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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: April 8th, 2024

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  • Another laziness by the professors is using book questions instead of just writing their own.

    When I taught I told my students that the book was a resource for studying the material from a different perspective than the one I gave in lectures. Not actually required for the course even though I didn’t have control over it being listed as required on the course listing. And I told them if they wanted to get it, they should find the cheapest copy they could. I’ve heard you can sometimes find very cheap electronic copies (wink wink).

    It is funny to see the questions you write end up on Chegg though.








  • Someone posed a very ill-formed question that results in no winners. “Would you rather find yourself in the woods with a bear or a man?”

    The argument is almost designed to make men feel discriminated against and women feel like men don’t listen to them. There’s just enough room for everyone to bring in their own assumptions about the situation to justify their position, so everyone else feels defensive.

    The only winner is the bear.



  • Almost all of this would be true if we celebrated a day (or two) each year that were outside of the months and weeks, except events tied to points in our orbit would stay put a lot more. We would still have the same calendar every year. In your version we have a full extra week every 6 or so years, in mine every year we have a dedicated New Year’s Day that isn’t in a regular month or a day of the week, and every 4 or so years (same rules as now) we have 2 New Year’s Days.

    Though I would argue for Sunday being the 1st day of each month/year. IMO weekends should be like bookends, one on either side.

    Edit: your Wiki link contained a link to the International Fixed Calendar, which I’ve been inadvertently arguing for. This is almost identical to what I’ve been proposing, except they put the leap day at the end of June. But it fixes the major disadvantage of your system: that a year isn’t a year. In your system 1/1 is never one year away from 1/1. In mine it is within leap day drift, just like the current calendar.




  • Ahh, that makes sense. Here I was thinking it would be fun to have a day or two every year that weren’t any day of the week.

    The leap week is a little bit of an unsatisfying solution since it means solstices and equinoxes will shift around a lot more. Also not as likely to get governments and employers to be willing to treat them as holidays.

    I highly doubt we’ll move from our current calendar anytime soon. Its flaws aren’t bad enough to justify the effort, but I would really love a more symmetrical calendar. And payroll folks would probably love it too. Hourly and salary structures would be a lot more in sync.