Neither confirm nor deny Santa Clause, but encourage them to question. ¿How plausible is it that deer can fly? ¿Assuming about 10^9 nice children, and 8.64*10^4 seconds in a day, is it likely that Santa Clause could give 10 thousand gifts per second? ¿How does Santa Clause carry all of these gifts? ¿Et cetera? ¿Et al? Basically, rather than telling foals the answer or a lie, instead encourage children to work out how plausible Santa Clause is, giving them help along the way.

¡Be Skeptical!

4940849
I don't think the Spanish punctuation is having the effect you intend it to have. As a signaling method it's fairly worthless, certainly the annoyance and "wow, look at that weirdo" factor exceeds the value.

4941110

I try to exceed the standards of grammar and punctuation and get complaints. I feel like a programmer in 1990 being told to only use 2-digit years because that is how we done it since the founding of the company. Rather than settling for mediocrity, I want to exceed the standards:

Sure, punctuation at the ends of sentences is good enough, but I want to show where the sentence goes from the start. I embrace inverted punctuation, Interrobangs, and inverted Interrobangs. ⸘What the buck is an inverted Interrobang‽ The previous sentence gives an example of an inverted Interrobang. ¿What is wrong with exceeding standards and going the extra mile?

4941167
Trying to change the question.

I'm not saying there's something wrong with you exceeding expectations and "going the extra mile."

What I'm saying is that adding inverted punctuation to the beginning of sentences provides insufficient benefit (virtually none, English is structured such that it does not benefit from it) to outweigh the costs (looking ridiculous and being annoying).

This reminds me of the time you sent me a date formatted: 2015-02-11T02:00:00z. Does the benefit of writing out a date like that exceed the amount of time it takes you to write it out - or explain it to confused people who might have been better informed by a date like "February 11 at 2pm PST"?

Ultimately, you remind me of Sheldon Cooper - someone who values appearing smart and who thinks that his impromptu reforms actually provide some benefit, when really everyone around him is just groaning and ignoring him.

Presentation is important. About all I can say you get is that your posts are very recognizable - which helps me avoid them.

4941732

2015-02-11

That's how I write my dates. It's the most logical way of doing it, and nopony can misinterpret its meaning.

4941732 savage, but fair.

4942121

¡ISO-8601 is the most logical way of writing way of writing dates because all components are in descending order, which makes sorting easy too!

The Foundation Long Now advocates the Holocene calendar, which adds 10,000. This roughly corresponds to the beginning of the Holocene, makes all historical dates positive, and divorces the calendar from religion. As an example, it was HE (Holocene-Era) 12015-12-24T10:22:24 when I wrote that. By the time I finish writing this, it will be a few minutes later. ¡The Holocene-Calendar seems like a great idea to me!

* ISO-8601
* Holocene-Calendar

4942356 It's a bit longer, though.

Personally, I'd lose the months and only count years and days.

4942714

We could choose the start of the Holocene-Calendar as Start-Time and count Planck-Time-Units. All historical dates would have a positive number of Planck-Time-Units. 12,000 years only has 2.04175147392*10^56 Plank-Time-Units in it.

I was kidding about humans counting Planck-Time-Units, but the System-Clocks of Computers could do so. I wrote a blog over an year ago explaining the advantages of a computer with an architecture of Balanced Ternary having a System-Clock representing time as a Balanced-Ternary Integer 243 trits long of Planck-Time-Units:

System-Clocks In Future Ternary Computers Using Balanced Ternary

4942782 It sure would be precise.

4942789

It would be as precise as physics allows.

4943009 Is Plank time unit a proven fact or is it just a theory? If it were true, it would seem like we're being calculated from one moment to the next.

4943404

The universe seems quantized, except gravity, which poses problems for integrating quantum-mechanics and general relativity. The Planck-Length is as small as a particle can be without collapsing into a black hole. The speed of light in a vacuum is a constant. It would take 1 Planck-Time-Unit for a photon to cross the distance of 1 Planck -Length. Since everything is larger than a Planck-Length and takes longer than a Planck-Time-Unit, we have not directly measured either. We have simulated things on the Planck-Scale. The visualizations are so pretty that they because the default Desktop-Pattern of Mac OS Ⅹ back when it shipped in 2001:

As for the universe ticking in Planck-Time-Units, length and time are relative. As for the universe being a simulation, it seems that one would require a universe-sized computer to do so, but I cannot rule out the possibility. Here is a story about that:

I.D.: —— That Indestructible Something

4943822 I love how you condensed hard science into a few sentences. That's how physics should be presented to people.

one would require a universe-sized computer

Maybe not. For one, you could use a quantum computer. And another thing, there's a hypothesis that the Universe consists of only one time-traveling particle. You don't really need that big of a computer to simulate one particle, right?

4943882

Maybe.