time
“Humans are not meant to keep exact time,” the Native poet Sandra Ball once said. “We are meant to live within the confines of seasons, light and dark, and our own body’s rhythms, which are not the same from day to day or from year to year.”
mary retta • close but not quite
Now, virtually every culture in the world today uses that Roman seven day week, but not everyone uses the same names for the days. Thor’s Day makes sense to us, so Thursday came to be, and it really stuck!
For the French, jeudi is their fifth day. This derives from the Latin dies Jovis —day of Jupiter. Likewise, both Italian and Spanish hearken... See more
For the French, jeudi is their fifth day. This derives from the Latin dies Jovis —day of Jupiter. Likewise, both Italian and Spanish hearken... See more
Andrew Smith • Thor's Day
The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so... See more
raptitude.com • Your Lifestyle Has Already Been Designed
Days, months, and years all make sense as units of time—they match up, at least roughly, with the revolutions of Earth, the moon, and the sun.
Weeks, however, are much weirder and clunkier. A duration of seven days doesn’t align with any natural cycles or fit cleanly into months or years. And though the week has been deeply significant to Jews,... See more
Weeks, however, are much weirder and clunkier. A duration of seven days doesn’t align with any natural cycles or fit cleanly into months or years. And though the week has been deeply significant to Jews,... See more
Joe Pinsker • We Live By a Unit of Time That Doesn’t Make Sense
As the Earth orbits the Sun in an ellipse, it moves more quickly at perihelion (closest-to-the-Sun) and more slowly at aphelion (farthest-from-the-Sun), which leads to changes in the time at which the Sun rises and sets, as well as the duration of the actual day, over the course of a year. The obliquity of Earth’s orbit also affects the equation of time. These patterns repeat annually and are latitude-specific, but generally lead to a “figure 8” pattern for Earth’s analemma: the shape our Sun traces throughout the sky at the same time every day throughout the year.
