BeautifulMag Week 53-01 | Time After Time

Time is a virtual understanding and for us, human beings, something that can not be rationally explained is just really difficult to grasp. Hence we invented the calendar. There are many different ones, but they all are based on the same principal: boxing time. However, it really isn’t that easy after all. Cause you see, time is a constant that just isn’t that easily boxed by rational thinking. For instant, it takes the earth 365.2422 days to revolve around the sun. But what kind of year would that make. And so it was decided that the year has only 365 days, causing some extra time every four years, which we then conveniently added to February since this was the shortest month anyway. We named these exceptions leap years and decided everything was solved now. But, and here comes the rationalization again, we then realized that, even if every year that is evenly divisible by four is a leap year, the years that can be divided by 100 are not. Unless they can be divided by 400… To make this even more complicated, we came to realize that this leap year system solved a lot in aligning time with our invented seasons, but there was still room for improvement. And thus we ended up with an extra week added to a year every now and then.

53 Week-years happen, and they are as common as leap year, though less stable. 53 Week-years happen every 5 to 6 years which doesn’t seem very accurate considering the precise calculation we used to box time. It seems more like an after thought. Something like: oh it seems like we made a miscalculation so let’s add a few more days in December. The last 4 millennium we saw 71 years with 53 weeks. And this year, 2009, is one of them. Now why is this so important. It really isn’t, to be honest. It just gives us one extra week before we close the first decennium of the 21st century, and that is just a nice thought, since time is already moving fast. It also gave us the opportunity to add one extra cover in this year. One that overlaps week 53 with week 1, and thus creating a seamless bridge, not only between two years, but between two decennia. And if nothing else, that is just nice.

Oh… Happy New Year… ☺ –B-

BEAUTIFULMAG

Comments

[Steve]

Well, now you're getting into my area of expertise. The problem here is one of semantics, and what you mean by the word "week". If the year 2009 really had 53 complete weeks, there would be 53 times 7 or 371 days in 2009. Obviously, this is not correct since there are 365 days in this calendar year as usual, and it is not a leap year either.

There are some years with 53 Sundays, or Mondays, or Tuesdays, or Wednesdays, or Thursdays, or Fridays, or Saturdays, but never 53 COMPLETE weeks. All years in our current Gregorian calendar system contain 52 complete weeks containing 364 days, plus one extra day, or two extra days in the case of a leap year.

OK, enough already of this boring calendar talk. I am just very happy that you are squeezing in an extra issue of BeautifulMag, and from what's on the cover, looks like it's going to be another stunner!