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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   1927 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 22, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Is there any solution to Youtubes algorithm thinking I'm retarded or a boomer or a 3 year or old from the third world?

There's this class of videos out there produced by content farms I don't want near me with a 10 foot pole. I'm talking those nursery song videos where the adults are cosplaying, or those "satisfying" compilations, or those that are even worse and skip reality altogether and just animate the entire thing. My search sometimes gets literred with this shit.

There's a way to get into your Google profile and view what it thinks of you, and make changes if you wish. I don't remember how, exactly; the last time I tried, I got so annoyed that it thought I only graduated high school that I nearly added my education history, before remembering that I don't actually care for Google knowing everything about me. I think it's something something accounts.google.com, but, it's also Google, so there's probably some encantation that will convince the search box to send you there.

I don't much watch YouTube, but for what little I do the YouTube recommendation algorithm was bonkers. For years I would get lots of Marvel and Star Wars breakdown/reaction video recommendations. I never have and never will watch one of those or anything remotely similar.

Checking now the algorithm appears to have corrected course. It recommends Blippi and Super Simple Songs compilations, which are actually relevant to my current typical use of YouTube as a song player for little kids.

Are you marking all that as "not interested"?

Yes, but a new channel from vietnam shitting up the search results pops up every two days.

Do you look at weird shit on your YouTube account? These days if someone sends me a bizarre YouTube I copy it into Firefox and that seemed to end the uncanny valley bullshit for me. Alternatively do you fall asleep with youtube autoplay on? After a few hours of "random" videos (like not all woodworking or all spider bites or whatever floats your boat) it can start to get pretty weird, and although it's not supposed to treat autoplay videos with the same weight as your picks, it still has an influence.

Recently read/attempted:

Droll Stories Vol. ii (Honore de Balzac)

Honore de Balzac is more famous for his impressive realist novels set in 19th century France, but he also wrote... These things. A collection of ribald short stories set in medieval France, made compelling by their casual relationship with historical accuracy and sexual morality.

A collection of short stories by Katherine Mansfield. Didn't get far with this one, found it outrageously boring, and the prose horrible to get through.

Next: Beyond Euphrates by Freya Stark.

Whoa whoa, tell me more about your Balzac! Seriously though, can you give us an example of what you mean by their casual relationship with historical accuracy and sexual morality?

Like most men under 40, I enjoy gaming as a way to spend my free time. However, I feel guilty about struggling to enjoy or be successful at gaming 'classics' like Super Mario Bros or Skyrim. My gaming interests are narrow but deep, and I find e-sports games transient and fast-paced games too demanding on my hand-eye coordination.

I really like Quantic Foundry's Gamer Motivation Model. According to my results, the two components of games I really love are what they call "Creativity" and "Immersion." I like playing games that give me the opportunity to enter a different world and role-play as a different person. I also like games which provide opportunities to build and customize things.

Games like Star Wars: The Old Republic, despite flaws, satisfy my desire for a complex storyline, character customization, and player housing. Further, while BioWare games often fulfill me with their strong stories, Bethesda games don't. I find their characters wooden, with bland dialogue and settings.

But I feel like I'm the sort of person who ought to be playing a broader range of games. I have the personality type, and my friends throughout life have always been inveterate gamers.

At times, I feel like a dog eating crumbs that fall from the master's table, satisfied only by limited (and often buggy or underdeveloped) aspects of games which focus on motivations -- like competition, or blowing stuff up -- that are more common among the core gaming demographic.

I suppose my struggle is to identify what is actually valuable to me -- is it to play the 'gaming classics,' or is it to focus on games that satisfy my unique preferences? Can anyone relate to having such unique tastes?

SWTOR is one of my very favorite games. In general, I only play games because of the story. I can enjoy the gameplay, and even actively play some games (God of War, Dragon Age, Jedi Survivor) on the very highest difficulty to challenge myself, but I mostly like the feeling of adventure that comes from the synthesis of gameplay and narrative.

Yeah, I can relate. I am mainly interested in gaming from an aesthetic perspective. I think the switch from prerendered backgrounds to fully 3d environments in JRPGs between the PS1 and PS2 eras killed the genre. The prerendered backgrounds of FF7, 8 and 9 are probably the best art that have ever come out of gaming and 3d environments are extremely ugly in comparison. Prerendered cutscenes are beautifully lit shot and angled by an artist to create an attractive visual, whereas 3d environments have a crappy camera angle pointed at random stuff that doesn't look good.

Similarly I strongly prefer the art and music of SNES era to N64 era. The creativity after N64 era really took a dive, the industry was no longer about innovation but rather the genres became very rote and the industry has become much more bland. I blame this also on Japan's economic stagnation after the 90s, and though American tech companies had plenty of money to pump into gaming they lacked the taste and creativity of Japanese designers in the 90s and early 2000s. I believe creativity in gaming has basically died after We Love Katamari was released.

I took the Gamer Motivation Model you linked to and scored highest on creativity as well. I like games like Animal Crossing and the early Harvest Moon games where you can decorate/arrange things. I also used to spend an embarrassing amount of time on crappy Korean farm sim games on my phone so I could design beautiful towns with their assets. Actually, I would prefer to play a game like Super Mario RPG or Persona 1/2:EP/2:IS which all have really really good art direction, even over games where I can be creative, because it's enjoyable to see the art that other people have made.

You mention games that you don't like in your post but none that you do. Which ones do you like?

3d environments are extremely ugly in comparison.

Uhh.. what ?

The only complaint one can have with them is that they're too laborious or GPU intensive.

There's little question in saying: Baldur's Gate 3 has better graphics than Baldur's Gate 2. Art direction, no, but otherwise.

I have never played either of those games but I just google image searched both of them and I disagree.

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53a2f2e5e4b01da0d6aee932/t/54d04cbce4b01a6d6f39e282/1422937279489/?format=1500w

https://assetsio.reedpopcdn.com/eurogamer_baldur_s_gate_ee_1.png?width=1200&height=1200&fit=bounds&quality=70&format=jpg&auto=webp

https://www.beamdog.com/media/images/1-PC-English.height-1100.jpg

I prefer the above to these:

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/MDMeCbXyQ2EXMjpE25yw3D-1200-80.jpg

https://oyster.ignimgs.com/mediawiki/apis.ign.com/baldurs-gate-3/e/e5/BG3_Combat_Guide_-_Initiative.png

https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1086940/ss_332cd26db210d4b10df744485ecf0a9b3f2e9024.1920x1080.jpg?t=1703250718

The BG3 shots are chaotic and messy and at a random crappy angle. The BG2 shots are organized and clean and easy to look at. I am a designer and prefer the former.

Broadly I don't really like the art styles of either of these games but I have the same opinion of, for example, FF7-8-9 vs FF15/16, or Persona1/2 vs Persona 3/4/5

I am not saying that prerendered background are like, technically better in terms of computer power or technology or something, I'm saying that 3d environments that have random camera angles are less aesthetically appealing than a fixed angle view arranged by an artist.

The BG3 shots are chaotic and messy and at a random crappy angle. The BG2 shots are organized and clean and easy to look at. I am a designer and prefer the former.

That's by choice of the user.

I'm saying that 3d environments that have random camera angles are less aesthetically appealing than a fixed angle view arranged by an artist.

Might be true sometime, especially if camera control is bad. Which isn't really the case in BG3.

BG3 pissed me more due to e.g. kitschy graphical design choices (at times), maps being too small when that wasn't required and especially writing wise.

Not sure if it would change your mind, but I find seeing the gameplay in video footage instead of a screenshot can change how you perceive the graphics, as motion and animation have a huge impact on perception. If you ever pause a video the image never seems "right" and often you get people in strange facial poses/expressions. Or if you ever pause an animation when a character is making a big movement you get some really funky-looking images.

I play Starcraft and I prefer the visuals of Starcraft Broodwar to Starcraft II. The interesting thing about Brood War is that the units pop out to me whether it is on video or a screenshot, but Starcraft II looks much worse as an image than when I view it in a video. So something similar could be happening to BG3.

You can see a similar in Age of Empires series;

Age of Empires 2: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/813780/ss_e2fc6cfd934c8150cf751955d44deb688ab3c7d0.1920x1080.jpg?t=1702497119

Age of Empires 4: https://cdn.akamai.steamstatic.com/steam/apps/1466860/ss_48195285a60c6208f8bd722f74c556b9a224f4b0.1920x1080.jpg?t=1702338967

The units in Age of Empires 2 just seem to pop out more to me.

I am in general agreement with you that things look worse in 3d, but I'm speaking strictly from an RTS gameplay experience where your ability to process visual information in a short amount of time is crucial. For a game like BG3 where the gameplay is turn-based and people are probably playing to immerse themselves in the story, I don't think the 3d art detracts from the gameplay or experience.

Can anyone relate to having such unique tastes?

.. unique ?

I like playing games that give me the opportunity to enter a different world and role-play as a different person. I also like games which provide opportunities to build and customize things.

Kenshi sounds like right what you want.

Or you should play Dwarf Fortress. Plenty of creativity and building.

I suppose my struggle is to identify what is actually valuable to me -- is it to play the 'gaming classics,' or is it to focus on games that satisfy my unique preferences? Can anyone relate to having such unique tastes?

Sort of. There are a lot of games I enjoyed as a kid, which I also sucked at. And I always felt kind of guilty and inadequate for sucking at them. I could probably get good if I focused and spent hundreds of hours practicing but... that seems like a poor use of time...

Fuck doing things you hate in futile hope to impress others. I like new games because they provide new experiences, but if there's a game I don't enjoy among them, I have no qualms about uninstalling it.

Related to @DuplexFields below, if you could create a system of weights and measures that would be used worldwide, what would you do?

The SI system is pretty good (and a vast improvement over the mishmash of units that they replaced), but IMO there's still room for improvement. The "kilo"gram is the most obvious failure with its extraneous prefix, a change of one Kelvin is too small to detect unaided unlike one second, meter, or kilogram, and the ampere and mole are just weird numbers.

My proposed system would keep water as the informal reference material, as well as the second. Everything else would change to match the new discoveries in the last ~150 years: I would keep the rotation of the Earth, the mass of an atom, and the density and freezing point of water, but replace the circumference of the earth, the force produced by electromagnetism, and the boiling point of water with absolute zero and the elementary charge as follows:

Dimension Value Original Metric Derivation
 New Derivation
Time 1 s 1/(24 * 60 * 60) day No change
Length 2.71 cm 1/(40000000) circumference of Earth A 1x1x1 cube of water masses 1
Mass 19.93 g Water has density 1000 kg/m^3 10^24 carbon-12 atoms has mass of 12
Electric Current 160.3 mA Magnetic force between wires 10^18 elementary charges per second
Temperature 2.7316 K 100 degrees freezing-boiling
 0 is 0, freezing is 100
Amount 1 Atoms per gram None
luminous intensity ?? Whatever.

Do you have any improvements to the metric system you can think of? Any other changes you'd like made?

Use metric for making vaccines and building jumbo jets. Use it when extremely precision is necessary.

Use base 12 for every day human stuff like buying stuff from the drugstore or measuring a table leg. I like dealing with 1/2, 1/3, 1/4. I don't like dealing with 0.3333 or 0.25. You get used to it but it's unnecessary and slower.

I'd love using base 12 for everything. Unfortunately, imperial is stuck with mixed base 10-12-2n instead. Dividing one foot into thirds is easy. Dividing 28' 3 5/16" into thirds is a nightmare. Also, decimals are better for offsets: I'd rather deal with 0.51 than 33/64.

(also, there's nothing wrong with thousandths of an inch. Lots of machining is done to very high precision using the imperial system.)

I've generally heard it described as "imperial units are superior for human-scale measurement; metric is superior for much larger or much smaller scales."

base 12

*base 6

I would also accept this.

base 6

*base 60

I was recently wondering why the orders of magnitude for units of length, volume, and mass don't line up. 0.001m^3 = 1L = 1,000g, for water at 4°C. Why aren't they defined such that 1m^3 = 1L = 1g? If we leave the liter as is, this would require redefining the meter to be equal to a current decimeter, and gram to a current kilogram.

Do you have any improvements to the metric system you can think of?

Well, its base unit of measurement is fucking stupid. There's a very good reason that every pre-SI system of measurement, including the Chinese one (which was metric before the imposition of SI), has its two dominant units of length at 30cm (1 foot) and 3cm (~1 inch)- because it's meant to be human-scale.

Going off of something not relevant to the way most humans use measurement, like the size of the Earth, is a deficiency.

Nobody copies the French, and the French copy nobody- because the things they come up are weird and kind of batshit. Let them impose their standards at gunpoint (which is ultimately how SI spread across the Continent) and you're going to have a bad time- at least decimal time was too weird even for them.

Luminous intensity: perhaps based on the brightness of the full moon on a cloudless night, or the sun at noon. Centi-suns but named metrically?

Also, you said "freezing is 100", you mean absolute zero to the freezing (melting?) point of water should be exactly 100 units?

I like that idea for luminous intensity. The other option would be a number of photons, but I'm not sure how well that would work out.

For temperature, absolute zero (-273.15 C) is 0, freezing (0 C) is 100, room temperature (20 C) is about 107, and boiling (100 C) is about 136 (depending on elevation).

Last minute gift ideas? I'm in a standard northeastern USA town I need a gift for my father in law. Realistically social convention demands I spend $50, I'd drop $200 for a really extraordinary gift.

Coins, if he collects

Difficult to say.

Gift baskets (Harry and David). Gift cards (Barnes and Nobles if he's an avid reader, etc.). Alcohol, candy, coffee, or cigars if you know what he likes. Subscriptions if you know what he likes. Tickets to an event if you know what he likes.

Don't know the precedent established in the family.

Power tool?

Nicely bound journal, a record if hes into that. Maybe a bag of fancy coffee. Idk depends on the person.

Spend two hours making a large piece of modular origami from a few dozen Post-It Notes. If your hourly wage is at least 25 $/h, then the gift is worth 50 $, right? ;-)

Little leather wallet for just coins. Should have a button to stay closed. I was gifted one of these years ago and never realized how much I hated jangly coins. I love it. Of course in these cashless days maybe this is a dinosaur gift.

I just pawn all mine off on my poor wife since she has one of those coin purses. I always keep a 500 though, Japan still has lots of odd situations where you must have a coin.

The 新500円 however has failed me many times. By the time all the buses and whatnot accept them they'll probably come up with yet another version.

Modernization proceeds at its steady slow trickle, at least. My tier-3 city's bus system finally started allowing you to pay with a QR code so I no longer have dig through couch cushions for 100s. Maybe we'll be able to do away with coins altogether by 2100 lol.

fancy pen?

Distilled liquor of some sorts?

I spend almost as much time on Janitor Duty as I do reading the threads and comments. How would everyone prefer I rate posts, by strict attention to the rules, or, by a fuzzy combination of rules + effort + novelty (which, being honest, is what I do now)?

I don't care how you rate them, but my ratings are something like:

High-quality: Convinced me of something

Good: I agree with this and it's well-written

Neutral: Everything else, including polite stuff I strongly disagree with

Bad: Lots of heat without any of the lower stuff

Deserves warning: Personal attacks on interlocutor

Deserves ban: Threats, e.g. threatening to kill interlocutor

As you might imagine, the vast majority of my ratings are Good/Neutral/Bad, though I've hit "deserves a ban" at least once (and it was, indeed, for a murder threat).

This is how I rate them, if I think the comment is breaking the rules but isn't likely to lead to more breakages then I'd say bad. If it breaks the rules and will likely lead to more breakages I rate it with a warning. I think I've only ever said something deserved a ban once but I save that for anything I think deserves a permaban only.

I'm more lenient than the mods (not lately though, things are pretty chill these days compared to reddit) but I also find it hard to ever say something definitely deserves a ban without context so most of the time I treat the warning as if it would lead to an actual warning/a short ban/a week ban because with more context it could be any of those things. I also rarely get served up with duty for egregious comments, anyway.

I mean how should you rate it? Use the metarule and treat janitor duty as a way to hopefully shape this place in the way you'd want it to be through suggestion. Otherwise I wouldn't dwell on it too much. I don't think they're using the janitors as juror votes.

We do see the overall results of the user moderation, but not the specific votes. I'm not sure how zorba set up the calculations behind the scenes.

I think it's good that you are basically seeing what we have to do.

Leave alone vs warn vs temp ban vs permanent ban. The added complication for us is that we have to also write something to go along with a punishment decision. That does make me marginally less harsh as a mod. Especially if there are just lots of small things wrong. But it probably makes me more harsh when it's just one really bad thing in an otherwise ok post.

Video on League of Legends player who obtained rank 1 in two servers simultaneously, as well rank 1 Korea within two weeks. (That’s a top 99.9999th percentile skill in a highly competitive strategy game with millions of players)

Some interesting takeaways:

  • Despite playing the “jungler” role, which is considered cooperative and supportive, the player never listens to his teammate’s ping unless he has independently judged the trade to be beneficial with extreme certainty. The common social expectation of cooperation is ignored, and the player instead focuses on benefits to his character that he can control. Ironically, this produces the most cooperative result, which is winning the game for your team. We see that the social expectation of cooperation is not always the best result for everyone in a group.

  • Wins and losses are totally devalued in importance, and instead the “mundanity of excellence” is pursued. The player cares only about whether he made the statistically correct decision every time a decision arises, not whether it failed once or succeeded another time. This results in a player who is immune to “tilting”, ie bad or flippant moods that arise from loss sprees. Quoting from the eponymous classic study, “excellence is accomplished through the doing of actions, ordinary in themselves, performed consistently and carefully, habitualized, compounded together, added up over time. While these actions are qualitatively different from those of performers at other levels, these differences are neither unmanageable nor, taken one step at a time, terribly difficult […] Every time a decision comes up, the qualitatively correct choice will be made. The action, in itself, is nothing special; the care and consistency with which it is made is.”

  • The math on everything is neurotically and fully understood. Every potential trade is understood in second and tertiary consequences (ganking a lane has risk yada yada, but the secondary effect is loss of jungle farm, and the tertiary effect is that your farm spawns irregularly the next time they pop up). There are only a handful of gank strategies that the player has mastered, but he can execute them with precision.

Your first takeaway is interesting, because when I used to play over a decade ago, the social aspect was the hardest part of winning. It was crucial to keep your team focused on the game, and not arguing in chat.

There was one strat - split pushing - that went against the expected meta at the time. It was basically an aggressive fork, going too deep, too quickly in order to make the opponent commit to defending one side, and gain momentum on the other. I was really good at it. Experience seemed to confirm it worked. The problem is that (at the time), it was just seen as a "thing you don't do". Doing it (or worse, letting the team know ahead of time I was going to try) would prompt such a raging backlash, it was actually counterproductive. The strat was sound, but tilted teammates typing in allcaps for thirty minutes don't win matches, so I stopped trying.

If this player earned this rank in public games, it makes sense that his strategies are anti-social. There isn't any trust in public games. The best you can do to unite the team is to be the example of good play.

Such players (aka "tryhards") are terrible company during casual play, and sadly there are a lot of people who adopt this behaviour before they're actually good enough to carry their weight independently. A commonly said wisdom is "sticking together with a bad plan is better than going separately with no plan".

We see that the social expectation of cooperation is not always the best result for everyone in a group.

I don't know much about League of Legends, but do solo queue people get pitted against pre-assembled groups of 5? I imagine the group that has experience playing together would be more receptive to cooperative play because they know exactly what those pings mean, whereas in solo queue that ping could mean anything from just providing information "hey enemy is here" to " hey jungler you need to come and gank now". Cooperation means you take the other player's input into account, not to just blindly follow another person's orders.

I've never played LoL or even watched it, but the second and third points were universal attitudes and characteristics shared by nearly all top players in MtG arena. I remember Gevlon Goblin came up with something similar when he blogged about the game, too.

If it were up me to update the calendar for the next century, I would put us on 13 months of 28 days each, and make the Saturdays of every month line up with the moon phases; full, half, and new moons would all be on Saturdays.

There would be only one leftover day in three out of four years, and two leftover days in the leap years. I would put the annual leftover day on the winter solstice, and call it New Year’s Day, the day without a month, and I would put the leap day between October and November, and call it Election Day.

The 13th month would be between May and June and it would be called “Leftober”.

I would just find a way to adjust the orbit and rotation of the Earth to make it be exactly 364 days and 24 hours, no leap years or leap seconds, 13 months with 28 days each. Or 8 months with 30 days and 4 months with 31 days, if you want to keep 12 months for seasons.

The biggest drawback would be the birthdays always falling on the same day of the week.

Nah, as someone who has had heated arguments with people who are so adamant about the US adopting the metric system that they casually toss off metric units in casual speech as if they don't expect people to think they're insufferable dicks, the only calendar change I will support is a metric one.

The only SI unit of time is the second, so we'll start there. 100 seconds to the minute, 100 minutes to the hour, 10 hours to the day. 10 days a week, 10 weeks a month,.10 months a year. Of course, we wouldn't use those names; we'd redefine the second in terms of the metric day, so these hours would be decidays, years kilodays, etc.

Obviously, days wouldn't reliably track to sunrise and sunset, let alone anything like moon phases or seasons, but people who cite this as a reason my system is impractical are missing the point — the metric system isn't about making units that have any relationship to our everyday lives, it's about making the units divisible by ten. This is the information age. We have accurate clocks that can track time to a miniscule degree based on the half-life of a cesium atom, why the hell are we concerned about astronomical shit? Are you some fucking 5th century farmer who can't read and needs to count moon phases so you'll know when to plant your crops? Hell, no; the time is whatever the hell your phone says it is. It's time we get this shit in step with the 21st century.

Also, the fact that you'd add an extra month and not call it Smarch is borderline criminal.

The 30 days to a month isn't completely pulled out of the ass. It's based on the moon's movements. Same with the 12 months to a year. The specific micro lengths of the months not being evently diviced could be rectified. Also whichever joker decided OCTOBER isn't the 8th month of the year should burn in hell for all eternity.

It’s not the only one:

September - 7
October - 8
November - 9
December - 10

Historical reasons conspired to make these lose their connection to their meanings. The reason we have April Fools Day is April used to be the first month of the year, and people who didn't get the memo on the shift to January were mocked when they celebrated on April 1.

Your displeasure is misplaced. There's a very good reason why our time measurements are centered around a solar day. When we someday leave the cradle of Mother Earth forever we might switch to a kilo- and mega- second timekeeping method, but as long as all our daily activities are dependent on the Sun's position in the sky the day of 86400 seconds is there to stay.

In contrast, there's nothing about US customary units that makes them have any relationship to our everyday lives. They are as arbitrary as metric units, but at least with metric units conversions are simple and intuitive.

The conversions which actually get used in imperial units are also quite easy. The ones I use with any regularity are:

12 inches : 1 foot, 3 feet : 1 yard
16 oz : 1 lb
3 tsp : 1 tbsp
2 cups : 1 pt, 2 pts: 1 qt, 4 qts : 1 gal

These are not onerous or difficult to remember. They are even easy to calculate, in this day of having a computer in your pocket at almost all times. People advocating for the metric system always go "BUT DO YOU KNOW HOW MANY STONE ARE IN A BUSHEL" and have a good laugh, but this is a bad faith gotcha. For the typical every day use, imperial conversions are quite easy to remember and work with.

How many fluid ounces are there in a tablespoon? How many ounces of water in a fluid ounce? Or are they equated via a different substance?

I don't know, nor are those conversions which I've ever needed.

Customary units aren't arbitrary. If I need to measure feet without a tape measure I can use my own feet and get a reasonable approximation. For inches I can use the distance between knuckles. The mile is based on how far you travel in one minute at normal highway speeds (at least in the days of the 55 mph speed limit, assuming 5 mph of leeway), a gallon is based on the amount of milk a family of four uses between grocery trips, the pound is based on the weight of the average cantaloupe, etc.

Joking aside, the point is that these measurements aren't arbitrary, but based what people find useful and convenient in their everyday lives. When metric proponents are pressed on the time question, they always point out that dividing the day into ten 100 minute hours doesn't result in any useful units of measurement. Well, so what? The last I checked, the distance between the equator and the north pole doesn't have any reasonable relationship to my everyday life, why should I expect units of time to? And the argument about ease of conversion never made any sense to me either; I couldn't tell you the last time I had to convert between customary units. Maybe occasionally when altering a recipe, but even then it's only a mild inconvenience that wouldn't even be appreciably improved by a switch to metric. It's definitely not worth changing our entire system over. I just find most of the metrification arguments dumb, because they never seem to apply in any other contexts.

This part is confusing two entirely separate things:

The last I checked, the distance between the equator and the north pole doesn't have any reasonable relationship to my everyday life, why should I expect units of time to?

One is the need for an independently verifiable definition of your measures, these days generally based on fundamental physical constants. Instead of building your system on a prototypical example and then accumulating measurement errors outward from it. Every system needs this, and in fact your current imperial units are defined as fractions of SI units, piggybacking on the definitions work of metric.

The other is the scale of the default unit, which is completely independent from your method of definition. After deciding to base the meter on the earth's circumference the actual fraction can still be freely chosen. The meter was picked specifically as a length useful in everyday life, it's pretty much the same scale as a yard.

dividing the day into ten 100 minute hours doesn't result in any useful units of measurement.

That's different from redefining the day itself. One day being exactly 100000 "decimal seconds" long would've worked just fine and scaling various processes would've been much easier. If one brick firing cycle takes 7 normal hours, how many days will it take to make 17 batches? If it takes 30 metric hourons (100 hourons in a day), then it's 510 metric hourons or a bit more than 5 days.

I couldn't tell you the last time I had to convert between customary units. Maybe occasionally when altering a recipe, but even then it's only a mild inconvenience that wouldn't even be appreciably improved by a switch to metric.

You could at least number your wrenches in 1/32ths of an inch, so they don't go 5/8, 11/16, 23/32.

And I do conversions all the time when doing technical sketches by hand. On mm graph paper I can directly measure any distance and convert it on the fly. Is it a 1:10 scale drawing of a staircase? This means 6.8cm is 67l8cm. Is it a 1:50 house plan? 6.8cm is 3.4m.

When we someday leave the cradle of Mother Earth forever we might switch to a kilo- and mega- second timekeeping method,

Multi-planetary timekeeping is something that doesn't really have a firm academic basis currently. Relativistic time dilation means that clocks, even Cesium sources, run at perceptually (for an Earth-based observer) different rates due to differing gravitational potential. I have talked with experts in the field before, and there is general agreement that the current "time is defined relative to Earth sea-level" probably doesn't work for precise applications (notably navigation) even on the Moon.

I love it.

Isn’t the lunar month 29.5, though? You’d precess off of Saturdays pretty fast.

Also, I suppose programmers would be upset at the concept of a “day without a month.” It would totally get counted as December.

the lunar month 29.5

You're right; just keep it a solar calendar, and let the moon precess as much as it wants.

New Year's Day would actually be a bonus for programmers: the zeroth day of the new year, and the first and only day in the zeroth month, keeping all the Saturdays divisible by seven.

Since you've dropped the lunar aspects, you can just intercalate a whole week at a time instead of having an orphan day every year, although this would cause the equinoxes and solstices to drift.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Calendar

Your proposal seems to be: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

I independently derived it, and chose a different location and name for the new month, but it’s fundamentally identical to the IFC, yes. I chose the name Leftober because it’s made from the leftover 2 or 3 days from the other months. Also, from the article:

Every year has 4 equal-length quarters of 91 days, each 13 weeks or 3+1⁄4 months long.

13 is my favorite prime number and 91 my favorite nonprime. It’s 7x13, a semiprime, and the only composite below 100 which can’t be factored by tricks and must be memorized:

  • Multiples of 2 and 5 end in 0,2,4,6,8 and 0,5 respectively
  • Multiples of 3 and 9 have their digits sum to 3,6,9 and 9 respectively
  • 49 is the square of 7 and is typically memorized in the square sequence 0,1,4,9,16,25,36,49,64,81,100,121,144

Leftober is kinda cool but the 13th month will always be Smarch to me.

I know, but I live in Albuquerque, NM. Every time I go to a minor league baseball game, I am reminded that the name of our franchise, the Isotopes, came from a (really good) Simpsons episode. I’d rather not watch Bort Johnson batting for the Isotopes in Smarch weather because of Simpsons gags.

Leftober is so named because it’s made from the leftover 2 or 3 days from the other months, but my favored alternative is “Sprung” between the old Spring and Summer months.

By the twelfth day of Christmas, my true love had given to me

12 drummers drumming,

22 pipers piping,

30 lords a-leaping,

36 ladies dancing,

40 maids a-milking,

42 swans a-swimming,

42 geese a-laying,

40 golden rings,

36 calling birds,

30 French hens,

22 turtle doves,

and 12 partridges in 12 pear trees!

What did you do with them?

I believe this is the answer to your question.

Or indeed, how you would manage to fit them all in an ordinary house

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