le Pétomane Ancien @lePetomaneAncien@qoto.org

@trinsec alrighty then. But what day is #caterdog day?

Not sure if this a a #caterday or a #Mondog

@rpilocator I checked around 9am EST and they weren't in stock. I just saw your notice and checked (1pm EST) and they weren't in stock. They fact that Adafruit had them even briefly is encouraging.

I've found Postman to be the most useful tool for exploring the API. cURL is still problematic -- I've followed carefully a couple tutorials with no success and I can't figure out why. A simple python script using the request library works well but isn't quite the explore and debug tool that Postman is.

Next up is hook up some sensor to an MCU, send data to a Raspberry Pi running Node-Red, then have N-R use the API to update my Mastodon status. Day job+holidays likely push that out to the new year.

@edrybicki @freemo @jonreed Thank you for not taking the low road and working "toot" into the limerick.

Yes, that's a crow at my backyard bird feeder. Not an everyday occurrence.

@wmvanstone Not bad, per se, just restricted to the MS Office suite and a bit cumbersome. But yes, if you're extending Excel native functionality, it's pretty much the only game in town.

I intended to make a joke but fell short of the mark. My apologies.

@wmvanstone Welcome. What did you do so wrong that karma made you code in VBA?

@freemo @sgul You probably could, as an exercise, extrapolate calendar systems forward and backward in time then attempt to align them. Any system that used a 7-day weekly cycle would allow aligning by weeks to "line up the Sundays." The hard part is that each system used a different approach to intercalary days to correct slippage.

@freemo @sgul Ah! Let me attempt to answer your actual question a bit more directly.

The Jewish people adopted the Babylonian calendar systems during the Babylonian Exile so for Western purposes we can mark the observance of the Sabbath and a 7-day cycle beginning sometime around 600 BCE. Of course every lunisolar calendar requires intercalary "leap" days to reconcile the lunar and solar cycles so "counting by Sundays" isn't easy over very long timeframes.

The last major revision to the Western calendar was, as others have noted, the switch from Julian to Gregorian, a process that took a couple centuries.

@sgul @freemo Wikipedia says 7-day "weeks" go back to Babylonia, including one day a week for making offering to the gods and avoiding prohibited activities.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar

Of course, other systems since have used different approaches including the French Revolution attempting to create a decimal calendar of 10-weeks.

Most calendar systems are lunisolar with the sun's position determining year length and the moon's phase determining month length. Reckoning weeks was more or less optional and of little interest.

And since prehistory is, by definition, before anything was recorded we can only speculate from limited findings how, or even if, time was recorded. It seems likely that some tribal leader made scratches on something to tally lunar months and maybe solar years.