Poe's law in action:

http://www.wnd.com/2014/08/without-god- ... orig=faith

(If anyone knows how to embed the video, please do. Usually, Rives' videos are available on his Youtube channel, but this one does not seem to be. Maybe that's what makes it a "WND Exclusive".)

Two things:


1-A friend who is a minister asked me not long ago, "Don't you see that the universe is obviously designed like a precision Swiss watch?" My reply was, "This precision time piece--by which you are so impressed--is off by one day every four years. You can pick up a ten dollar wrist watch at Kmart and get more precision than that."

2-The craziest thing about your video here is the advertisement at the beginning, wherein none other than Marie Osmond is shilling for a Mormon company that makes food to be stored for the apocalypse.

Of course, it's the Norse gods, not the Christian one, to whom we owe the week - each day is helpfully named after the god that invented that day.

I thought it was Babylonians playing numerology by dividing lunar months into quarters.

Arcanyn wrote:Of course, it's the Norse gods, not the Christian one, to whom we owe the week - each day is helpfully named after the god that invented that day.

Pretty sure Saturn isn't a Norse god.

pelfdaddy wrote:Two things:


1-A friend who is a minister asked me not long ago, "Don't you see that the universe is obviously designed like a precision Swiss watch?" My reply was, "This precision time piece--by which you are so impressed--is off by one day every four years. You can pick up a ten dollar wrist watch at Kmart and get more precision than that."

Ah, but he said a precision Swiss watch.

Monday is named after the Moon

Wednesday is named after Wodin

Thursday is named after Thor

Friday is named after Frigg

Saturday is named after Saturn

Sunday is named after the Sun

Cannot remember Tuesday

Depends which country you are in.

Tiw.

I would be interested to know what is the earliest historical reference to the seven day week and if it pre dates the Bible According to a comment on the website it was Caesar who established it. If there is a definitive point in history then what was the standard before that and was it universal as it is now or were there regional variations ? Now when the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian one in Europe it was generally accepted but not in England which had to wait over a century before it was. This is why sometimes anyone who was born or died in England during that time has two different dates for each. The most famous example of this being Isaac Newton. This is somewhat confusing but I myself use the Julian calendar for those dates because that is the one which would have been used in England at the time

Tuesday is named after Tiw. The Norse god of single combat.

surreptitious57 wrote:I would be interested to know what is the earliest historical reference to the seven day week and if it pre dates the Bible According to a comment on the website it was Caesar who established it. If there is a definitive point in history then what was the standard before that and was it universal as it is now or were there regional variations ? Now when the Gregorian calendar replaced the Julian one in Europe it was generally accepted but not in England which had to wait over a century before it was. This is why sometimes anyone who was born or died in England during that time has two different dates for each. The most famous example of this being Isaac Newton. This is somewhat confusing but I myself use the Julian calendar for those dates because that is the one which would have been used in England at the time

Ceasar did not come up with the week, it definitely predates his time. Also, the seven-day week only got any kind of standing in Rome with Augustinus, by whose decree it started coexisting with the eight-day nundial week that the romans previously had used. The seven-day cycle in Europe probably has existed without any break ever since Augustinus - calendar reforms have always left the week unchanged.

In different places of the world there are week-systems of pretty much any length between 4 and 19 days, some places even having two or more cycles coexisting.

The Babylonians don't seem to have had weeks as such, although they did celebrate certain days of the lunar month which almost are multiples of every seventh day - not exactly though, due to the lunar month being longer than 28 days.

The earliest certain evidence we have of seven-day weeks are with the Jews, although it seems they developed it as a subversion of the Babylonian system - turning the days of bad luck into celebrations. The days of bad luck - which occurred at roughly every seventh day - were a consequence of Babylonian astrological considerations.

I wish the French had completed the metrication of time.

Scot Dutchy wrote:I wish the French had completed the metrication of time.

Alas, nature kinda prevents metrication of time from making sense.

Also, why'd ten days per week be in any objective manner superior to seven? Because it has less religious baggage? Well, how is religious baggage a problem if it's not an ostensibly harmful baggage?

Well, that's not right, is it? You could have ten days in a week, ten weeks in a month, and 3.65 months in a year, except in a leap year when it would be 3.66.

Seriously, though, we could usefully have the metric system for periods shorter than a day. Though it would mean abandoning the second as an SI unit.

Well, the French Republican Calendar was pretty simple: 10 days per week, 3 weeks per month, and 5 or 6 extra days at the end of the year. Also, each day was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds.

That doesn't actually help, though, does it? The whole point of a decimal system is that it makes it easier to calculate, and we can't get away from the fact that the number of days in a terrestrial year is not a power of ten, or even a multiple of ten.

Evolving wrote:Seriously, though, we could usefully have the metric system for periods shorter than a day. Though it would mean abandoning the second as an SI unit.

Time units that are conveniently divisible by 2,3,4,5,6, 10, 12 and 15 are kinda useful though. Decimal stuff is divisible by 5 and 2 without going into non-integerland, which is somewhat less convenient.

Quick, what's 4 hours 23 minutes 15 seconds minus 1 hour 46 minutes 7 seconds?