Saturday Night Rules!

[SB_UK]

Here's someone who knows how to "play"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0O2aH4XLbto
(Watch at least 20 seconds of it. I thought it was a joke at first)

well worth a'click.

[labelwench]

Any thoughts on the origin of the seven day cycle we call a WEEK?

The Invention of the Week


Our chief occasion for leisure—the weekend—is the direct product of the mechanical practice of measuring time. Counting days in chunks of seven now comes so naturally that it's easy to forget that this is an unusual way to mark the passage of time. Day spans the interval between the rising and the setting of the sun; the twenty-four-hour day is the duration between one dawn and the next. The month measures—or once did—the time required for the moon to wax, become full, and wane; and the year counts one full cycle of the seasons. What does the week measure? Nothing. At least, nothing visible. No natural phenomenon occurs every seven days—nothing happens to the sun, the moon, or the stars. The week is an artificial, man-made interval.

Generally speaking, our timekeeping is flexible, full of inconsistencies. The length of the day varies with the season; the duration of the month is irregular. Adjustments need to be made: every four years we add a day to February; every 400 years we add a day to the centurial year. The week, however, is exactly seven days long, now and forever. We say that there are fifty-two weeks in a year, but that is an approximation, since the week is not a subdivision of either the month or the year. The week mocks the calendar and marches relentlessly and unbroken across time, paying no attention to the seasons. The British scholar F H. Colson, who in 1926 wrote a fascinating monograph on the subject, described the week as an "intruder." It is an intruder that arrived relatively late. The week emerged as the final feature of what became the Western calendar sometime in the second or third century A.D., in ancient Rome. But it can be glimpsed in different guises—not always seven days long, and not always continuous—in many earlier civilizations.

Seven appeared as a magical number among the Babylonians, as early as the third millennium B.C., and played an important role in their calendar. There were seven heavenly bodies with apparent motion in the sky: the "erring" seven, the seven "wanderers" —that is, the seven planets of antiquity (including the sun and the moon). Whether they suggested the belief in the magic number or merely reinforced it is not clear. In any case, as astronomy—and astrology—spread from Babylonia to Greece, Egypt, and Rome, the seven heavenly bodies became identified with the great gods of the pantheon.

At the time that the planetary week became popular in Rome, there was already a seven-day week in place: the Judaic Sabbath observance. It is possible—although the idea is disputed by many scholars—that the Jews adopted this method of timekeeping during their exile in Babylonia in the sixth century B.C., and converted the septenary fascination into their Sabbath. The adoption of a continuous seven-day period independent of the lunar cycle was unusual, and exactly why the Jews evolved this mechanism is unclear. According to the Old Testament, the Sabbath was "their" day given to them—and them alone—by Jehovah. Unquestionably, its very singularity appealed to the exiled Jews as a way of differentiating themselves from the alien Babylonian Gentiles who surrounded them. In any case, that the Sabbath occurred on every seventh day, irrespective of the seasons, was a powerful idea, for it overrode all other existing calendars.

The origin of the planetary week is obscure as regards place and time. Dion Cassius, a Roman historian who lived in the third century, A.D., thought that the planetary week was conceived in Egypt, but modern scholars dispute this claim; more likely it was a Hellenistic practice that migrated to Rome. He also maintained that the planetary week was a relatively recent invention. There is some evidence, however, of a planetary week during the Augustan period, 200 years before, and it may have originated even earlier. What is certain is that by Dion's era the habit of measuring time in cycles of seven days was already established in private life throughout the Roman Empire.

The week was many things to many people, sometimes many things to the same people. It was magical and practical both. A superstition at first, it survived as a social convention, much as shaking hands with the right hand has endured because there is a need for a gesture to represent friendly feelings to a stranger. The week was a short unit of time around which people could organize their lives, their work, and their leisure. At the same time, the week was a simple and memorable device for relating everyday activities to supernatural concerns, whether these involved observing a commandment from Jehovah, commemorating Christ's resurrection, receiving the influence of a planetary deity, or, just to be safe, all three.

