Miscellaneous desk
< October 31	<< Oct \| November \| Dec >>	November 2 >

Welcome to the Wikipedia Miscellaneous Reference Desk Archives
The page you are currently viewing is an archive page. While you can leave answers for any questions shown below, please ask new questions on one of the current reference desk pages.

November 1[edit]

The Azad Hind Postage Stamps of India[edit]

During world war 2,postage stamps were printed in Germany for use in India. These were called the Azad Hind Stamps. They were never officially used. They were supplied in Perforated and Unperforated types. My question is: Did the paper used have a watermark and, if so, what was it? I would appreciate some help.86.7.164.108 (talk) 08:38, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I think they were unwatermarked, but I may not have checked in my stamp-collecting days. Any unsimplified stamp catalogue (printed or on-line) should tell you. —— Shakescene (talk) 13:44, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

7 Day Week[edit]

I'm unclear from the articles week and 7 day week: has the 7-day-week calendar, as used by Jews and then Christians and Muslims, been a weekly calendar running continuously and uninterrupted for over two thousand years while the monthly and yearly calendars have been tweaked? So, for example, when a country skipped a few days to adjust the year calendar, did the days of the week get messed up too, or did they just keep going independently? If I went back in time a multiple of 7 days, would I find (as long as the 7-day-week was used) agreement on which day of the week it was (assuming accurate translation)? If I went back 3500 days (a bit less than a thousand years) or 7000 days and found a Jew, would they agree that the Sabbath was two days ago? 86.164.145.242 (talk) 10:30, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know the full answer (and I doubt if anybody does), but according to Gregorian calendar#Adoption in Europe each time a country changed to Gregorian and dropped dates, they did not interrupt the week cycle. --ColinFine (talk) 11:13, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, upsetting the cycle of seven days would upset too many people. I think it would be difficult to find positive evidence that the cycle has continued uninterrupted for thousands of years, but it may well be true. Of course, the cycle wasn't very widespread until the Roman empire spread it. Dbfirs 13:06, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

It looks as if the cycle was upset in Alaska where Friday was followed by another Friday. Enter CBW, waits for audience applause, not a sausage. 13:38, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Just to clarify: 3500 days is 10 years, not a thousand years. --Lgriot (talk) 14:12, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I clearly had a massive maths!fail there. I don't know what I was thinking... 86.166.42.171 (talk) 16:32, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The 7-day cycle is a practical cycle - it has meaning in the lives of everyone from the lowest laborer to the highest aristocrat from the time they are old enough to recognize basic patterns. Once the pattern is established it gets woven into the fabric of daily life and becomes almost impossible to alter. Systems related to larger cycles, by contrast, are are almost invariably for ceremonial purposes, and are much easier to adjust as ceremonial needs change. --Ludwigs2 15:42, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for thoughts so far. I felt the same way Ludwig did, but the article seemed vague on this point. I agree with Dbfirs that it would be hard to find evidence to support it, but on the other hand a disruption to the cycle would probably be noticable enough that someone would have recorded it. Alaska was because of the international date line shift, yes? Thanks. 86.166.42.171 (talk) 16:32, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, and thanks Colin for finding what is probably the best/most relevant article on Wikipedia on this topic :P 86.166.42.171 (talk) 16:34, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The French had a ten-day week for a while: French_Republican_Calendar#Ten_days_of_the_week. The Soviet calendar had five or six day weeks. 92.24.185.90 (talk) 20:45, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Something of an aside: all the common calendar systems have the demerit that, because years aren't an integral multiple of 7 days long, months, and years, don't consistently begin on the same day of the week. The necessity of an occasional intercalary day (a leap day, to account for a year not being a whole number of days) just makes matters worse. So there are 14 possible configurations for the dates (wrt day of the week) for Gregorian years, and thus you can't reuse a calendar the following year, and you get endless little niggles where anniversaries and feast-days don't fall consistently on the same day of the week. The Old Icelandic Calendar resolves things differently - they guarantee that each month starts consistently on the same day of the week. But this gives a year that's 364 days long, so the year drifts off the astronomical year pretty quickly; to fix that they intercalate a whole week every seven years. If I understand this ref correctly, that intercalated week ("sumarauki") is a special mini-month all to its own. But to my mind the best, most glaringly wonderful, solution is JRR Tolkien's Shire Calendar. He has 12 months of 30 days, with 5 special feast days - these are neither members of any month nor are they week days: they're special unique days with their own names. When they need a leap-day, he intercalates that into the summer festival days; so that's another day of summer holiday every four years. -- Finlay McWalter ☻ Talk 22:15, 1 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

Arguably that property is an advantage, not a demerit. It means you don't get anniversaries and feast-days endlessly falling on the same day of the week. How would you like it if your birthday was always on a Tuesday when other people always got to have theirs on Saturday? --Anonymous, and hoping this won't lead to a debate, 08:59 UTC, Tuesday, November 2, 2010.

Getting a bit OT, but other cultures had different calendar systems; the Aztecs for example used the Xiuhpohualli with 18 x 20-day 'months' per year, with a separate 5-day period at the end of the year called Nemontemi which was considered unlucky. There were many other complexities, like using 20 named day cycles in 13 day periods. Feast days etc were worked into this, not sure how concepts like 'weekends' worked or if they existed at all. Regardless, I'm sure no one asked them about issues when they were converted to our calendar system. --jjron (talk) 03:04, 2 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]

The seven-day week cycle is known to have been uninterrupted for around 2000 years: the oldest inscription to include both a weekday and a date convertible to the modern calendar is from around then. --Carnildo (talk) 21:44, 3 November 2010 (UTC)[reply]