Last useless musings about time...
Dispite the biblical explanation, I find 7 an odd number (bad pun intended) of days to have in a week. It's not connected to any astronomically observable period and it doesn't divide evenly into a year or month or lunar cycle or any cycle. Some older societies had differing numbers of days per week, and thanks to Wikepedia, I was surprised to learn that even modern ones proposed different week systems (though they still had 7 days). This paper says that there is some chronobiorhythmical basis for the original apparently arbitrary 7 day social convention. I thought it was interesting. I suspect, rather, that people determined that 8 was too many and 6 was too few. I'd settle for 8 if the extra day was attached to the weekend, as I think it should be. But with the periods of the earth and moon's rotation and revolution being not nicely divisible, I think there's no way around having some "week"ly or any time period that won't be assymetric in one way or another. I guess we'll forever be stuck with what amounts to feet and inches when it comes to times and dates.
Well, there is our notion of how we count time that is partly arbitrary. So I know where 60 seconds per minute, then 60 minutes per hour come from... But 24 hours in a day? I read somewhere that it's origins come from counting system used by the ancients where they would count using their finger joints, 12 per hand, not including the thumb. I find it mildly apocryphal but it's probably true. I'm sure the number 12 has something to do with it and it divides into 360 nicely. I wonder if anyone tried to push "metric" time; a system whereby you could add and subtract different times on different days trivially without having to constantly multiply by 24, 60, and 60 and then reversing the process and counting remainders to get the result. They'd have to redefine the metric second to be something longer than the current second but it wouldn't be that drastic. Dividing a day by 10 or 100 doesn't feel quite right to me though; I feel like I should be able to divide a day into 3 parts without a repeating decimal.
2 comments:
Your time musings make my head hurt. I tried playing around to figure out new time increments but nothing fit "nicely".
Sun goes up... Sun goes down...
Seems to me that that has to play a part in determining a "day".
Ahhhh, TofU. In as much as I would love to find some significance, some universal truth about how we measure things, weather it be in seconds or microns, gallons or litres, miles or kilometers, I've come to the conclusion, that, by our very nature, we just have to...
NO...
We NEED to MEASURE everything. And I mean EVERYTHING. Perhaps this urge is encoded deep down in our DNA. And then there's the fact that measuring things makes things easier... Helps us keep on track, on schedule, put the right amounts into recipes, etc.
I'd like to believe there is some LOGICAL explanation to all of the numbers we cling to. And some are more logical than others (eg metric vs. U.S)
In the end, it comes down to this: Someone had to say "This is how we're going to measure __________" AND enough people agreed (or were forced to agree).
I think it would be really cool if we could have a standard international currency. Boy, did we (HotFudge & I) get ripped when we converted U.S. to Euro for our Italy trip...
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