If it were an even number those body builders wouldn’t have had to argue over it

The French had 10-day weeks for a while.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

I have no knowledge of this ; and would argue the 7 days are because they are prime . If not, it would have long ago be broken up into smaller weeks .

7 days is the Goldilocks zone of that unit of time size . 5 is too small and 11 is too long

Weeks are made up. Like hours and minutes.

The number of days in a week wasn’t chosen as an arbitrary number, it was chosen because it’s the length of 1 moon phase. 4 phases of the moon is 1 cycle (new moon to new moon), or 1 month (28 days).

The fact that we now have most months with 30 or 31 days is basically a hack to try to line up 12 months to 1 year (1 orbital period of the earth), but that was never going to work!

Inconvenient how?

10 hours per day was already pretty stupid, but the name they gave to the months was worse, like Grapemonth, Frostmonth, Rainmonth, Flowermonth, etc.

Not sure on grapes but the other three are pretty easy to match to a season.

13 months would have been 13x28=364 days which could just have an extra filler day (or two when needed for leap years).

I was taught that it's a seven day week because of the seven visible 'planets' the ancients saw in the sky.

Sunday = Sol

Monday = Luna

Tuesday =Twe [aka Mercury]

Wednesday = Wodin [aka Jupiter]

Thursday = Thor [aka Mars]

Friday = Friga [aka Venus]

Saturday =Saturn

Yeah i don't understand what op is talking about

That's metric months.

Congrats you invested invented International Fixed calendar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

Edit: typo

Lucky our existing names aren't stupid! Imagine if April just meant "Bud-opening-month," or if the rest were named after gods, or festivals, or emperors, or if they were numbered but the order was all wrong. That would be ridiculous.

yeah I think we should have 6 day weeks although someone pointed out to me 5 day is divisible into the number of days in a year but I can see dropping the size of the week by something close to 15% of 5 starts getting pretty short for a week

Since it's popular to talk about a 4-day work week (reducing working days from 71.4% to 57.1% of the week), I have an alternative proposal.

73, 5-day weeks, with 3 working days and 2 weekend days each. 60% working days, which scratches that itch for better work-life balance.

February 29... well, have you watched The Purge? It's a little like that. We don't like to talk about it.

Eh, don't forget that Julius and Augustus Caesar made months for themselves (July and August). Or is that made up? I'm not really sure. It's an interesting story though. But Sept- means seven, Oct- means eight, Nov- means nine, and Dec- means ten, so it stands to reason that July and August were disruptively added somehow.

FYI, there is kind of a push toward this, usually by landlords and other bill collectors, who would just love to be able to charge an extra month of rent or bills each year.

There's no way in Hell under the current leadership in many parts of the world that bills would be multiplied by 12, then divided by 13, and then capped at that. The cap wouldn't work anyway. The only responsible way to do it would be to charge bills on an annual basis, and divide it by the "number of months" for the "convenience" of the consumer. Then it would just be set up to where all the monthly payments would go down. But yeah, no way they enforce that.

Oh, shit, I was finding the 13-month year a great idea until you made me think about the consequences...

Wasn't (Julius) Caesar and some other dude responsibles for adding 2 months to the year (Augustus I guess) ?

I guess they think 60 seconds, 24h etc are convenient because you can easily split them up in halfs, quarters, 1/6 and so on.

Tuesday: Tirs day

Wednesday : Odens day

Thursday: you guessed it Thors day

Etc.

Saturday was Lögardagen, the day for the bath

From scandinavia anyways.

No shit.

Which is why we should stop believing minutes and hours and weeks are real

Eh, that doesn't really answer it. Months are about 30 days long. First, there are better numbers than 7 to fit in 30. Five 6 says weeks would work much better for this. Second, moon "phases" are completely arbitrary. Really there are only two "phases", waxing and waning; anything else is arbitrary subdivisions.

The real reason there are seven days in the week is because there are seven moving objects in the sky. (From a human perspective.) There are seven days of the week:

1. The Day of the Sun
2. The Day of the Moon
3. The Day of Mars
4. The Day of Mercury
5. The Day of Jupiter
6. The Day of Venus
7. The Day of Saturn

These are the seven days of the week. They're named for the seven great moving lights in the heavens. Everything else is a fixed star or invisible to human eyes.

Its also inconvenient that the number 10 only really has2 and 5 as factors.

Metric Week 💚

You say tomato, and I say tomato.

Very. I do dialysis every Monday Wednesday and Friday but I have to go 2 days off over the weekend. So Monday I always have more fluids to take off.

Maybe it’s deliberate though - as the week doesn’t divide well it forces weekly rituals.

https://www.timecube.net

The Roman calendar originally didn’t last all year round. It began in the spring and ended at the start of winter, and then the winter period just didn’t exist on the calendar.

Calendars were invented to plan the growing of crops, so tracking the days in winter didn’t have any purpose, so they left winter out.

How do I invest too, I want in.

6 days on and 1 day off is the maximum workers can handle for a long period of time. France switched to a 10 day week after the French Revolution and then went back because it was unsustainable for the workers.

Yes but also yes

We should switch to a base 12 number system.

Base 60 is my favorite.

Too many digits

All because of religion: rested in the seventh day.

I think 6 day weeks would be ideal (4 days work 2 days off).

Pretty sure it was religion, rest on the seventh day.

It's way too long for a week, yeah.

Just to be an insufferable pedant, I would like to point out that a base-60 system would only have one digit from 0 to 59. So technically fewer digits than with our current system to express the same range of values, and as we all know, technically correct is the best kind of correct.

Babylonians divided their lunar months into 4 weeks, the number seven was significant as the number of celestial bodies they could see other than non-moving stars. It wasn't until later that the seventh day got any association with resting.

I read about it in a few places it this sums it up: https://www.scienceabc.com/eyeopeners/why-do-we-have-seven-days-in-a-week

Digits too much. Already have 10 and it took me long enough to memorize those ones.

But you need 60 different symbols. That's what I was referring to

Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, the overall number of extant digits would increase six-fold. I was trying to express the idea that the number of digits in an operation would decrease.

That's also why the months are numbered wrong. If you know Latin, or at least one of the romance languages that derived from Latin, then "Septem"ber should be the 7th month, "Octo"ber should be the 8th month, "Novem"ber should be the ninth month, and "Decem"ber should be the 10th month. But that's not how it works today, as we no longer count March as the first month of the year.

Weekly and bi-weekly pay cycles are much more common than monthly or semi-monthly. It would be easier to budget if bills directly corresponded to pay cycles.

And then we have a prime number of months. Checkmate OP

What a fantastic website, thank you 😁!