Category: "Hmmm…"

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Kinda Surprising

https://youtu.be/Qaacd-oFaLM?si=sZMzH0htwsAKTDCM

A lot of folks who I thought were still alive, and a lot who I thought had died…

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More Food For Thought

In about 100 years—2123—we will all be buried with our relatives and friends.

Strangers will live in the homes we fought so hard to build, and they will own everything we have today. All our possessions will be unknown and probably in a land fill, including the car we spent a fortune on. Some of our things may survive to end up in the loving hands of collectors.

Our descendants will hardly know who we were, and won't directly remember us. How many of us today know our grandfather's father or what he did?

After we die, we will be remembered for a few more years, then we are just a portrait on someone's bookshelf, and a few years later our history, photos and deeds disappear in history's oblivion. We won't even be memories.

If we paused one day to analyze these questions, perhaps we would understand how ignorant and weak the dream to achieve it all was.

If we could only think about this, surely our approaches, our thoughts would change, we would be different people.

Always having more, with no time for what's really valuable in this life. I'd change all this to live and enjoy the walks I've never taken, those hugs I didn't give, those kisses for our children and our loved ones, those jokes we didn't have time for. Those would certainly be the most beautiful moments to remember, after all they would fill our lives with joy. And yet most of us waste it day after day with greed and intolerance.

~Anonymous

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From Inverse, originally published in 2018:

A CALENDAR WHERE EVERY MONTH IS 28 DAYS WOULD ACTUALLY MAKE A TON OF SENSE

Wednesday marks the last day of February, the shortest month in the Gregorian calendar. It doesn't have to be this way, according to some advocates who propose a calendar where every year is 13 months and every month is 28 days. It sounds like a drastic change to a calendar that's been in use since 1582, but dig a little deeper and the idea makes a lot of sense.

The idea is simple. Each month has four, seven-day weeks, making a total of 28 days. There are 13 months in a year, totaling 364 days, with a new month in between June and July called "Sol" to mark the summer solstice. The leftover day is a special Year Day, with two such days every four years.

The idea was first proposed by British railway worker Moses B. Cotsworth, who devised it in 1902 as a way of making his job easier. George Eastman, head of Kodak, used the calendar in his company from 1924 to 1989, but employees didn't live their lives by the strange structure and stuck to Gregorian outside of work. A proposal put forth to the League of Nations attracted a great deal of interest, but that too fell by the wayside as World War II disbanded the league.

The design has a number of advantages. It means the 8th is always a Sunday no matter the month, and the same applies to every other day. Holidays like Thanksgiving wouldn't move around the calendar anymore. Monthly and quarterly data becomes easier to compare, with both measurements an equal number of days. It also means never checking when the month ends.

The idea has since occasionally come up in fiction. The Simpsons lampooned the idea during a Treehouse of Horror Halloween special, where a particularly spooky segment takes place on the 13th day of the 13th month. Marge explains that the school calendars were misprinted, and Homer can be heard complaining about the "lousy Smarch weather."

The Simpsons episode actually raises one of the downsides of the calendar. It would mean having a 13th month every year, and also means every month would contain a Friday the 13th. It may sound like a small detail to some, but don't forget that Microsoft never released a version 13 of Office, and data from 2015 showed 574 Manhattan condos lack a 13th floor. Don't underestimate the power of superstition.