Tag: #Calendar

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C is for Calendar

Was it a calendar? photo by Kajmeister.

(May) maybe if I ask your dad and mom
(June) they’ll let me take you to the Junior Prom
(July) like a firecracker all aglow
(August) when you’re on the beach you steal the show
Yeah, yeah, my heart’s in a whirl
I love, I love, I love my little calendar girl

Neil Sedaka, “I Love My Calendar Girl”

We take the division of time for granted. How many minutes left on the test? What time do I get off? Is the next holiday on Monday, so I can have a three-day weekend? Some people even wear wrist devices which describe those divisions, linked to their health data, like their heart rate and whether they sleep. However did we manage before a wristwatch could describe our sleep?

The ancient people had to invent all those divisions from scratch. They did it repeatedly, across multiple cultures, using varying tracking systems. Their lives depended on observations–the rise of the river waters, the start of the dry season, the first bite of frost. I was well into middle age before I noticed how far north the sun set in the west in the summer vs. the winter. I think it was because I’d finally lived in one place for more than a decade. I bet even the Neanderthals figured that out before I did, since their lives depended on such things.

Today’s topic is the Calendar. How could they mark time, before writing was even invented? How did different societies integrate math with time? Were there different versions of calendars? Where did they stand on ending Daylight Savings Time?

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Facing forward, facing back

Source: GnosticWarrior.com

The turning of the year is always a time we treat ourselves to a new round of self-reflection and self-flagellation for what we have done and what we have not done. It’s a good time to take stock and make plans. But resolutions are flighty beasts. If you create them, do so with an eye towards success rather than suffering.

All of life can be broken down into moments of transition, or moments…of revelation. This has the feeling of both.
—G’Kar, Babylon 5

Blame the Romans for emphasizing this act of two-faced reflection, this looking forward and looking back. Along with roads, sanitation, and language, they also gave Europe and the New World a workable calendar. Some tweaking was required; the original “Romulus” calendar was ten months long and began in March. Legend credits King Numa Pompilius — the dude in charge sometime after Rome’s foundation but way before the Republic and Julius Caesar — with adding two more months to help bring the lunar and solar year into synchronization. The new year was moved to start a week or so after the winter solstice on January 1st in a new month dedicated to Janus, the god of doorways, the god of looking forward and looking back. Continue reading “Facing forward, facing back”

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Our Days Are Numbered

Midweek since the time change, I’m still not sleeping properly, waking in the middle of the night and dozing until suddenly it’s later than I should be up, and I drag out of bed, logy and bleary-eyed. Yesterday was 3-14, a calendar quirk that’s labelled Pi Day on our Gregorian-driven pages, a day of no significance but a fun day for the mathematically-amused.
20170315 calendar

In movies, clocks show time passing, calendar pages falling, seasons changing with sped-up elapsed time. Why don’t we see other metaphors—for example, how often are rulers used or tape measures? We move through time and space, but we seem to take no notice of space. We are comfortable with granting the importance of spatial distances, but when it comes to time, we want to see it measured.  By instinct, we feel time all around us, whether we are forever noting the digital clock readout of our phones all day, feeling the seasons pass, or obsessing about our age, it’s as if time sits like a bird on our shoulder.

If we are saving daylight, when do we get to spend it?
Many of us grew up with Daylight Savings Time, so it’s hard to imagine that the practice is relatively recent and didn’t catch hold in the mid-1970s U.S. Energy Crisis. Even then, some places like Arizona still choose not to participate, and the starting dates have shifted around nationally, moving to a different day in the year just a decade ago. While the extra hour of daylight in the evening favor those who work inside all day, farmers and those who put on evening entertainment oppose the process. For example, dairy farmers know that the cows don’t want to be milked an hour earlier just because that’s what the clock says. Continue reading “Our Days Are Numbered”