Posts Tagged ‘calendar’
“Fortune sides with him who dares”*…
Timing is everything: risk and the rhythm of the week…
The seven-day week originated in Mesopotamia among the Babylonians, and it has stuck around for millennia. However, it’s not inherently special. Egyptians once used a ten-day week, and Romans used an eight-day week before officially adopting a seven-day week in AD 321.
Still, the seven-day week is so ingrained that we may notice how days “feel.” I was recently caught off guard by a productive “Tuesday”, realizing halfway through the day that it was actually Monday. Recent research shows that a big player in the psychology of weeks is a tendency to take risks.
“Across a range of studies, we have found that response to risk changes systematically through the week. Specifically, willingness to take risks decreases from Monday to Thursday and rebounds on Friday. The surprising implication is that the outcome of a decision can depend on the day of the week on which it is taken.”…
“Feels like a Tuesday: research explains why days ‘feel’ certain ways,” from Annie Rauwerda @BoingBoing. The underlying research, by Dr. Rob Jenkins, is here.
* Virgil
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As we take a chance, we might recall that it was on this date in 1908 (a Thursday) that Thomas Etholen Selfridge became the first American to die in an airplane crash. An Army lieutenant and pilot, he was a passenger on Orville Wright’s demonstration flight of the 1908 Wright Military Flyer for the US Army Signal Corps division at Ft. Meade, Maryland. With the two men aboard, e Flyer was carrying more weight than it had ever done before…
The Flyer circled Fort Myer 4½ times at a height of 150 feet. Halfway through the fifth circuit, at 5:14 in the afternoon, the right-hand propeller broke, losing thrust. This set up a vibration, causing the split propeller to hit a guy-wire bracing the rear vertical rudder. The wire tore out of its fastening and shattered the propeller; the rudder swivelled to the horizontal and sent the Flyer into a nose-dive. Wright shut off the engine and managed to glide to about 75 feet, but the craft hit the ground nose-first. Both men were thrown forward against the remaining wires and Selfridge struck one of the wooden uprights of the framework, fracturing the base of his skull. He underwent neurosurgery but died three hours later without regaining consciousness. Wright suffered severe injuries, including a broken left thigh, several broken ribs, and a damaged hip, and was hospitalized for seven weeks…
Wikipedia
Two photographs taken of the Flyer just prior to the flight, show that Selfridge was not wearing any headgear, while Wright was only wearing a cap. Given speculation that Selfridge would have survived had he worn headgear, early pilots in the US Army were instructed to wear large heavy headgear reminiscent of early football helmets.
“a publisher’s emblem or imprint, especially one on the title page or spine of a book”*…
Knowing a book (or its publisher anyway) by its cover (art)…
Colophons started out as short statements providing a book’s publication info—details like where and who and when. Those statements often included little emblems, logos, which are now also referred to as colophons (from the Greek kolophōn, meaning “summit, final touch”), and they slowly made their way to the spines of books. Like tattoos or mascots, many of these logos depict animals, often fish (or dolphins): FSG, Anchor Doubleday, Aldine Press, and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Birds are another well-represented category: Penguin, Bantam, Norton, and Europa Editions, to name a few. So if you’re going to be judging a book by its cover (you’re probably kidding yourself if you think you don’t) then you better start factoring in the colophon as well.
These symbols are often taken for granted because most readers are, understandably, less familiar with publishers than writers or booksellers are, but they have a totemic quality to them that’s worthy of consideration, functioning not just as trademarks but as little windows into the personalities of the publishing houses and the people who run them. The following list is a very unofficial ranking of some of the more interesting colophons, the ones that take risks or have more of an emphasis on design, something unique about them, that offer subtle clues as to what awaits us inside…
“An Unofficial Ranking of Publishing Colophons“: Dylan Brown (@dylanwalsdorf) on the fishes, kangaroos, and borzois that adorn our books.
[With thanks to MK]
* “Colophon” as defined by Oxford Languages
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As we linger over logos, we might recall that in Britain on this date in 1752 absolutely nothing happened. There was no “September 3” (nor September 4-13) in Britain that year, as 1752 was the year that Britain converted from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, which required an adjustment of 11 days. Thus, that year British calendars went from Wednesday, September 2 directly to Thursday, September 14.
