Re: spoon-discuss: Re: Calendar vs Clock

[Joel Uckelman <uckelman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Quoth Josh:
> 
> Joel Uckelman sez:
> >Sharp observers will notice that this is not cyclic as it should be, since 
> >Monday never immediately follows Wednesday. Why the impossibility of this 
> >didn't occur to me when I coded it I'm not sure.
> 
> I don't think it's a priori true that Monday never follows Wednesday.

I think I can confidently say that there has never been a Wednesday 
immediately followed by a Monday--even during September 1752 when the 
Julian calendar was replaced by the Gregorian, which resulted in the day 
after the 2nd being the 14th, 2 Sept. was Wednesday and 14 Sept was a 
Thursday. Names of weekdays, though strictly a convention, are not likely 
to be altered (cf. the French Revolution, though). So, though it is not 
impossible for our system to change, it remains impossible for Monday to 
immediately follow Wednesday within the system we currently use. I believe 
Kant might say that it's a priori synthetic, actually, since the names of 
days come from experience, while the structure onto which they are mapped 
is a purely mathematical object (natural numbers mod 7, I think).

-- 
J.