We all understand that time is linear, yet our lunar nature insists on clocks and calendars, even naming the months and days after the gods. These cyclical notions have become so ingrained in our collective psyche that if we try to consider linear time our circadian brains curl into a fetal position and must be coaxed back to normalcy with cookies and milk.
Back when I first learned computer programming, in between woolly mammoth hunts, I would devise these complex code fragments to figure out how many days elapsed between two dates, or if you started on date A and added 1075 days, what would the new date be? In other words I was doing crude “calendar math”. Internally computers store our MM/DD/YYYY style date in a form called the Julian Date, which is a measure of linear time. Day zero starts on January 1, 4713 BC, Jan 2, 4713 BC is day one, Jan 3 is day two and so on. Once our normal dates are converted to Julian Dates, then regular math can be used to do calendar arithmetic. Two routines are needed:
1) Convert our normal date to the corresponding Julian Date
2) Convert a Julian Date back to our normal date
3) Walla!
For example, today is Jan 1, 2019, or the Julian date of 2458484, as shown below. Because the Julian date is just a number, the fractional part of days can be represented as a decimal fraction to the right of the decimal point.
Which brings me back cyclically (see what I did there?) to Wednesday. Odin of Norse Mythology was king of the gods. In the Anglo-Saxon version of the myth he was also known as Woden, and the mid-week day became known in Old English Wōdnesdæg or Woden’s-day. Woden’s son was Thor from the Marvel Comic Universe and sure enough Thorsday follows Woden’s-day.
Today, Wednesday is sometimes called “hump-day” (old english: Hmupdae) because it represents the peak of the work-week followed by a blissful slide into the weekend, also known as Sæterdæġ, after Saturn.
And round and round we go…
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