The roots of the week lie deep, too deep to understand fully. An air of mystery surrounds the week; perhaps that, too, is a part of its appeal. It is an observance that has been distilled over centuries of use, molded through common belief and ordinary usage. Above all, it is a popular practice that took hold without magisterial sanction. This, more than anything else, explains its durability. Less an intruder than an unofficial guest, the week was invited in through the kitchen door, and has become a friend of the family—a useful friend, for whatever else it did, the seven-day cycle provided a convenient structure for the repetitive rhythm of daily activities. It included not only a day for worship but also a day for baking bread, for washing, for cleaning house, for going to market—and for resting. Surely this over-and-over quality has always been one of the attractions of the week—and of the weekend. "Once a week" is one of the commonest measures of time. The planetary week is not a grand chronometer of celestial movements or a gauge of seasonal changes. It is something both simpler and more profound: a measure of ordinary, everyday life.

[SteveA]

I wonder how big that Holy Mother of All blessed Problems would have to be,
at least
to give birth to a 'work's* out for ever' sign.

I was thinking about that after I posted this ... it could be that all that play would still inherit that imagined singular property of work that they were derived from.

(How we extend the dichotomy to include a larger range of pleasant interims between each 'work'? Then again, it would still be there and every once in a while come back and be that annoying nudge that doesn't let you completely relax completely.)

- there's no sense of satisfaction unless there's some form of resistance against which one is required to work.
Problems arise when the resistance represents another person.

Yes, I think you put it well.

The biggest problem appears to be the natural confinement of humanity on Earth, though I think we're much less confined than people typically assume or portray it. There's plenty of land out there and plenty of volume inside the Earth or floating on the seas etc., but no, people typically congregate despite the conflicts.

I think a good litmus test of whether or not a society is providing resistance though is whether or not people are allowed to peacefully leave it and set up some alternative (if you find that some people in the group feel obligated to pursue them and 'bring them back to the fold', then there's likely a problem. I think one of the most fundamental rights in a society is over (dis)association - if a society can't tolerate competition but most impose a social monopoly, then it's almost certainly not a very desirable state).

The entire process of building the mind feels like an exercise in countering resistance.
It feels as though there's actual pain involved in destabilizing existing prior to replacing those with novel better models of reality.

It can be painful to have to take some concept you've believed in strongly and built dependent knowledge or beliefs upon and find ultimately that the choice is to either leave it and be limited by it and have to work around it, or to "pay" attention to it and honestly rework things from the ground up to build something more solid and reliable for the future.

In the end, I don't think it's truly painful or even work, it (just somehow) is simply necessary. It's a lot like the difference between the pain of a toothache and the shorter (but temporarily more intense) pain of pulling the tooth. The pain of pulling the tooth is really caused by the toothache and not pulling it - you would not have pulled it had it not hurt. The final pain of pulling is almost just out of spite!

I think also that likely little attention needs be paid to pain itself (not always simple to do) because if pain was truly something that you had control of and did not want, then it should not exist. If it does exist, then you either do not have control over it or you somehow want it - in either case, there's no required reason to pay attention to it. It's often assumed that pain keeps people alive, but I don't think that's even true - did pain create birth and if not, then life is not created from pain nor does pain stop life.

Imagine if evolution was at work, but people were simply too stupid or forgetful to remember or pay attention to pain ... what would happen? Well evolution would still have to continue on despite all the blunders.

Consider this - people have done lots of stupid things in the past and the body has built in protection against most of these things (though those protections can be seen as limits). Birds can fly and breath cleaner air than people do, who have been making fires and smoke for a long time. Well birds die much quicker than a person from contaminants in the air (I know one person who killed a pet bird simply by breathing smoke at it and they used to carry canaries into mines to detect for harmful gases).

It would appear that evolutionarily, the best option would be to ignore pain and yet still live. In that case, there's no evolutionary benefit to pain nor impediments to growth. Any pain would be simply a distracting deterrent that evolution should have no reason to keep. If ones actions are orthogonal to pain and do not respect it, then the two space become separate and disconnected and there should be no evolutionary benefit to pain - and like the old saying goes, "there's nothing to fear but fear itself".

Isn't that whole process of learning enough to keep the young 'uns busy up until their mid-30's?

I'm wondering more and more if this might be simply to tie them up with enough knots to keep them from providing any resistance later. (I'm not entirely serious here, but some component of this I do think is generally present in education)

In the long run though (and isn't today always the future?) it appears these drag everyone down.

