Re: Programming a calendar system

On Apr 30, 2004, at 3:10 PM, Mark J. Reed wrote:
> I never said that there was any *natural* correspondence between the
> number of planets and the number of days in the week.  It's completely
> arbitrary.  Just that in the case of our 7-day week it happens to go
> back to a tradition of putting the days (actually, originally the
> hours)
> into a cycle according to which the gods (i.e. planets) took turns
> watching over us.  The Babylonians first made this connection.  The
> Jews
> picked it up from them during their time in exile and incorporated it
> into their Creation story and Sabbath tradition.  (Those who insist
> that
> everything in the Bible be taken literally will dispute this, of
> course,
> and say that the seven-day week was ordained by God as one of the ten
> commandments based on how long it took Him to create the universe.
> That's fine, too - it's still arbitrary; it's just God making the
> arbitrary choice.  But you might expect that He would do something
> similar on your conplanet, so take that into account if that's your
> belief.)
> -Mark

Just nitpicking, but an exilic transfer isn't necessary (or even
likely).

I love the idea of God messing around with *my* conplanets, though. :P
It's not like God doesn't have enough planets of God's own to fiddle
around with ;) .

Ob?ConCalendar:
The Rokbeigalm have no week.  They just count years and months.  So
whenever i want to write a week-date in Rokbeigalmki i just have to
number the days Hebrew-style.

The calendar system which theirs is semi-based on, from my and my
brother's old RPG, did have weeks with named days, though.  The whole
calendar was purely metric, so the year had 10 months and each month
had 10 weeks, each of which had 10 days.  The days were named after
planets and other objects in their solar system.
Unfortunately, i can't find a copy of what their calendar looks like.
I remember there were other "in the sky" phenomena with days named
after them, including meteors and clouds.


-Stephen (Steg)
  "only the extremes are logical;
   but they are absurd."
      ~ samuel butler