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Admin
At press time, Trump promised to "make weeks great again" and change them to have 10 days, whereas Harris argued that weeks are a social construct which needs to be abolished. 🤣
Admin
Teams isn't lying; its AI just used a different year than you did. In 2021 it was a Monday.
Admin
How very French of him... (And they should be renamed to décades instead of weeks.)
Admin
Or perhaps Joshua is just planning way his vacation time way in ahead—November 8, 2027 is also a Monday.
Admin
Technically, weeks are a social construct. There is nothing astronomical that defines a week.
Admin
Astronomical weeks: new moon to half moon (first quarter), half moon to full moon , full moon to half moon (third quarter), half moon to new moon.
Admin
I wonder if whatever internal API Dropbox uses to get the percent full used to only return an integer (possibly as a string with a "%" already appended) and some code wasn't updated, it's interpreting that "19.95%" as "95%"...
Admin
Apart from the fact that there are 4 phases of the moon and that the period between each phase is about a week?
Admin
"About" a week, but not really all that close (roughly half a day off on each phase). Certainly not nearly as clear as a day, month, or year.
Admin
What could go wrong?
Admin
Apart from the fact that we don't base years on the 4 phases of the sun (aka seasons), but whole revolutions, and that we use leap days to keep calendar years synchronized to the sun. Where are the week-leap-days to keep weeks synchronized to the moon? Makes little sense otherwise: "Last Full Moon was on a Thursday and thankfully our weeks are based on the moon, so the next Full Moon will be on a Friday or perhaps a Saturday ..." ;)
What I find fascinating is that some feel the need to deny that the 7-day week is clearly a social construct (based on Jewish and Christian tradition), even though nobody actually proposed to "abolish" them.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week)
Admin
I forgot to add earlier: defining a week by dividing one revolution of the moon is also arbitrary (a "social construct"). Why should a week be 1/4 of a revolution instead of 1/2, 1/3, or 1/8?
Admin
Why should a week be 1/4 of a Revolution instead of 1/2, 1/3, or 1/8? Because a full moon, a new moon, and two half moons are the most obvious markers in the night sky you’ll ever see?
Admin
Months are clearly social constructs too… there’s absolutely nothing astronomical that defines a varying period of 30, 31 or 28 days…
For religious folk who follow the Judeo-Christian Old Testament of the bible, there’s a solid definition of a week, based on the six working days and one rest day God took to create the world… so I guess in the US, with separation of church and state, that’s a solid argument for abolishing the seven day week and replacing it with a different number?
Based on the “phases of the moon” cycle, I would argue that a week is closer to being an astronomical unit of time than a month, anyway.
Admin
Separation of church and state was originally about not allowing the church to be able hold any seat in the government (and vice versa), to avoid the situation that been the case in Europe for centuries by then.
Admin
Yes, the Julian calendar is a human invention.
Right. The point is that the 7-day week is not based on any natural phenomenon. A debate about it being a human invention or a divine invention is an entirely separate topic.
Admin
Not really with enough precision to define a week. And weeks would be noticeably out of sync with the phases of the moon after only one month.
If it makes you feel better to have a post-hoc explanation that's also inaccurate, go right ahead. The historical fact, however, is that to the best of our knowledge, the 7-day week originated with the Hebrew bible (or with the Israelites that wrote it down, depending on your exact theology).
Admin
The only reason why time was measured with stellar objects was simply because season were important for agriculture. So humans made up low digit segmentations from one to another to be able to predict optimal times in the future. By now we know that stellar objects interact with each other, so there is no precise constant predictable duration happening between those objects, hence in modern times we use atomic clocks. Obviously that doesn't solve the whole issue that human routine is still based on the day-night cycle while even the human biorhythmn doesn't fully align with 24 hours. So it's kinda fair to day that "weeks", "months", "year" are pretty much made up terms, because they don't and literally can't relate to anything stellar, they always have been rough approximations and different cultures used different systems, often multiple of them.
Admin
No, it really isn't fair to call them "made up terms". Even though we have more precise measurements than we did thousands of years ago, and we understand that the amount of time isn't as constant as we used to believe, you can't ignore historical facts. "Day", "month", and "year" all have definitions that are directly based on a single unit of an astronomical phenomena ("rotation of the Earth", "revolution of the moon", and "revolution of the Earth", respectively). A "week" was arbitrarily defined by humans (or God; again, that's a separate discussion) as a certain number of days.
Admin
The Babylonians had a 7 day week apparently, possibly related to 7 being a magic number. Romans had 6 or 8 days depending on the lunar cycle, until the time of Constantine.
Admin
Seven might have been chosen for the sun, moon, and five planets (which still have those names in romance languages).
As with most other Biblical-era ideas, it's hard to know who came up with it first. Ideas spread fairly quickly among the tribes in the region, and we obviously don't have complete written records from all of them.