I've been amazed at times how many things appear to be correct and more easily understandable by simply inverting the most common beliefs - it's almost like something turned every possible side of a Rubik's Cube at least once ... then again it may also be that I'm only considering to be real the sides that were rotated, so it could be an observational bias and maybe I'd have never known of any of it otherwise? (Then again, the knowledge may not be necessary, but here I am having fun trying to piece things together ... so I can't necessarily blame anyone else - even if something like General Relativity ends up being shown entirely false and almost obscuring of something more fundamental, it may be that it still took the construction of those ideas to see a larger picture and it may be that though democratically defined sciences are cumbersome and slow and often representative of a median ... the huge inertial "mass" it provides allows for stable references to be detected beyond it and it provides something to push off of to get into orbit ... gravity "sucks" (yes, pun somewhat intended), but then again there wouldn't be the stars waiting for it to be overcome without it).

So ultimately little I can complain about as I don't know how it could have been different (and maybe it already is different and I'm ignorant of how it would have been otherwise). Here's an idea - the mind is able to some extent to predict events in the future (after the apple is dropped it will hit the ground) and there are some correlations between the mind and time reversed events. Here's an interesting thought - what if there was an initial thought or desire but it moves backwards in time relative to physical events and so the physical future is showing how that initial desire is logically made possible? (The universe is looking forward to Saturday Night )

[austintorn@aol.com]

R E M E M B E R

It’s about time for a major revision to the calendar, one that’s reflective of modern times, for the only improvements made during the last few hundred years have been to skip leap days in years that are evenly divisible by 400, and, more recently, to add a few insignificant leap-seconds once a year or so (”Wow, that seemed like a really long weekend!”).

The last truly major revision to the calendar occurred over a thousand years ago when Omar Khayyàm realigned the Moslem calendar so that the seasons would arrive at the same time each year—back then the year started in March with the spring, the logical time for a new year to start, I suppose, since nature is new in the spring. It took Europe another 700 years or so to pick up on this change—I suppose they got tired of celebrating Christmas in July-type weather or shoveling snow in the summertime.

Omar also revised his philosophic calendar to suit his mental outlook—by advocating that dead yesterday and unborn tomorrow be removed from the calendar; thus, he could truly live for TODAY. Later on, he refined this theory further by also removing dead and unborn minutes, so that he could live for the moment. My calendar revisions are more along those lines.

First of all, I am eliminating the months of January (Bran-new-airy), February (Feb-buries), and March (March!) because 1) They all contain cold and rotten weather, and 2) They totally lack holidays on which we could get time off with pay from work—it’s a heck of a long wait for a holiday between New Year’s Day and Memorial Day (we used to get Good Friday off, but now even that day is eliminated, since it’s a religious-ethnic holiday and other religious-ethnic groups could have then proposed other such holidays and so there’d be no time left for actual work days). Note: don’t worry, Valentine’s Day is being retained and moved elsewhere in my calendar, as is New Year’s Day.

I am adding a whole new month, called Remember, which comes right after December. That way you will have some extra time to do all of the things that you meant or forgot to do during the year. Just think, there will be not as much need to say “wait until next year!”.

Therefore, my revised year starts in the spring, in April, which, as I’ve said, is much more appropriate since it is a time for renewal and rebirth. By the way, it is easily proved that the year once started in spring by noting the Latin numbers from which the months got their modern names, i.e., 7-sept, 8-oct, 9-nov, 10-dec. We, of course, have now adopted these Latin numeric prefixes into general English, as well, for example, septuagenarian (age 70-80), octagon (8-sided), octave (8 musical degrees), novena (9 days of devotion), decimal (base 10), decimate (to kill one in ten), decathlon, decade, etc. I also discovered that the old names of July and August were Quintus (Latin 5) and Sextus (Latin 6), but Julius and Augustus Caesar changed the names to suit their own. As for May, June, and April, those were the names of the Caesars’ girlfriends. So, anyway, what all this means is that since December used to be the tenth month (dec), the year obviously once started in March. So, I am generally readopting this policy, except that, since I’ve eliminated March, my revised year must now start in April, on April’s Fools Day, in fact, which will have to share the honor with New Year’s Day—an appropriate combination considering all of the foolish things that many do on New Year’s Eve.

