Re: spoon-discuss: Re: Calendar vs Clock

[Josh <kortbein@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Joel Uckelman sez:
>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).

Boy, prick a philosopher, and you don't just get blood, you get
eleven lines of text. :)


-- 
josh blog: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~kortbein/blog/