3 ms·

The week is not _completely_ a human invention, it is, conveniently, a period between two moon phases

worthless-trash 6mo ago
Just under a period. 29 days for a moon loop. 29 / 4.0 is 7.25. Every 4 weeks you'd be out a full day. So yes, a week is a human invention.
- technothrasher 6mo ago
  Either all of my old mechanical clocks with moon dial are wrong, or it's 29.5 days.
  - trollbridge 6mo ago
    Worse, it's 29.53, with a solar year being 365.25217 solar days, so 12.37 lunar cycles in a year, so you're off by 10.926 days a year. In every society, some of the brightest and best minds got employed as astrologers, astronomers, and designers of calendars.
  - worthless-trash 6mo ago
    Yeah you're right, i was doing it via memory. Which makes this whole thing even more incorrect. ITS NOT JUST A PHASE MUM!
- username223 6mo ago
  That’s how units work, fitting the messy natural world into comprehensible numbers. A year is 365 days, except every four, except every 100, except every 400. A month is 30-ish days, and there are 12 of them in a year, because that roughly syncs up the orbits of the Moon and Earth. Except there used to be ten of them (“DECember”), with garbage time filling in the remainder of Earth’s transit around the Sun. A second is something related to Cesium-133, because it’s close to 1/(24x60x60) of a day, because Sumerians chose base 60.
- marginalia_nu 6mo ago
  Discrepancy is that we're mixing (lunar) months and weeks with solar timekeeping, in a solar calendar. These are fundamentally incompatible, so we've gone with cramming the approximate periodicity of the lunar calendar into the solar calendar, while ignoring the fact that we're no longer tracking the moon, and that the weeks don't line up with the year, and the fact that the months are randomly different lengths because they also don't line up and we don't want a weird half-month at the end. Another potential fix would be having two calendars. A lunar calendar for weeks/months, and a solar calendar for seasons/years.
Quarrelsome 6mo ago
our work patterns are a construct of industrialisation.

Just under a period. 29 days for a moon loop. 29 / 4.0 is 7.25. Every 4 weeks you'd be out a full day. So yes, a week is a human invention.

technothrasher 6mo ago
Either all of my old mechanical clocks with moon dial are wrong, or it's 29.5 days.
- trollbridge 6mo ago
  Worse, it's 29.53, with a solar year being 365.25217 solar days, so 12.37 lunar cycles in a year, so you're off by 10.926 days a year. In every society, some of the brightest and best minds got employed as astrologers, astronomers, and designers of calendars.
- worthless-trash 6mo ago
  Yeah you're right, i was doing it via memory. Which makes this whole thing even more incorrect. ITS NOT JUST A PHASE MUM!
username223 6mo ago
That’s how units work, fitting the messy natural world into comprehensible numbers. A year is 365 days, except every four, except every 100, except every 400. A month is 30-ish days, and there are 12 of them in a year, because that roughly syncs up the orbits of the Moon and Earth. Except there used to be ten of them (“DECember”), with garbage time filling in the remainder of Earth’s transit around the Sun. A second is something related to Cesium-133, because it’s close to 1/(24x60x60) of a day, because Sumerians chose base 60.
marginalia_nu 6mo ago
Discrepancy is that we're mixing (lunar) months and weeks with solar timekeeping, in a solar calendar. These are fundamentally incompatible, so we've gone with cramming the approximate periodicity of the lunar calendar into the solar calendar, while ignoring the fact that we're no longer tracking the moon, and that the weeks don't line up with the year, and the fact that the months are randomly different lengths because they also don't line up and we don't want a weird half-month at the end. Another potential fix would be having two calendars. A lunar calendar for weeks/months, and a solar calendar for seasons/years.

Quarrelsome 6mo ago

our work patterns are a construct of industrialisation.