Editing Talk:1061: EST

Jump to: navigation, search
Ambox notice.png Please sign your posts with ~~~~

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision Your text
Line 9: Line 9:
 
"triple 4 hours after every full moon" = add on an additional 12 hours every full moon, to make the time between full moons exactly 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days). [[Special:Contributions/75.103.23.206|75.103.23.206]] 21:44, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
 
"triple 4 hours after every full moon" = add on an additional 12 hours every full moon, to make the time between full moons exactly 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days). [[Special:Contributions/75.103.23.206|75.103.23.206]] 21:44, 7 December 2012 (UTC)
  
: Erm, just like to say, as a UK resident for all my life (five decades, adult and child), that I've ''never'' heard of "English Standard Time".  GMT is Greenwich ('Gren-itch') Mean Time, which is ''for most purposes'' the same as UTC (which officially took over in the early 70s, but most lay-people still ''say'' 'GMT') and all the various other prime standards in use (give or take leap seconds, planetary rotation/orbitting adjustments, adherence to atomic clocks, etc) and BST (British Summer Time, i.e. GMT+1)has just taken over for this sun-tilted part of the year.  A brief check of the usual reference sites reveals no sign of EST existing any time since any form of standardised "Railway Time" was originally instituted in the days of the Industrial Revolution, but I might have missed it.
 
 
: Anyway, as such, the two ESTs is surely a constructed part of the joke not (as I read it) some fact from RL that needs explaining.  Yes, there's EST (Eastern Standard Time) for the US (and versions for Australia and elsewhere?), as well as main Egyptian time-zone and European Summer Time (actually a over-term for the three varieties: Western, Central and Eastern).  (The UK roughly matches up to Western European Time and Western European Summer Time accordingly, but that's by no means official except possibly by convention/shared heritage of definition.)  But I think the joke with the two 'EST's is ''purely'' to do with something like the whole Yard/Metre(/Meter) thing.  Although initially I imagined it might be something to do with UK/US Gallon differences, albeit that we now tend to have to use Litres.  Or, if you prefer, 'Liters'. ;) [[Special:Contributions/178.99.20.83|178.99.20.83]] 21:49, 1 April 2013 (UTC)
 
  
 
I seem to recall that Narnia time ran usually much faster but sometimes much slower than real-world time. [[Special:Contributions/130.160.145.224|130.160.145.224]] 20:51, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
 
I seem to recall that Narnia time ran usually much faster but sometimes much slower than real-world time. [[Special:Contributions/130.160.145.224|130.160.145.224]] 20:51, 10 March 2013 (UTC)
  
 
I always thought that Taiwan, Province of China missed a golden opportunity here to establish propaganda that they founded it.  Instead they are known as a township in the US. [[Special:Contributions/66.88.136.254|66.88.136.254]] 20:01, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
 
I always thought that Taiwan, Province of China missed a golden opportunity here to establish propaganda that they founded it.  Instead they are known as a township in the US. [[Special:Contributions/66.88.136.254|66.88.136.254]] 20:01, 13 March 2013 (UTC)
 
Think of what Jack Bauer could have done with 4 more minutes! {{unsigned ip|108.162.254.101}}
 
 
Not all possible attempts to make the calendar simpler would make it as complicated (or worse) than it is. For example, removing one day each from January and August to make February have 30 or 31 like the rest of the months would make the calendar (slightly) simpler and more logical going forward.[[Special:Contributions/173.245.50.174|173.245.50.174]] 18:39, 7 September 2015 (UTC)
 
:You'd have to rewrite {{w|Zeller's congruence}} and find a replacement for the {{w|Knuckle mnemonic}}, both of which depend upon the existing pattern, or you'd upset a lot of people!
 
:For the former, it relies upon the pattern of starting after February and observing that the days are 31,30,31,30,31 for March...July, the same again August...December and starting the same pattern again for January and, as far as it goes, February. Adjusting Zeller to use 12/5ths instead of 13/5ths might work out well. That seems (...back of an envelope calculation) to allow for 31 day months being March, ''June'', August, ''November'' and January (italics were 30 days), all the rest being 30 (demoting four previously 31-day months) except for the leap-February for which the ''extra''-extra-day causes no knock-on-effects.
 
:But you also ''could'' bring down every month to 30 days (use the factor 10/5ths, or actually just assuming the straight constant shift of +2 weekdays per month without needing to round down anything at all), except February which now has 35-or-36 days.
 
:(Even simpler, every month other than Feb could be 28 days - see how ''they'' like it, and Feb now be more than double the size to make up for historical wrongs. Which'd be reason enough to retain the year-downshift of Jan/Feb, but otherwise removes any month-number terms in Zeller, just the (adjusted) year-number bits because the year still ≠mod7 days.)
 
:...but I'd be sad to lose the Knuckles coincidence. Whatever other 'improvememts' you might think I'm suggesting! [[Special:Contributions/172.71.178.22|172.71.178.22]] 15:27, 3 September 2023 (UTC)
 
 
This might be a reference to the old TV show Babylon 5 here, but that's unlikely because the show is never mentioned anywhere else.[[Special:Contributions/208.97.36.166|208.97.36.166]] 3:18, 11 September 2015 (UTC)
 
 
Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but it should be noted "1958" could also refer to the Discordian calendar, in which that is the year 3125 (5^5, 5 being the by far most significant number in a religion especially obsessed with numerology).--[[Special:Contributions/141.101.105.29|141.101.105.29]] 22:10, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
 
 
The historical Jewish calendar did have month names; four of them happen to come up in the Old Testament. Some do suspect that the names were only used rarely.<br>The modern Japanese calendar - and I think a few others - does have numbered months only; don't recall if any historical ones do, unfortunately. [[Special:Contributions/141.101.80.44|141.101.80.44]] 09:53, 8 October 2015 (UTC)
 
 
: I agree that the connection to the Jewish (or for that matter Japanese) calendar is nonexistent. Will remove. [[User:Jkshapiro|Jkshapiro]] ([[User talk:Jkshapiro|talk]]) 02:58, 10 July 2020 (UTC)
 

Please note that all contributions to explain xkcd may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see explain xkcd:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)

Templates used on this page: