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Comment by emptybits

7 years ago

In the very first sentence, I appreciate what I think is an intentional use of five digit year formatting.

The Long Now Foundation isn’t getting caught with its pants down in an amateur Y10K bug!

“YYYYY” FTW

10 comments

emptybits

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hannasanarion  7 years ago

Disappointing that they would go for a 5 digit year, and not use the HE calendar, in which the current year is 12019

  • cmroanirgo  7 years ago

    From Wikipedia:

    "The Holocene calendar, also known as the Holocene Era or Human Era (HE), is a year numbering system that adds exactly 10,000 years to the currently dominant (AD/BC or CE/BCE) numbering scheme"

    [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar

    To me, it seems a little redundant to add a fixed 10,000 even if t0 is "near the beginning of the Holocene geological epoch and the Neolithic Revolution". So, so me using 02019 is just as arbitrarily as good.

    • hannasanarion  7 years ago

      The problem is that 02019 is not arbitrary, it is counting up from the traditional birth date of Jesus Christ.

      Many take issue with the continued use of a religious calendar in post-enlightenment society, and everybody knows that calling it "common era" is silly, because 1. It's a meaningless phrase, 2. It's audibly ambiguous, and 3. It's about as effective at covering up the ecumenical meaning as a happy face sticker is for covering a severed arm.

      Counting from the approximate dawn of civilization is a far more appropriate measure. The fact that it matches up with the AD calendar after year 10000 is a nice bonus.

    • MorganVR  7 years ago

      The reason for the 10000 years is to make explicit the real magnitud of our history, you would be surprised to learn the number of people that believe it all really started just 2000 years ago.

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