as the world turns

It's good to see that Beagles is looking things up, but I don't know why, having gone to all the effort,  he didn't just say why the Romans had May 1, as new year's day.

Back to the rotation of the earth,  The ancients knew that it took a certain amount of time after noontime until it would be noontime again and that it was the same amount every day.  I guess that they needed hour glasses to figure that out, but I think they invented them pretty early on, or water clocks, I remember reading about water clocks.  Mr Google says that the Egyptians divided the daytime into ten hours, one would guess because of that finger thing, then they added an hour on either side for dawn and dusk and that made twelve, and then gave nighttime twelve more.

The Romans picked that up and passed it on to to us.  Used to be that the twelve hours of daytime were shorter or longer than the twelve hours of nighttime depending on the time of year, but with advancing water clock technology they evened them out.  And then they divided the hour into sixty minutes borrowing from the Sumerians who used the base sixty, I am thinking because it can be divided evenly into two, three, four, and five.  You kind of wonder why they even bothered with minutes since it would be about two thousand years until trains were invented, but I suppose they still had to hard boil their eggs, and seconds, well maybe they wanted their eggs to come out just right.

Actually I suspect that minutes and especially seconds came from the astronomers of the day, and in fact minutes and seconds are the way a degree is divided.

AM and PM is kind of odd, I kind of like the military version of like 1630 hours, sounds so precise.  But why not 20 hours total, each one with 100 minutes of 100 seconds.  When the French were killing time between killing nobles to invent grams and meters why didn't they take up the measure of time? 

A month makes sense in that it is roughly full moon to full moon, but what of the seven day week?  Why not three weeks of ten days, or six of five?  I think we have the Jews to blame or credit with that with their seven days of creation though they may have borrowed from someone else for that. 

And just because I have a little time here, why do we call today 12/03/20 while on the continent they call it 03/12/20?  And why do we call it a continental breakfast when both America and Europe are continents?  And here's one, a friend informed me last night that she has heard that you should write it 12/03/2020 on a check because if you write 12/03/20 somebody could easily alter that to read 2015 or 2057.  It's not readily apparent how that would benefit anybody but you know, you can't be to careful these days