It was already known to scholars that the length of a (tropical) year is close to 365-and-a-quarter days since at least 238 BC (when Ptolemy III tried to fix the length of the year in the Egyptian calender to 365-and-a-quarter days in the Canopus Decree).
However, due to a mistranslation the Roman pontifices got it wrong at the introduction of the Julian calendar. The Romans counted inclusively, which means: counting with both the start and end included. (That is why Christians say in a literal translation from Latin that Jesus has risen on the third day, even though he died on a Friday and is said to have risen two days later, on the next Sunday.)
In the first years of the Julian calendar, the Roman pontifices inserted a leap day “every fourth year”, which in their way of counting means: every 3 years. Authors differ on exactly which years were leap years. The error got corrected under Augustus by skipping a few leap years and then following the “every 4 years” rule since either AD 4 or AD 8. See the explanation and the table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Leap_year_erro...
Also note that at the time, years were mostly identified by the names of the consuls rather than by a number. Historians might use numbers, counting from when they thought Rome was founded (Ab urbe condita), but of course they differed among each other on when that was. The chronology by Atticus and Varro, which placed the founding of the city on 21 April 753 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, was not the only one.
I don’t see why the grammatical cases of Latin and German matter in the interpretation of these abbreviations.
The Latin prepositions cum (with) and sine (without) are always followed by the ablative case. German has grammatical cases too, but no ablative. The German propositions mit (with) and ohne (without) are followed by the accusative case.
So c.t. = cum tempore = mit Zeit = with time (or with some delay), and s.t. = sine tempore = ohne Zeit = without time (or without delay).
While it's true that many Latin nouns have identical dative and ablative forms, tempus isn't one of those nouns. (In the singular. I think dative and ablative are identical in the plural for every noun.)
And of course, as everyone has already mentioned, spookie's comment is complete nonsense because the case is required, and fully explained, by the prepositions.
How would you argue such claims, geographically and/or accurately speaking? — Other than: that’s how I was taught it is; or that’s how my favourite teacher/book/source-with-some-authority says it is.
There is no generally-agreed-upondefinition for “continent”, in the same way that there was no generally-agreed-upon definition of “planet” prior to the IAU 2006 General Assembly.
Continents are identified by convention (and there are a few competing conventions) rather than any strict criteria.
I was taught (in Europe) that there are 6 continents, 1 of which close-to-uninhabited: Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, America, Antarctica. This convention is the same as the one for the UNSD “continental regions”. The five interlocking rings of the Olympic flag represent these five inhabited continents.
There’s another convention that considers Eurasia to be a single continent. And another that even considers Afro-Eurasia to be a single continent.
As an Australian, inculcated with the orthodoxy that this was the largest island while also being the smallest continent - how does 'Oceania' fit with your quite technical 'big contiguous mass of land'?
If we made another small rut parallel to either Suez or Panama, would we add 1 to the count of continents?
The prefered canonical name is continent-or-ocean/city-or-small-island because continents and cities are more stable than countries and country names. The America/state/city convention is the exception, not the rule.
Some timezone identifiers have changed, e.g. Asia/Calcutta to Asia/Kolkata in 2008 and Europe/Kiev to Europe/Kyiv in 2022. But the TZ DB maintainers are rather reluctant to make such changes, and require “long-time widespread use of the new city name” in English before deciding so.
In the same way that an hour is skipped in many places at the beginning of Daylight Saving Time every year (and the offset changes, e.g. from UTC–5 to UTC–4),
on this particular instant, in Iceland, 28 minutes were skipped because Iceland changed from the offset of Reykjavik’s mean solar time, rounded to the nearest minute (UTC–1:28) to the offset of Reykjavik’s mean solar time, rounded to the nearest hour (UTC–1).
So only from that moment on, Iceland was using UTC–1.
