> Months are related to Moon's orbit, weeks to its phases.
But in a way that doesn't work right.
> Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because Romans used to go to war in the Spring.
Yes? That's a mess and that's basically what the tweets said. They didn't mention the emperors but that makes it even messier. I'm not sure what you're arguing there. There's no "perfectly understandable" reason for having some gods some emperors and some wrong numbers.
It works great for the purpose that it was used: counting groups of days when regular humans didn't have the luxury of more precise calendars.
The part that doesn't "work right" is that the different natural cycles used to measure time are not multiples of others, so adjustements are always needed. That's why calendar is complex, it was fixed repeatedly until it doesn't drift.
Weeks and months are not kept because we don't know better, but because they're useful units for social reasons.
There's no "perfectly understandable" reason for having some gods some emperors and some wrong numbers.
That's a different part of the comment, addressing the hint that there's a religious reason for the calendar.
There are several eras used by different countries, and the common western calendar has several layers: weekdays seem to be of Sumerian origin, months at least in Latin and other European languages come from Roma and the AD year counting is "Christian" and widely used maybe because the last major useful adjustement was this one:
But it seems they didn't bother to change the names of previous layers. If something works, just leave it alone. You may argue that there are more "rational" ways to organize time measurement. I would recommend to read what Asimov had to say on the subject.
> It works great for the purpose that it was used: counting groups of days when regular humans didn't have the luxury of more precise calendars.
If you want a quarter month then have a quarter month.
Having a set of days that pretends to be a quarter month but rapidly falls out of sync is worse than having no quarter month at all.
If you gave any other reason for seven days, I wouldn't say it doesn't work right. But that reason makes the length of the week supremely half-assed.
> But it seems they didn't bother to change the names of previous layers. If something works, just leave it alone. You may argue that there are more "rational" ways to organize time measurement. I would recommend to read what Asimov had to say on the subject.
You're conflating two very different problems when you talk about it like that. Trying to make the units line up is legitimately difficult. Bad naming is not because of legitimate difficulty.
Having a set of days that pretends to be a quarter month but rapidly falls out of sync is worse than having no quarter month at all.
So you want to reform the week, the only time cycle that hasn't been altered in millennia to sync it with... what exactly?
Different groups of time have different goals. Scientific and technical applications only use the second. Years are useful both for agriculture and astronomy. Year subdivisions, weeks and months are useful for legal, social and personal purposes: weekends, holidays, celebrations, birthdays, embarrassing familiar reunions and all that.
They neither have to be in sync with anything, just being useful to track days in a year, nor they need to be mathematically pleasant, any programmers worth their salt will write you a perpetual calendar generator in five minutes.
But in a way that doesn't work right.
> Months have other gods's names: Janus, Phoebe, Mars, Aphrodite, Maya, Juno... Julius and Augustus were emperors and from that point are just numerals, starting at March. It was associated with Mars because Romans used to go to war in the Spring.
Yes? That's a mess and that's basically what the tweets said. They didn't mention the emperors but that makes it even messier. I'm not sure what you're arguing there. There's no "perfectly understandable" reason for having some gods some emperors and some wrong numbers.