) scholarship finds that the date given is wrong. It’s just better to pick a date, imperfect as the choice may be, and standardize on it than try to be “objective” and fuck it up completely like the BCE/CE system did.

Good on you for copping to the AI and even more for committing to human-made art for the final product!

If this becomes available in my area, I’ll definitely be picking up a copy just for this. (I mean aside from it sounding like a kick-ass game.)

If we counted years from the reign of the Yellow Emperor using Sun Yat-sen’s approach, this year would be 4722.

Huh. It’s almost as if I already said that.

And linked to the instructions for the Model Y.

And already pointed out that they’re well-concealed which is not what you want for an emergency.

Almost.

Who have you got doing the art?

I think you’ll find most cars have visible, obvious, manual door latches on the inside. I know the XPengs and BYDs certainly do.

The free speech absolutist gets upset when people don’t want to talk on his platform.

So they bought whatever “this” is while Apartheid Manchild was still in the womb?

The Manchild has never been a decent, normal human being. (The upbringing he received at the hands of his creepy father prevented that from being possible.) He was always what he is now. He just wasn’t rich enough to not care if people found out.

Back when I still did Christmas at all, I converted first to a religion that didn’t have Christmas. It did have, however, a 4-5 day festival of approximately equal importance in the spring. I made sure all my family, friends, and colleagues know that I wouldn’t be celebrating a Christian festival, but that I would be giving gifts in March. Then I’d look at what I got for Christmas and did some cynical calculations.

For each person who gave me a gift, I decided if I wanted to lessen the relationship, keep the relationship as-is, or deepen the relationship. I’d then pick a gift of lesser, equal, or greater value (roughly speaking) and give that response gift in March. The only difference? I’d get them all for a song and a dance in the inevitable post-Christmas bankruptcy sales.

So the best time to get Christmas presents is after Christmas. January and February is when businesses get very desperate (to the point of dissolution for many) and prices drop like concussed bees.

Worse.

They’re going to have to go to China to get the seals for those.

I mean it took a Chinese maker to get seals for one of the few remaining living people who needs an iron lung: https://www.wired.com/story/iron-lung-maker-community/

A truckload of “actual military support” that has such tight strings attached that it was basically useless except for a very fragile defensive posture.

Only this week has the USA actually finally allowed the Ukraine to go on the offensive with its kit.

Thing is, people leave and decide after a day or two they’re comfortable hanging out with Nazis, so they go back to the Nazi bar.

I genuinely think worse—far worse—of anybody with a Xhitter account, to the point of presuming that they can’t be trusted with anybody non-male and non-white. There are consequences, in the end, to supporting fascism, no matter what excuses people contrive.

I’m binge-watching The Last of Us this weekend.

I avoided it because it was based on a video game. I was wrong to.

The links left me more confused, not less.

Huh. TIL that Proudhon was a Marxist.

/s ← In case it wasn’t abundantly clear.

Don’t confuse anarcho-capitalism with anarchism. The former are disguised fascists. The latter are not.

Obligatory Link: Property Is Theft

This is something that can be addressed with owners, but what about passengers? Should they be carrying one around?

How 'bout Tesla just makes fucking mechanical door handles again?

You should not have to watch a video or read a manual to open a freaking car door.

👆 That right there.

The fuck are people supposed to do who don’t even own the car?

👆👆 And that even more so.

We have literally centuries of knowledge of human-machine interaction. We know what works and what doesn’t. We know the importance of getting this right from watching what would be a literal lake of blood if put into one location before us. And one of those things that works is making sure the emergency tools are very obvious and in our faces. The rear door instructions for the Model Y alone are a horror show for anybody who has ever been in a crisis before. And then on top of that not all Model Ys have such a latch anyway.

Everything about Tesla’s doors are horrific.