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What Is Date:Italy?
- deleted 4mo ago[deleted]
- thurn 4mo agoI wonder how Paradox handles this stuff in their games like Europa Universalis. Have they ever made a "the pope wants you to switch calendar systems" event which changes the actual in-game date?
- Macha 4mo agoEU3 and EU4 at least had no leap years. I assume 1, 2 and 5 are the same. Checking the wiki, eu5 has an advance (guess these are like the nation ideas in eu4?) for Julian calendar which gives you +10% to orthodox or miaphysite nations. I doubt it has any effect in the calendar system in the games UI.
- recursivecaveat 4mo agoSounds like they just ignore any calendar weirdness. I don't envy anyone the task of trying to properly program this. You basically have to decide for everything time related in the simulation whether it is tied to the calendar or the physical passage of time. Sometimes you would have to split variables, like characters are legally older, but no closer to old age. Bonus points if your solution allows characters to get into conflict with each other about stuff like when a treaty ends or whether their loans are due 15 days sooner.
- cyost 4mo agoSome notes: Paradox's Clausewitz game engine seems to handle "negative" years very poorly, so stuff like historical Roman emperors in Crusader Kings have some oddities. It's probably also why Imperator: Rome uses ab urbe condita dating (aside from immersion). The Elder Kings 2 mod actually has custom date handling (it's actually a custom date localisation system) to enable transitioning to the 3rd era on founding the Empire of Tamriel.
- sohex 4mo agoMy initial thought was that that would probably be taking the simulationism too far. My second thought was how funny it would be to swap calendars to get out of a truce early. “My Lord, you can attack them until March of next year!” “Then March of next year it shall be!”
- no-name-here 4mo ago> My second thought was how funny it would be to swap calendars to get out of a truce early. Congress did something similar last year - National Emergencies declared by the president, such as for tariffs, are required by law to be reviewed within 15 days by Congress. So Congress redefined the calendar so that the remainder of the days during that session are not officially considered to be calendar days. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/congress-johnson-calendar.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/congress-johnson-calen...
- tomtomtom777 4mo agoPlease use HTTPS. I use HTTPS only. I don't think HTTP is acceptable for anyone let alone a technical blog post. It takes a few minutes, and it prevents me and all your visitors from getting all kinds of MITM injections. Thanks.
- hamdingers 4mo agoSurprised this is downvoted. Chrome forces me to click through a warning to even visit HTTP sites nowadays.
- LtWorf 4mo agoYup, very secure. Then every single IT department installs a cert on the machines to MITM everything.
- hamdingers 4mo agoI have no idea what you're trying to say, there's no IT department managing my laptop and none of the IT departments I've worked in or with "MITM everything." Do you want to try again?
- pc86 4mo agoOn the flip side, every company I've ever worked for has installed trusted company certs on their computers and do MITM everything.
- Joker_vD 4mo agoYep. You apparently need HTTPS for intranet resources too, or you can't develop/use web-apps in Chrome, and since no self-respecting CA would certify your localhost, internal homegrown CA it is, baby — and given the web runs on the lovely model "any CA can attest any website; okay, maybe CAA is not a bad idea"...
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- ComputerGuru 4mo agoGood write up! Relevant folklore Usenet post about the history of the calendar I am again obligated to share: https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/an-extended-history-of-time-the-calendar.2851/ https://neosmart.net/forums/threads/an-extended-history-of-t...
- jauco 4mo agoIt’s actually worse than that. It wasn’t always whole coubtries who decided to adopt (or not) but cities and sometimes people within cities (i.e. the protestants in the city would be lagging, or maybe I’m misremembering and this was about people who where abroad) In any case, for awhile, the date you picked depended on who you were writing to. And then also the relative standing. If he was of much lower standing you might force your own calendar on them. Also, I think with the previous calendar it was always a bit debatable what year december belonged to. I can’t quite remember the details.