So, since my year as so far constructed is only ten months long, I must now distribute the excess days that made up the two missing months. I would like to make all the months thirty days long since people have problems with variations. So, I am introducing a new, unnumbered day into the week, called Funday, a day which does not have to be numbered or accounted for in any way whatsoever. Funday occurs between Sunday and Monday. On Funday you can do as you please. Funday doesn’t even have a numerical date, and so it cannot possibly count against schedules, deadlines, or bills. Weekends, as we all know, have always been too short, but now, with the introduction of Funday, weekends become three days long. I have, as have many others, already pioneered the concept that led to Funday: I get up late on Saturday and Sunday to recover energy spent during the work week, and then, by Sunday night, being so well rested, I go to sleep quite late or sometimes not at all and stay up all night reading or doing you know what. Of course, I pay for all of this by being very tired on Monday, but naturally it’s much better to be tired on company time than on your own time, and who ever expects much of Monday anyway. So, this is what led me to the idea of a Funday on which you could do whatever you want—you don’t even have to visit your relatives. Funday is totally dedicated to fun, and a new law will make it a crime for you to do anything else, although shopping and home chores are allowed if you whistle while you work or sing a happy song. Yes, people are so harried these days that we have to force them to enjoy life.

So, thanks to Funday there will be no more rush-rush or hectic feelings when the work week starts. People need no longer waste short weekends of great weather by doing silly and ridiculous things like going grocery shopping or doing laundry. Well, you might say, instead of lengthening the week why not just get people to do all their weekend chores during the week—but, of course, they can’t since they’re so stressed out and exhausted when they get home from work that they just collapse and can’t even do the simplest thing. Yes, yes, I know that this is simply a matter of attitude and style, but, believe me, personal changes, even such common sense changes, seem to take huge amounts of effort; whereas, I can simply solve the problem much more easily with the introduction of Funday.

But, ten months of thirty numbered days plus five undated Fundays each month equals only 350 days, so there are still fifteen more days that must be dispersed into the new calendar. I am solving this by adding a special summer and winter festival period of seven days each, the winter festival being no more really than a re-establishment of the old Saturnalian pagan festival held in olden times before the Christians put a damper on it. This winter festival is added between Christmas and New Year’s Day so that we can have a vacation from our vacation of visiting relatives and feasting and pigging out. The summer festival is inserted between July and August and centers around the true midsummer’s day. Naturally these festivals do not count against anyone’s vacation time.

OK, there are just a few minor alterations left. There is still one day left to be accounted for, and I am inserting it between May and June as Valentines Day. I am removing a day from June, so that the saying “Nothing is so rare as a day in June” will actually be true. In the old calendar, a day in February was 4.2% more rare than a day of June, but, of course, February is gone now. The day removed from June will be called World Day. On this day we should try to get all the world’s peoples to coexist in perfect harmony. This day occurs between June and July. I am moving the Fourth of July to the first Monday in July so that we will have yet another extra long weekend.

Monday mornings and Friday afternoons are to be designated as home/work transition adjustment-recovery periods, during which one need not be present at work, thus reducing the work week to only four days! Yes, the computer age has arrived and it’s time that we reaped its benefits and gained more leisure time, for this was the promise of the computer age: that computers would free us—so why do I feel that they have become our masters?

Furthermore, the nebulous day called Someday is being removed from the calendar and from everyday conversation—because what it really meant was “Noneday” (as in “Someday we’ll go out to lunch.”).

Also, just as a matter of information, note that the days of the week were named after the sun, the moon, and all of the known planets of the time, although some of the days derive their names from French or Latin: Sunday (sun), Monday (moon), Tuesday (Mardi in French, or Mars), Wednesday (Mercredi, or Mercury in French), Thursday (Jeudi in French, or Jupiter), Friday (Vendredi in French for Venus), Saturday (Saturn). However, this still leaves Pluto, Uranus, and Neptune unrepresented but I’ll probably leave those for my next revision. My new names for the days of the week are: Onesday, Twosday, Wedsday, Thirstday, Fryday, Satday, Sundae, and Funday.

Or, we could just forget all of these revisions and go back to Omar’s great idea about having a calendar with only one day on it called TODAY. Anyway, the new calendars will be on sale soon.

[SteveA]

I love it! Very cute and clever, Austin.

[labelwench]

And another piece of historical trivia...

A Weekend History by Krissy Clark

The extremely short, and mostly right, history of the weekend can be captured on a bumper sticker: "The labor movement. The folks who brought you the weekend."

Ricardo Levins Morales is an artist and labor activist in Minneapolis. And he, in fact, makes that bumper sticker. He designed it in the early 1980s, in an era when unions were losing favor.

