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What's the craziest thing you were told by your friends as a child? (programming.dev)
submitted 1 month ago by vrek@programming.dev to c/casualconversation@piefed.social
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Nothing serious, this is for fun. My example was a friend told me you get computer viruses if you use disks that were dropped on the ground outside. His logic was he was told you get sick if you eat stuff off the ground. Sickness is caused by viruses. Computers can get viruses. Computers "eat" floppy disks. So if you put a dirty floppy into a computer you will make it sick by giving it a virus.

Yes it's mostly wrong but you can sorta see the logic...

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[-] m_f@discuss.online 13 points 1 month ago

I think that does stand for "Before Christ":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anno_Domini

Anno Domini (AD) and before Christ (BC) qualify years in the Gregorian and Julian calendars, whose epoch is the traditional year of the conception or birth of Jesus. AD counts years since the epoch, BC the years before the epoch.

The modern terms are called Common Era:

Common Era (CE) and Before the Common Era (BCE) are conventions used in the Gregorian or Julian calendar to specify whether the year is before or after the epoch. They correspond exactly to Anno Domini (AD) and Before Christ (BC): "2026 CE" is the same year as "AD 2026", as are "400 BCE" and "400 BC". BCE/CE are used to avoid religious associations by not referring to Jesus as Dominus ('Lord').

Personally, I think we should pick the start of the Holocene as year 0

[-] calliope@retrolemmy.com 3 points 1 month ago

To add on to this, the article on Common Era actually also mentions when different countries started adopting BCE vs BC.

In 2002, an advisory panel for the religious education syllabus for England and Wales recommended introducing BCE/CE dates to schools, and by 2018 some local education authorities were using them.

In 2018, the National Trust said it would continue to use BC/AD as its house style.

In 2013, the Canadian Museum of Civilization (now the Canadian Museum of History) in Gatineau (opposite Ottawa), which had previously switched to BCE/CE, decided to change back to BC/AD in material intended for the public while retaining BCE/CE in academic content.

this post was submitted on 31 Jul 2026
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