I was going to title this post “top o’ the week to ye”, but I realize that many people consider the week proper to begin on Sunday; standard calendars in places such as the US and Canada and the rest of the British Commonwealth and so on look at it that way.  In Japan, on the other hand, I’m led to understand that the week officially starts on Monday, since that’s the day work starts, and Saturday and Sunday (Doyōbi and Nichiyōbi) are the weekend.

Though Japan has individually named weekdays referring to esoteric things much as we do in the West, the Japanese months‒at least their current, standard names‒are basically just numbered (though I understand there are older, more traditional names).  It seems pretty sensible just to number the months‒and the days, for that matter‒rather than give them names.

Then again, while there is a certain logic to the number of months‒related both to the length of the year and to the moon’s orbital period, both of which are objective, external facts‒the number of days in a week is pretty much arbitrary.

It seems the sort of thing that, around the time of the Revolution, the French might have wanted to make decimal, with, say, three ten-day periods (decadi?  decamaines?) per month and 36.5 of those a year.  I mean, multiples of ten were justifiably popular with them.  For instance, they defined the units of distance so that a meter was one ten-millionth the distance from the pole to the equator at the arc passing through Greenwich, England.

Thus, there were 10,000 kilometers on that arc, making the Earth’s circumference a relatively easy to remember 40,000 kilometers (with variations depending on which great circle you’re measuring).  Then they defined their measures of volume accordingly (a liter as one cubic decimeter, for instance), and then their standard of mass based upon those volumes of water, which is surely the most “standard” substance for living creatures on the surface of the Earth.

Of course, now the meter is “officially” defined in terms of the speed of light, which is, as far as we can tell, absolutely constant in all reference frames.  So, a meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1 / 299,792,458 seconds exactly.

The second, by the way, is defined as the time taken by 9,192,631,770 cycles of the unperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition in the electrons of Cesium-133, again exactly.

Of course, given General and Special Relativity, how long that takes can vary depending on one’s reference frame relative to other reference frames‒this is why the GPS system has to compensate both for velocity-based time slowing in the satellites relative to the Earth and gravity-based time slowing on the surface of the Earth relative to the satellites.  Ponder that when you use your GPS; it would not work at all without those constant corrections due to Einstein.

The specific numbers used to define the meter and the second are fairly arbitrary, but they are consistent, and so are useful.  They definitely make more sense than the choice of starting the week on “Sunday” in the part of the world formerly known as “Christendom”.

Think about it*.  Sunday is considered the Sabbath day in most Christian and formerly Christian cultures, certainly those influenced by the former British Empire.  But the Sabbath is supposed to be observed in remembrance of the seventh day of Creation, when God rested.

Leave aside the strange notion of an infinite being either reckoning days based on the cycles of one planet around one of hundreds of billions of stars in each of possibly trillions of galaxies.  We can accept that as a non-literal measure of time, since God is supposed to be outside of space and time, anyway**.  But why would an infinite being of infinite power need to rest?

Anyway, the original Sabbath, as observed in Judaism and a few of the sects**** of Christianity, is Saturday, the official end of the week according to that arbitrary choice.  Even the Spanish word for Saturday, for instance‒sábado‒is related to the word “Sabbath” or “Shabbat”, and Spain is traditionally a very Christian place.  I don’t know what’s behind the disjunction between the Sabbath and the end of the week occurred in the realm of “Christendom” when even some of the most Christian languages maintain the vestiges of a recognition that the sabbath day ought to be at the end of the week, according to their own “holy” book.

Oh, well.  It’s all arbitrary or at least stochastic.

Don’t get me wrong‒I like 7 for the number of days in a week.  It’s a prime number, for one thing.  It’s also the number of “non-fixed” celestial bodies known in antiquity because they were visible to the naked eye (the Sun, the Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn), which is probably why we have seven days.  Many of the days of the week in western languages retain traces of having been named for those bodies.

Also, 7 times 52 is 364, which means 7 divides into the days of a year with only one and a quarter days’ remainder, so the same date will fall one day “earlier” on each subsequent year (two days earlier after a “leap year” but not after the turn of three out of every four centuries, because of the adjustments made in the Gregorian calendar).  At least they don’t skip quasi-haphazardly through the days of the week every year.  Such would be the case in a decimal “week”*****, unless one made the 5 (or 6) remainder days of the year entirely separate, not ordinary days at all.

This is, apparently, how the Hobbit calendar works in Tolkien’s world, though they put their extra days in “mid-summer”, around the summer solstice rather than around the winter solstice.

Well, this has been much ado about not much of anything but random trivia about time and measure and the days of the week.  I suppose that’s appropriate for what is the beginning of at least the work week for most of us, depending on how you reckon it.

Try to have a good day, everyone, in any case.

*There must be higher love.

**So says Francis Collins, anyway, and he ought to know***.

***Well…no, he oughtn’t know.  No one ought to know, or has any way to know, or any justifiable claim to know such things.  It’s all conjecture and speculation, unsupported by any evidence that would stand up in even a kangaroo court, and what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.  But never mind; it can be fun to think about it.

****Christians often seem much more comfortable dealing with sects than dealing with sex.  Ba-dump-bump.

*****Although…on non-leap years, the dates would cycle between two “opposite” days of the “decamaine”, then would ratchet over to the next pair on leap years, so that might be fun.