this post was submitted on 26 Aug 2023
661 points (95.6% liked)
Atheist Memes
6258 readers
2 users here now
About
A community for the most based memes from atheists, agnostics, antitheists, and skeptics.
Rules
-
No Pro-Religious or Anti-Atheist Content.
-
No Unrelated Content. All posts must be memes related to the topic of atheism and/or religion.
-
No bigotry.
-
Attack ideas not people.
-
Spammers and trolls will be instantly banned no exceptions.
-
No False Reporting
-
NSFW posts must be marked as such.
Resources
International Suicide Hotlines
Non Religious Organizations
Freedom From Religion Foundation
Ex-theist Communities
Other Similar Communities
!religiouscringe@midwest.social
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This probably doesn't count, but Sosigenes of Alexandria was an Ancient Greek astronomer who designed the Julian calendar in 45 BC. This was replaced in 1582 AD with the Gregorian calendar (named after Pope Gregory XIII) and is still in use today. Of course both were found by science, but it took the weight of the Catholic Church to push for the more accurate calendar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
I think the vast majority of scientists, at least computer scientists, would argue against the efficacy and accuracy of the Gregorian calendar.
It's more of a "we're stuck with it" situation than a testament to its scientific veracity.
The Gregorian calendar is pretty solid actually. Other than a leap second every few years, it'll stay in sync for a few thousand years. You can easily calculate all leap days in a one-liner.
365 is semi prime, so we could do a 5 day week, but that's pretty minor in the grand scheme of things. There isn't a lot to improve on the Gregorian calendar
Don't get me started on timezones
Time zones are an abomination of legacy design features that should be taken out back and put out of their misery... And then a functionally similar but way simpler system put in place.
And that's the way science should be, with more data and better tools, you adjust and make things more accurate. I'm not sure what the efficacy issues are, but it's my understanding that current UTC leap seconds are put in place to reflect slight variation in the rotation of the earth. It is done in reaction to the earth's movement, so not something that could be predicted 450 years ago.
It drives me nuts. Whenever possible, I use the 4-4-5 or 13-month calendars so I can better forecast or compare historical data. Gregorian is useless on month scale or lower. I honestly can't think of any practical use for it except to make things harder.