Interesting thing indeed. Would you care to expand?
Edit: This is interesting from the case of "beginning of the calendar" - coincidentally just read this from a reddit thread (linked):
> Let me start with a quote you may hear in a lot of history classrooms: "Jesus Christ has been born 7 years Before Christ", sounds a bit weird doesn't it. Yep, historically the idea was to mark his birth as a dividing point, however, there are a bit of problem of determining precisely what year we're trying to set as first one. To keep the meaning intact, we would have to move dates if we find better information about exact year of his birth, not convenient at all.
> When we say that we are in year 2012 CE, then we don't care that year 1 CE should be some specific event (there isn't year 0 in common notation BTW), we just need all agree on the same starting point. We leave the date intact because it's widespread, so it's more convenient not to change the date, the same way we still use non-decimal hours, minutes, seconds. If f.e. Anno Mundi (from Creation of the World) system remained in use in Europe with the agreement on the same date (Latin and Greek scholars disagreed on Biblical age of Earth), we would use it as Common Era.
This is interesting to me from a wild out there idea that feels similar to 'coordinate space for storing data.' Time as a coordinate space for simulations in a way.
Edit: This is interesting from the case of "beginning of the calendar" - coincidentally just read this from a reddit thread (linked):
> Let me start with a quote you may hear in a lot of history classrooms: "Jesus Christ has been born 7 years Before Christ", sounds a bit weird doesn't it. Yep, historically the idea was to mark his birth as a dividing point, however, there are a bit of problem of determining precisely what year we're trying to set as first one. To keep the meaning intact, we would have to move dates if we find better information about exact year of his birth, not convenient at all.
> When we say that we are in year 2012 CE, then we don't care that year 1 CE should be some specific event (there isn't year 0 in common notation BTW), we just need all agree on the same starting point. We leave the date intact because it's widespread, so it's more convenient not to change the date, the same way we still use non-decimal hours, minutes, seconds. If f.e. Anno Mundi (from Creation of the World) system remained in use in Europe with the agreement on the same date (Latin and Greek scholars disagreed on Biblical age of Earth), we would use it as Common Era.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TrueAtheism/comments/14nuuw/i_think...
This is interesting to me from a wild out there idea that feels similar to 'coordinate space for storing data.' Time as a coordinate space for simulations in a way.