June solstice was at 02:40 UT (22:40 EDT); it's summer in the Northern Hemisphere & winter in the Southern. Hope everyone has a great season; also hope most of us in the U.S. (or really anywhere) don't melt over the next week, or maybe even all summer. #solstice #astronomy #calendars #timekeeping

Ahhh good old #ProgrammingFalsehoods! Some bastard just made me remember the Roman calendar, and the falsehood "the day of the month always advances contiguously from N to either N+1 or 1, with no discontinuities."

Search Engine Land: Is it Tuesday? Google AI Overviews doesn’t know. “Google thinks today is Wednesday and yesterday was Tuesday. But it got the dates correct (today is May 29 and yesterday was May 28). So, yay Google also spit out this equally helpful answer, telling me the date is May 29 (correct) but again said that it’s Wednesday, even including a citation to a site.” This is so […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/05/29/search-engine-land-is-it-tuesday-google-ai-overviews-doesnt-know/

In #Mesoamerica, #time and #calendars were sacred, connecting the divine, nature, and humanity, guiding both daily life as well as rituals, and legitimizing power.

https://www.thecollector.com/aztec-maya-perceive-time/

The Babylonians seem to have used tithis even before the Indians. We don't know what, if any, name they used (hence modern scholarship just uses the Sanskrit term), but it seems quite likely the Indians learned the idea from the Babylonians.

There are some vague hints that the Greeks also learned about tithis from the Babylonians, but the evidence there is unfortunately scanty.

A 1965 Calendar of The West Country - Jarrold & Sons

https://www.ebid.net/uk/for-sale/a-1965-calendar-of-the-west-country-jarrold-sons-221943396.htm

Marduk made made the moon appear and entrusted to him the night. He designated him as the night’s adornment, to define the days. Every month without ceasing he exalted (him) with a crown. “To light up over the land at the beginning of the month, you shine with horns to define six days and on the seventh day a half crown!

—Enúma Eliš explains why there are seven days in a week.

I absolutely refuse to believe today's Tuesday.

I know this coz one of David Marr's guests tonight on #LNL, as per Phillip Adams before him, is LaTingle to summarise the latest political idiocies. Laura is on Monday nights, ergo today is Monday.

No further correspondence shall be entered into.

Tolkien's manuscript.

This is from another area of Tolkien's mind: calendars.
He was pretty obsessed with making calendars for his Middle-earth. He wrote a big appendix to "The Lord of the Rings" about it, and wrote a great deal about the calendars before settling on the text as printed in Appendix D of "The Lord of the Rings".

I also feel like making a Font of Tolkien's own pen writing. What do you think?

If you'd like to migrate your #AddressBooks and #calendars from somebody else's platform to a self-hosted or self-managed one, but there's no "migration assistant":

Check whether both platforms support the #CalDAV and #CardDAV standards. If they do, look into #vdirsyncer https://vdirsyncer.pimutils.org

We'd recommend to test-migrate your existing data to a local filesystem storage first, and swap in your new storage only when syncing to the test storage worked without errors.

To protect yourself against migration blunders, mark your source storage (platform) as read_only and let it "win" in your conflict_resolution setting.

For address book pairs, you can also sync the "displayname" and "description" metadata – for calendar pairs, additionally "color" and "order".

I know for a fact that self-hosting is very difficult to pull off but I tip my cap to those who can manage it successfully.

Here's @emilygorcenski who shows us how to create a self-hosted calendar solution.

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/owning-my-own-data-part-1-integrating-a-self-hosted-calendar-solution/

University of Edinburgh: Most AI struggles to read clocks and calendars. “While AI models can perform complex tasks such as writing essays and generating art, they have yet to master some skills that humans carry out with ease, researchers say. An Edinburgh team has shown that state-of-the-art AI models are unable to reliably interpret clock-hand positions or correctly answer questions about […]

https://rbfirehose.com/2025/03/15/university-of-edinburgh-most-ai-struggles-to-read-clocks-and-calendars/

Homer (not Simpson), Hesiod, and Euripides describe the beginning of Winter as being when the Pleiades, the Hyades, and Orion set just before sunrise, at the same time as Greeks hear crane calls.

When they were writing, this would have happened around the halfway point between the southward equinox and the southern solstice, same as how the Celts and Chinese reckon the seasons.

Today I want to talk about Borana timekeeping. This is hard to do without getting into anthropological controversies, and it's not every day I get to disprove a widely-repeated idea. (I am not the first to disprove it but I did it independently).

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The timekeeping system of the Muni (or Mursi) will challenge your preconceptions of timekeeping, and your ideas of what a calendar even is. Indeed, the Muni seem to keep good time without needing a formal calendar.

Like Pacific Islanders and the Haida, the Muni measure time by the phases of the moon, which ultimately determines when to sow and when to reap.

The year is seasonal, based on which plants are flowering, which are growing, and what animals are doing.

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