91–100 of 114 posts
Okay, but can we come up with a calendar system where the months September, October, November, and December don't have the wrong names? It has always bothered me that the prefix sept- means seven, but it is the ninth month, oct- is for the tenth month, etc...
In other fun facts, March is so named because that's when you go to war.
Eviatar Zerubavel's Seven Day Circle is a detailed and complex history of time telling. It really helps to understand that in a calendar we're trying to measure three distinct (and variable) cycles, none of which fits precisely into the others, and each of which imposes its own rhythms on human life. Attempts to break each from the current 7/12/365 basis have virtually all failed. The first is the Earth's rotation ab…
It's not clear that the rotation of the moon has much significance in modern life any more, so maybe the problem can be simplified. What was the significance of cycles of the moon in the past, anyway? The main thing I can think of is astrology. Can tides be predicted accurately using phases of the moon?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is wrong. Saturday in Japanese is 土曜日, which is like "Earth day". There's also "Sun day"(Sunday), "Moon day"(Monday), "Fire day"(Tuesday), "Water day"(Wednesday), "Tree day"(Thursday), "Gold day"(Friday), "Earth day"(Saturday). So your claim is wrong in Japanese for every day except Sunday. If you see something written like 四日("4 day"), this refers to the day of the month not the day of the week(for Japanese).
Chinese uses the numbers for days of the week, so 星期一,星期二,星期三,星期四,星期五,星期六,星期日 for Monday to Sunday. They can use 周 or 礼拜 instead of 星期. I remembered Japanese copied the Chinese at something there, but, whoops, it was the names of the planets that were copied. So the Chinese names of Mars(火星), Mercury(水星), Jupiter(木星), Venus(金星), and Saturn(土星) are copied onto the same days as planets that Romance languages name their…
My interpretation has always been that 日 is meant to represent "zero", but I never put any thought into why they didn't just call it 星期零.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One has to admit that it complicates even trivial communications about days and times. Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Or "Is Nov 12th on the weekend?" I feel these are practical things that _most_ people would _like_ to easily reason about, but can't. It imperial units for days; or like trying to do math in a numerical system where each significant digit has a di…
Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Fortunately we don't have a very pressing need to answer these sorts of questions; we have tools galore to handle them for us: smartphones, calendars, messaging apps, meetup etc. Topics like these often remind me of one of Einstein's more famous quotes: [I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in bo…
This is precisely why the metric system, or uniform length of months, are useful.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Chinese uses the numbers for days of the week, so 星期一,星期二,星期三,星期四,星期五,星期六,星期日 for Monday to Sunday. They can use 周 or 礼拜 instead of 星期. I remembered Japanese copied the Chinese at something there, but, whoops, it was the names of the planets that were copied. So the Chinese names of Mars(火星), Mercury(水星), Jupiter(木星), Venus(金星), and Saturn(土星) are copied onto the same days as planets that Romance languages name their…
FYI, 日 is not "seven". It's "sun" or "day". It's almost like someone had a sense of humor when they named that day. My interpretation has always been that 日 is meant to represent "zero", but I never put any thought into why they didn't just call it 星期零.
I've noticed while living in China that, whereas Westerners like me virtually always remember what day of week it is but often forget the date in the month, Chinese are more likely to remember the day of the month and forget the day of the week.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A very small percentage of the population ever has to write date handling logic. For the rest, things "just work", thanks to those few. Besides, even as a member of that small group, I like the variety of the current calendar, inefficient as it is.
You know, given that we have computers to perform the calculations, my own mad dream is to return to solar hours: twelve hours from sunrise to sunset, and twelve from sunset to sunrise. Thus summer hours would be longer and winter days would be shorter. Ditto minutes and seconds. Science would of course need to have a standardised second almost always different from the current second, but that's no different from ha…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not clear that the rotation of the moon has much significance in modern life any more, so maybe the problem can be simplified. What was the significance of cycles of the moon in the past, anyway? The main thing I can think of is astrology. Can tides be predicted accurately using phases of the moon?
It is extremely important in agriculture, which much of the world sustained, and sustains, itself on.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
One has to admit that it complicates even trivial communications about days and times. Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Or "Is Nov 12th on the weekend?" I feel these are practical things that _most_ people would _like_ to easily reason about, but can't. It imperial units for days; or like trying to do math in a numerical system where each significant digit has a di…
Well, we already do math in a crazy-radix system for time, and the not-easily-divisible unitless variable of (1 year / 1 day) means that we can't do too much better -- we can reduce the problem to about one crazy radix, but no smaller; that radix will probably always depend on the value of the more-significant number in the date (the year). But yes, we probably should quash the "variety is fun" argument early in the…
The problem is, you'll find, that naming things is an incredibly political act. Agreeing on a new name for anything is a terribly complicated process, and when you're talking about something every single person has a stake in... well, it would have never happened. He tried very skillfully to bypass all that, and basically succeeded.
No, his mistake was to underestimate the clout that religious tradition still had on large sectors of the ruling elites. Even now, when we pride ourself in the "scientificness" and rationality of our societies, we're still enslaved by stories written by agrarian priests at the dawn of civilization -- in many ways, it's worse now because nobody would even entertain proposals as bold as modernizing a system we've been using, almost unchanged, for two millennia, no matter how broken it might be.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is extremely important in agriculture, which much of the world sustained, and sustains, itself on.
How is the moon's phases important in agriculture?
traditional agriculture uses the moon to determine what to plant when.
i'm not saying this actually makes a difference (altho it might, considering the moon does influence sea levels and hence how water flows through the system), just that it's what agriculture is traditionally based on.
Eviatar Zerubavel's Seven Day Circle is a detailed and complex history of time telling. It really helps to understand that in a calendar we're trying to measure three distinct (and variable) cycles, none of which fits precisely into the others, and each of which imposes its own rhythms on human life. Attempts to break each from the current 7/12/365 basis have virtually all failed. The first is the Earth's rotation ab…
It's not clear that the rotation of the moon has much significance in modern life any more, so maybe the problem can be simplified. What was the significance of cycles of the moon in the past, anyway? The main thing I can think of is astrology. Can tides be predicted accurately using phases of the moon?
Really not my metier, but a few thoughts.
The Moon is highly significant if you're living along a coastline (and most humans do) as the tides are directly related.
In a pretechnological society, the biggest and cheapest source of night-time lighting was moonlight (though you could locally out-shine it with torches, candles, or lanterns). For travel or any sort of nocturnal activity (including ocean navigation), you'd likely take it into consideration.
In arctic cultures, moonlight might be your only light for much of the year, and on snow, full moonlight is amazingly brilliant.
In terms of dividing up the the year, different moons, particularly named moons ("hunters", "harvest", etc.) are significant.