- masklinn 4mo ago> It’s actually worse than that. It wasn’t always whole coubtries who decided to adopt (or not) but cities and sometimes people within cities (i.e. the protestants in the city would be lagging, or maybe I’m misremembering and this was about people who where abroad) There was some of that indeed, depending on the centralization of the country e.g. Spain and France adopted the gregorian calendar wholesale because the king decreed it, but in less centralised countries like the Dutch Republic or Switzerland it happened by region (the seven catholic cantons switched to the gregorian calendar in 1584, the protestant canton only switched over piece by piece during the 18th century, and Schiers and Grüsch were the last remnants of Julian calendar in the entirety of western europe, only adopting the gregorian calendar in 1812). ... and then there's Sweden, which started on a plan to gradually approach the Gregorian calendar by skipping leap years over 40 years, except they immediately forgot to skip the second and third so concluded the plan was stupid, then instead of switching to gregorian they reverted to julian, before finally switching to gregorian 40 years after that.
- Georgelemental 4mo agoWe still have this sort of thing today. In the occupied West Bank, Israeli settlers change to daylight savings time on a different day than the Palestinians
- cratermoon 4mo agoArizona in the US does not observe DST at all. Within Arizona is the Navajo nation, which does observe DST. Within the Navajo nation are Hopi enclaves, where DST is not observed, and finally, within one of those Hopi enclaves is a Navajo community where, again, DST is observed.
- cdot2 4mo agoJulian date is sometimes used to synchronize timing for encrypted radio systems. My understanding is that early radio systems adapted it because it was used by astronomers. Astronomers used it because it didn't skip any days which would cause issues tracking long term astronomical cycles.
- CodesInChaos 4mo agoThe big annoyance with Julian days/dates is that they start at noon, not midnight.
- Sharlin 4mo ago> Astronomers used it And still use, in fact!
- cdot2 4mo agoI deal with those radio systems occasionally and I've always wanted to find or modify a digital watch to display the Julian date. It feels like that would be such a simple firmware change to something like a g-shock.
- jaywcarman 4mo agoCheck out the Sensor Watch project[1]! It's "An ARM Cortex M0+ board swap for the classic Casio F-91W wristwatch" that allows you to write custom firmware. [1]: https://www.sensorwatch.net/ https://www.sensorwatch.net/
- cdot2 4mo agoThank you! That's exactly what I'm looking for.
- iberator 4mo agoJulian date works exactly like Unix epoch, but instead of starting in junary 1 1970 it starts something like 2500 years ago. Super easy for astronomy as you don't need to handle timezones and other junk
- bsimpson 4mo agoIt's wild to think about how different things were in pre-modern times. There are no computers, sensors, watches, or spaceships. There are also no TV-style distractions, and a lot more people are growing food. When would you notice that the longest day of the year is a few days away from what the books say it's supposed to be? For that matter, the printing press was only a century old. How well-known was it that particular days are meant to be the longest or shortest of the year?
- bombcar 4mo agoIf I recall correctly - it was surprisingly well known (in fact it was a common way to make fun of "lettered" people because they'd claim dates that were obviously silly; everyone knew when the solstice was). Some of the earliest things we have a sun-based calendar trackers, which need not be more complicated than a stick and a rock (meaning millions more have not survived).
- turtletontine 4mo agoIn an agrarian economy people are definitely much MORE attuned to the cycles of the seasons. If your town always starts planting crop X two weeks before the solstice, and the harvest festival is the week after the equinox, you’re going to keep track of these things.
- phainopepla2 4mo agoI think that when OP said "When would you notice" they meant you the reader in contemporary times, to draw attention to the high level of attunement you're referring to
- quuxplusone 4mo agoYeah, but I took the parent comment as a non-rhetorical question. Say you were one of these "MORE attuned" people of the past: how long [literally] do you think it would take you to notice that the calendar was drifting? Like, if the calendar says the equinox should be on Monday, but in fact it's actually technically more like Tuesday, would you notice? What if it was technically on Wednesday? If the rate of drift was like 5 days per year, then sure, people'd probably notice in a year or two — three tops, right? But how fast would the drift be? It's a question about how much people can detect small changes in daylight and how big the change actually is. I also observe that we put up with tons of drift in our months: the new moon is hardly ever on the first of the month! And that's really easy to detect (within a day or two). So maybe people would notice a drift relative to the seasonal cycle and just not mind, the way we don't mind a drift relative to the lunar cycle.
- scubbo 4mo agoAh, the cause of the weirdest bug I ever debugged. Obvious in hindsight - but we were totally puzzled as we continued debugging further and further down the stack of why one particular random seed would cause a fuzzed-input test to cause some date-handling code to error out.