calendarThis week’s episode brings our friend Jon Olsen to the basement studios for a conversation about calendars.  Jon has a long held interest in how we mark time and it makes for a broad conversation topic.  We even learn why the seventh day of the week isn’t a Sunday!  Jon also has the distinction of being only the second theist to appear on our podcast, a fact we almost completely ignore.

Jon will be performing The Insufferable Spiteness of Beaver at the Bryant Lake Bowl in February, 2015.  The show opens on the 5th and will also play on the 6th, 12th and 13th.  Go see his show!

Additional show notes below the fold:

Tim mentioned a BBC series with Christopher Eccleston as Jesus.  It was The Second Coming.

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3 Responses

  1. When I was a kid taking German lessons, it was presented that Europeans tend to have Monday as the first day of the week on their calendars. You can choose the first day of the week in Google calendar.

    Thanks for having Jon on, I’ve been thinking he’d be a good guest!

  2. I think that the calendar having the weekend bookending a print calendar is a layout decision regarding the workweek: if you have the weekend wrapping around the sheet, you perceive it as being longer than just two boxes out of seven. When you look at the calendar with Monday as the first day, you can clearly see the ratio of work to weekend and feel bad about how much you hate your job.

    Also, with the names of the days in English, there’s a nice symmetry to having the S_TWT_S arrangement.

  3. The original Roman calendar was, for lack of a better term, crazy-ass. They didn’t count days like we do, so the idea of “December 25” would have made no sense to, say, Julius Caesar. (The Julian calendar was named for him because in his role as pontifex maximus, he reformed the calendar to actually pay attention to little things like seasons.)

    The ancient Romans had three named dates every month: the Calends (the 1st of each month); the Ides (usually the 13th, but the 15th in March, May, July, and October); and the Nones (nine days before the Ides, so either the 5th or the 7th). When counting days, Romans included both the starting and ending day, which is why we would think of the Nones as eight days before, not nine.

    Other dates are counted backward from reference to these — so January 2 is “four days before the Nones of January” and March 13 is “three days before the Ides of March.” December 31 would be “pridie (the day before) the Calends of January.”

    Unfortunately, the Julian calendar (while very good), had one flaw — it had leap years a bit too often. The Council of Trent realized the calendar was 10 days off of the “traditional” dates of the equinoxes, so Pope Gregory XIII (in his role as pontifex maximus — continuity!) issued a papal bull dropping those 10 days from the calendar in 1582 as observed in all good Catholic countries. England (and its American colonies) were Protestant by that time, however, and resisted this change as Papal meddling, so the Catholic calendar and the English calendar no longer used the same dates. They fell another day out of step in 1700, when England celebrated a leap year and Catholics did not. Ultimately, England got tired of converting all their dates and deleted these 11 days from their calendars in September 1752. (If you are in an English-speaking country, fire up a Unix window and type the command “cal 9 1752”. Freaky!)

    Those of us who plan to live into the 22nd century will get to experience something very few people alive right now have: seven consecutive normal years (2097-2103). Too bad for all those February 29 babies!

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