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Comment by freitzkriesler2 | Hacker News Reader

Instead of 3 day weekends, why don't we go to a 6 day week? The only reason we have 7 days is because of the 7 classical planets.

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A lunar month (28 days) is a slightly useful and easily measured unit of time, but a bit too long for a lot of purposes. But it only splits into 47 and 214, so a shorter measure would be 2 days (not so useful), 4 days (maybe), 7 days (maybe) and 14 days (too long). A seven day measure aligns nicely with the moon's quarters as well. That's what I had always assumed was the reason for a 7 day week; I wonder if the celestial bodies reasoning is more of a religious cover story for something people were already doing (this is pure conjecture on my part)

Gah; markdown seems to have ruined my calculations; should read 4x7 and 2x14

When would God rest?

It's crazy when you think about how much of society is aligned around the totally arbitrary idea of a 7-day week. It would be hard to switch because so many things are aligned to it.

The thing is it's completely non-existent in nature. Not to get too into the Naturalistic Fallacy, but we're biological organisms that evolved in nature and have acclimated through evolution to it the things that do exist.

That is we have a circadian rhythm, because for millions of years we couldn't see much at night, so we just went to sleep. And all sorts of animals including us start getting frisky in spring because it means resources are about to become abundant so it's a good time to copy ourselves. Even women's menstrual cycles are roughly equivalent to the lunar month.

But a 7 day period? Only exists in society because of - essentially - the bible.

In nature (on Earth) there are days, years, months, seasons, but that's really it. Even an hour is an arbitrary amount of time in a day (the length of which actually varies anyway!).

The 7 day week predates the bible mate. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Week It's all because the ancient saw 7 wandering stars (aka planets) and assigned 7 days them.

My proposal, let's dump Saturday. Saturns mythology is trash and it doesn't deserve a day.

It’s probably easier to effect change within a small region using the existing days than persuade the entire world to change their calendar simultaneously.

Take a look at this https://calendars.fandom.com/wiki/6-Day_Week_Solar_Calendar_...

Would be one of the biggest innovations in time keeping we could unleash on the world.

And to the person who downvoted my post: get over yourself mate.

From your link:

> Another minor disadvantage can be the time needed to adapt which is valid for any reform. But as it was also already mentioned, the availability of modern day software can diminish these difficulties.

Lol. I think the inertia of all our software running on the Gregorian calendar is probably the single biggest reason we'll never bother changing it.

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