Web Excursions 2021-11-17
How the Week Organizes and Tyrannizes Our Lives
Some Letts diaries are now sold less for the planning of weeks than for the pursuit of wellness.
A week is mostly made up. There have been five-day weeks and eight-day weeks and ten-day weeks.
each of the four phases of the moon (full, waxing, half, and waning) lasts about seven days, though not exactly seven days.
On the other hand, the number seven comes up in Genesis: God rested on the seventh day.
Another reason for seven lies in the heavens.
Many civilizations seem to have counted and named days of the week
for the sun and the moon and the five planets that they knew about,
a practice that eventually migrated to Rome.
weekliness became relentless only about two hundred years ago,
and that this development was most driven and widespread in the United States.
In time, elections tended to be held on Mondays and Tuesdays,
public feasts and weddings on Thursdays, and public executions on Fridays.
Then came factory life and wages and paydays: Saturdays.
Saturday night was a night out.
Put that together with Sunday as a day of rest and you’ve got a weekend.
writers of treatises on housekeeping were advising women to plan all their household chores around a particular day of the week.
Mend on Mondays,
iron every Wednesday,
sweep the floors on Friday,
inspect the pantry every Saturday.
The development that really established the seven-day week as insurmountable came in the middle of the twentieth century: the television schedule.
because they reached so many more people and faced so little competition
If asked, as a ten-year-old, I’d have guessed that the seven-day week came from the menstrual cycle,
which my mother always called “your monthlies”
but which, inspecting boxes of contraceptives in medicine cabinets at houses where I babysat, I understood to be a weekly affair
In archives, menstruation is the notation that I find most often while paging through dead women’s calendars and week-at-a-glance appointment books: ticks or hash marks and, very often, the letter “P,” in red ink, or pink, every four weeks
No one has ever really been able to topple the seven-day week. French revolutionaries tried to institute a ten-day week. Bolsheviks aimed for a five-day week. No one tried harder than Miss Elisabeth Achelis
In the eighteen-nineties, Moses B. Cotsworth,
an Englishman who worked as a statistician for a British railway company,
began pondering the possibility of a more efficient calendar,
one that would make it easier to compare revenues from month to month and week to week.
He devised the International Fixed Calendar,
which consisted of thirteen months of twenty-eight days each,
with one extra day following the last day of December and one more, at the end of June, in leap years.
The new month, between June and July, would be called Sol.
Achelis endorsed a calendar of twelve months made up of four equal quarters of thirteen weeks, or ninety-one days.
“Each year begins on Sunday, January 1,” she explained;
every quarter begins on a Sunday, and ends on a Saturday.
“Every year is comparable to every other year; and what is of utmost importance, days and dates always agree.”
All I Want From My Smartwatch Is to Give Me a Break
any athlete or doctor will also tell you that rest and recovery are incredibly important to your overall health, preventing injuries, and avoiding motivational burnout.
Unfortunately, most wearables fail at giving you a break, even when it’s justified.
It’s simply not built into their programming.
While it can feel amazing when you’re in the zone, it can ironically be demotivating when you break a streak for reasons outside your control.
And the longer the streak, the more demotivating it becomes when you inevitably break it.
Peruse any smartwatch or fitness forum and you’ll find people fretting about streaks or obsessing over losing “credit” for an arbitrary goal.
This isn’t to say wearables companies and fitness apps aren’t moving in the right direction.
With the Fitbit Charge 4, the company moved away from its arbitrary 10,000-step goal toward a new metric called Active Zone Minutes (AZM).
What made this shift notable is AZM focuses on your weekly activity level, as opposed to daily streaks.
This year, the company also added something it calls a Daily Readiness Score,
which helps users decide how active they should be based on their body’s signals and prior activity.
In watchOS 6, Apple added a Trends tab that contextualized your progress over the past 90 days compared to your yearly average.
This year’s watchOS 8 update also added a host of mindfulness tools, but they’re more focused on meditation than recovery.
Oura Ring defines a “good” activity score as hitting a calorie goal three to four times a week, and last year, it added a new Rest Mode.
In Rest Mode, the ring snoozes your activity goals and readjusts your scores to prioritize recovery.
These are all steps in the right direction, but most mainstream wearables still don’t have a way to stay motivated
without penalizing you for needing a physical or mental break every now and then.
Daring Fireball Craig Federighi’s Sideloading Keynote at Web Summit
Earlier this month, Craig Federighi delivered a keynote address at Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal.
It’s just 20 minutes long, including the introduction, and worth watching. His sole topic is sideloading
Apple released a white paper making the case against sideloading back in June
I found Federighi’s talk to be more compelling than Apple’s June white paper, despite the fact that in general Federighi is a charismatic speaker.
With Phil Schiller seemingly retired from speaking on stage, Federighi is now by far the company’s most compelling advocate for a talk like this.
Apple is clearly taking the threat of legally-mandated sideloading seriously.
Apple SVPs don’t deliver keynotes in Portugal on a lark.
Rhetorically, Federighi does a clever job of appealing to E.U. regulators as an ally rather than an adversary, right in his opening lines:
> My topic is privacy and security, and it’s great to speak about this here in Europe, where so many have embraced these values not just as high ideals — but as fundamental human rights. I have to say, there are times in the U.S. when fighting for privacy has felt a little lonely. But knowing that our values are shared with so many in Europe, and that European policymakers have been willing to take action, well that has felt like a bit of a lifeline.there’s a key topic that Federighi does not broach: money.
I remain convinced Apple wouldn’t be facing these regulatory pressures today
if they’d walked away from a strategy of maximizing App Store profits years ago
If Apple stopped making it look like they’re running the App Store primarily to maximize their own revenue from it,
regulators and lawmakers might stop thinking that Apple is running the App Store primarily to maximize their own revenue from it.