I think that a 12 hour day (or at least a day that requires daylight savings time), a 7 day week, a 3-4 week month, and a year that’s dependent on leap years & seconds are hopelessly outdated and rely on cultural history rather than science or necessity (there’s a great idea about 3 day weeks that I’m all for…I can’t find it right now, though)
Here’s a quick hit for you all: Muslim call to adopt Mecca time. (Get it? Like a call to prayer only…yeah, fire that headline writer.) I don’t think it’s a good idea because I think Allah is the one true god, or because I think we should all be slaves to Muslim (rather than current-cultural) time, but because I think we need to question the assumptions of this particular construct, Time.
(Maybe we could just switch to stardates!)
(Also, I really like Japan’s eras, there’s a cultural/traditional construct of time that makes sense! Since I’m not Roman.)
3 responses so far ↓
1 Elaine // May 5, 2008 at 10:23 am
You know, I have enough trouble operating in the current system. You know, remembering which months have 30 days and which have 31 days, things like that. Change to another one, and I won’t be able to function at all.
It’s like switching to metric. I’ve been exposed to degrees C as well as degrees F for years now, but I still don’t connect what air temperatures feel like in terms of degrees C any more than I ever did. I get that a meter is slightly longer than a yard, but it still doesn’t compute in practice for me at all. Neither do pounds versus their metric equivalents.
Maybe it’s just a number thing. I have to write about various currencies and their relative values every day for work, and have had for a couple of years now, but I still have to sit and think about it before figuring out which have advanced or declined versus others.
So, please, no. Don’t change the way I have to deal with calendar dates. Pleeeeese?
2 xJane // May 5, 2008 at 4:07 pm
hehe, see switching to metric for me was awesome. No more remembering how many whats to a what: there’s 100! End of story! (or 10, or 1000, but always multiples of that, which made it perfect for my anal self.) I’d like there to be 10 hours in a day, 10 days in a week, 10 weeks in a month, and however many months fit into a solar year; if there are leftover days, we should just have one final month of make-up days.
My mother taught me
which I still recite when trying to figure out what day or how many days or when what is or whatever. But it’s still so illogical!
Or, or! This would be logical, too: count months of lunar cycles! And again, however many fit into a solar year, there you go.
Calendars are just so arbitrary that it irks me. I mean, time is our construct, so we might as well have it work for us, neh?
3 Elaine // May 5, 2008 at 7:32 pm
Yeah, I know calendars are arbitrary. Which is why I don’t want a new one introduced. I’d have to remember new stuff.
And, yeah, I know that rhyme…it just irks me that I still have to resort to it at my age to remember that information.
Although, if we could take the whole month of leftover days off, I could consider the change. Can you tell that I need a vacation? Even though I just had a week off work week before last.
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