There’s plenty of room for reasonable discussion and questions, even about human rights. Are all human rights individual rights, or are there collective human rights (peoples’ rights)? Are there limits to free speech, and if so, what are they? Are liberties more fundamental than rights that require taxpayer expenditure? Is paid holiday really a human right (UDHR art. 30)? Does the expansion of the concept of human rights weaken fundamental human rights?
> I'm sorry I just can’t find a single source backing you up.
As adastra22 points out: some authors define the term inflation primarily as the increase in the money supply (“monetary inflation”), others primarily as an increase in (consumer good) prices (“price inflation”).
At least in modern economic literature and usage, the term “inflation” (without modifier) is more often used to denote price inflation rather than monetary inflation.
The insistence that the term “inflation” ought be primarily rather used for “monetary inflation” goes back to at least Ludwig von Mises, The Theory of Money and Credit, 1912:
“In theoretical investigation there is only one meaning that can rationally be attached to the expression inflation: an increase in the quantity of money (in the broader sense of the term, so as to include fiduciary media as well), that is not offset by a corresponding increase in the need for money (again in the broader sense of the term), so that a fall in the objective exchange-value of money must occur.”
The first factor of the Drake Equation (the average rate of star formation in our Galaxy) has dimension 1/time. The last factor (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space) has dimension time. The other factors are unitless ratios.
So yes, the Drake Equation is dimensionally sound.
It is also a true equation. Not observed to be true, but reasoned to be true. The right hand side is the left hand side multiplied by some non-zero factors, and divided by the same factors, and rearranged (into the multiplication of a time rate, 5 ratios, and a length of time).
There’s still a lot of uncertainty about the numerical value of some of the factors — but the math is sound.
Therefor I wouldn’t put the Drake Equation in the same category “mathiness” that the original article is talking about.
They might be rarely considering code formatting specifically, but the claim that one language is a superset of another really does imply that all valid instances of the latter are also valid instances of the former (and are similarly parsed).
The old spec of YAML 1.2 section 1.3 explicitly said:
YAML can therefore be viewed as a natural superset of JSON, offering improved human readability and a more complete information model. This is also the case in practice; every JSON file is also a valid YAML file.
The revised spec 1.2 revision 1.2.2 (2021-10-01) no longer contains that sentence; but still says, in section 1.2:
The YAML 1.2 specification was published in 2009. Its primary focus was making YAML a strict superset of JSON.
and in section 6.8.1:
Note that version 1.2 is mostly a superset of version 1.1, defined for the purpose of ensuring JSON compatibility.
Given all these claims, Patrick Stevens’ observations that YAML really isn’t a superset of JSON, because YAML can’t handle all JSON number literals, and tabs as whitespace, really is surprising. At least to me.
When previously JavaScript/ECMAScript 2018 was found not to be a JSON superset, at least it was about unescaped occurrences of little-used characters U+2028 LINE SEPARATOR and U+2029 PARAGRAPH SEPARATOR in string literals. And even that got fixed (by allowing the unescaped characters) in ECMAScript 2019.
However, due to a mistranslation the Roman pontifices got it wrong at the introduction of the Julian calendar. The Romans counted inclusively, which means: counting with both the start and end included. (That is why Christians say in a literal translation from Latin that Jesus has risen on the third day, even though he died on a Friday and is said to have risen two days later, on the next Sunday.)
In the first years of the Julian calendar, the Roman pontifices inserted a leap day “every fourth year”, which in their way of counting means: every 3 years. Authors differ on exactly which years were leap years. The error got corrected under Augustus by skipping a few leap years and then following the “every 4 years” rule since either AD 4 or AD 8. See the explanation and the table in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar#Leap_year_erro...
Also note that at the time, years were mostly identified by the names of the consuls rather than by a number. Historians might use numbers, counting from when they thought Rome was founded (Ab urbe condita), but of course they differed among each other on when that was. The chronology by Atticus and Varro, which placed the founding of the city on 21 April 753 BC in the proleptic Julian calendar, was not the only one.