Since then, he's sold tens of thousands. He says it's funny to watch people in the rear view mirror squinting with puzzled looks at the stickers. "For people who are not steeped in labor history, it might take a few minutes to figure out what on earth they are talking about." Because, Morales says, most people think the weekend has always been here, "you know, like the weather."

It is hard to imagine life without the weekend. But the word didn't even exist until the 1870s, when Americans were deep into the industrial revolution. "Many working people who were in the factories of the industrial revolution were fresh off the farms, and they were used to regulating their own day, and their own working rhythms," says Morales. "And here, all of a sudden they're having to adapt themselves to whistles, to bells, to the clock."

Many workers—men, women and children—put in 10 to 16 hour days, seven days a week. And you remember this part from history class: Labor organizers called on the government to mandate shorter hours. Workers lost lives in the struggle. At Haymarket Square in Chicago, police gunned down protesters and men were hanged for inflammatory speeches.

The men were demanding, as they put it, time for "what we will."

"The right to have time with our families. To pursue education," says historian Michael Feldberg. And to go to the zoo, the museum, the church. Actually, getting Sunday off for worship was relatively easy. Feldberg says, it was Saturday that was the tough part. "If the Jewish Sabbath had been on Wednesday, we would not have a weekend. We would have Wednesday and Sunday off."

And what kind of weekend is that? Feldberg says even as Americans agitated for more time off, two days off right next to each other was not a foregone conclusion. He says for that, we can thank the massive influx of Jewish immigrants in the late 1800s. They made up a big part of the factory work force. And, Feldberg says, their holy day wasn't Sunday. "Jews for the most part had to either voluntarily not conduct business on Saturday while the rest of the country did, or abandon their religious principles to make a living, keep a job."

But Jewish and gentile factory workers aren't the only ones who brought you the weekend. Some of the people who owned the factories helped too. People like Henry Ford. Ford hated labor unions. But he shared their hope in this strange new thing called a weekend. He gave his workers two days off back in the early 1900s, even though the federal government didn't mandate the forty-hour work-week until 1938. Ford pretty much invented weekend road trips, and promoted his own weekend romps in breathless newspaper editorials.

Christian Overland of the Henry Ford museum explains it like this: Ford wanted to sell his Model T. And if people were stuck in factories all week, "when are they going to use it? If your workforce is your consumer, you have to give people the time off to buy the things." And to take them out on weekend adventures, and drives in the country, and, later, trips to the mall, and little league practice, and all those other weekend errands we've come to know and love.

So, who invented the weekend? It was brought to you by the Labor Movement, but also Management. Jews. And Gentiles. And you may as well throw in God, since he came up with the whole "day of rest thing" in the first place.

[racecar]

Blizzcon wih the kids

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xy4AwQgWX78

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEWgs...eature=related

[labelwench]

An excellent cover of a classic Saturday song, Tom Waits (Looking for) The Heart Of Saturday Night.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hj3SU...layer_embedded

[SB_UK]

Any thoughts on the origin of the seven day cycle we call a WEEK?

28 days (lunar cycle,menstrual cycle)
lunar gamma ray emission cycle

28 days
~
.
/\
/\\/
.
//\
/\//\//
1/2
/\//3/4

- there're 4 discrete sectors in one wave length.

The week represents the expression cycle in either a pituitary, thyroid or parathyroid hormone
- a hormonal expression cycle which correlates with our general levels of 'energy'.
The hormonal expression cycle (in question) in man
- developed (evolved)
because of
- lunar gamma ray emission
from our perspective
- to take advantage (absorb the energy) from lunar gamma ray emission.

The observation that energy is availed -
can drive evolution -
- though if availed to drive evolution -
must then be {used by,integrated into}
the novel evolutionary structure.

- Thyroid hormone -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thyroid_hormone#Function

They act to increase[/decrease] the basal metabolic rate.

How sure that the week relates to BMR?
Certain.

Why ?
Because immediately upon having the idea -
there's an embarrassing silence whilst one wonders why one hadn't realised this previously.

[SB_UK]

[ quote=;94733 ]
//\
/\//\//
1/2
/\//3/4

1,2-3 points of inflexion
1-2,3-4 maximum,minimum

4 points in our 28 day cycle where we are required to undergo disorientating changes
- disorientating changes in energetic availability
- which are best tackled 'in our own time'.

Sunday drivers switching 'lanes' on the weekend.