Most historians believe that persistent stories of riots in England at the time, demanding “give us our eleven days,” are an urban legend, fueled in part by an over-enthusiastic take on Hogarth’s 1755 painting “An Election Entertainment”:
“When angry, count four. When very angry, swear”*…
Anger, like other emotions, has a history.
It is not merely that the causes of anger may change, or attitudes toward its expression. The nature of the emotion itself may alter from one society to another. In classical antiquity, for example, anger was variously viewed as proper to a free citizen (an incapacity to feel anger was regarded as slavish); as an irrational, savage passion that should be extirpated entirely, and especially dangerous when joined to power; as justifiable in a ruler, on the model of God’s righteous anger in the Bible; and as blasphemously ascribed to God, who is beyond all human emotions.
Profound social and cultural changes—the transition from small city-states to the vast reach of the Roman Empire, the adoption of Christianity as the official religion of Rome—lay behind these shifting views, but all the positions had their defenders and were fiercely debated. This rich heritage offers a wealth of insights into the nature of anger, as well as evidence of its social nature; it is not just a matter of biology….
The history of anger– indeed, the very fact that it has a history– sheds light on the elevated emotional climate of today: “Repertoires of Rage.”
* Mark Twain
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As we wrestle with wrath, we might recall that in 1752 in Britain and throughout the British Empire (which included the American colonies) yesterday was September 2. The “jump” was occasioned by a switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, as a product of which almost all of “western civilization” was then on Pope Gregory’s time; Sweden (and Finland) switched the following year.
“I told my doctor I broke my leg in two places. He told me to stop going to those places.”*…
The “Hanoi Street Train”
As we depart the 2010s, a period that gave rise to influencers and forced us to grapple with our carbon footprints, and set sail for the ’20s, we at Fodor’s are asking ourselves a simple question: How can we be better travelers in the decade to come?
We’re hardly alone in asking it. We all desperately wish to see and experience this wonderful world, but how can we do so responsibly? Ultimately, we must each, individually, come to our own conclusions. And that’s how we view this year’s No List.
Every year, we use the No List to highlight issues—ethical, environmental, sometimes even political—that we’re thinking about before, during, and long after we travel. For this year’s No List, as we do every year, we highlight places and issues that give us pause. The underlying issues are ones that we’ll certainly be grappling with in the decade to come…
Fodor’s explains why we might NOT want to visit a baker’s dozen famous tourist destinations in 2020– their “No List”: “Thirteen places to reconsider in the year ahead.”
* Henny Youngman
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As we move off the beaten path, we might recall that this date, January 1, debuted in 46 BCE with the advent of the Julian calendar. It became the first day of the year in 1622; that honored had previously belonged to March 25.
January 1 is both the furthest away and closest day to December 31st. Because of time zones, the first person born in a year can be born before the last person of the previous year.
Happy New Year!
“‘For a while’ is a phrase whose length can’t be measured”*…
A reproduction of the fragmentary Fasti Antiates Maiores, an early Roman calendar (c. 60 BC) [source]
What year is it? It’s 2019, obviously. An easy question. Last year was 2018. Next year will be 2020. We are confident that a century ago it was 1919, and in 1,000 years it will be 3019, if there is anyone left to name it. All of us are fluent with these years; we, and most of the world, use them without thinking. They are ubiquitous. As a child I used to line up my pennies by year of minting, and now I carefully note dates of publication in my scholarly articles.
Now, imagine inhabiting a world without such a numbered timeline for ordering current events, memories and future hopes. For from earliest recorded history right up to the years after Alexander the Great’s conquests in the late 4th century BCE, historical time – the public and annual marking of the passage of years – could be measured only in three ways: by unique events, by annual offices, or by royal lifecycles…
Once local and irregular, time-keeping became universal and linear in 311 BCE. History would never be the same again: “A Revolution in Time.”
See also: “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there”*…
* South of the Border, West of the Sun
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As we mark time, we might recall that it was on this date in 293 that Roman Emperors Diocletian and Maximian appoint Galerius as Caesar to Diocletian, beginning the period of four rulers known as the Tetrarchy. Although he was a staunch opponent of Christianity, Galerius ended the Diocletianic Persecution when he issued an Edict of Toleration in Serdica in 311.
Porphyry bust of Galerius [source]
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