Posted on by David Thompson

What is The Weekend Assignment? The purpose of this blog series is to create a casual and fun learning environment where we all can explore a topic/theme each weekend and through the week.

Each blog will set a new topic/theme and then share what we all learned from the previous assignment.

The assignment for this weekend is focused on the theme of space. You can approach the theme from any angle. For example, you could explore how all the stars in the sky are a glimpse into the past. Or you could explore how stars were used to help sailors navigate the seas. The avenues for exploration are endless.

Now let’s explore the previous assignment on calendars.

Cal·en·dar
/ˈkaləndər/
Noun
a chart or series of pages showing the days, weeks, and months of a particular year, or giving particular seasonal information.

The word calendar comes from the latin word calends, which was the name for the first day of every month in the Roman Calendar. The word signified the beginning of a new lunar cycle and was set as a day where all debts must be paid. The debts were kept in kalendaria, essentially the Roman version of an accounting book.

The earliest forms of timekeeping involved tracking of the movements of the sun and the moon, but it wasn’t until the bronze age that we got the first recorded evidence of calendars. This came at the same time as the development of writing.

There were many areas of ancient society that used calendars, but it was most useful in helping farmers keep track of time so they could plan their planting and harvesting seasons.

Calendars have since moved from physical objects into the digital world of computing, but calendars and computers once caused a big issue.

During the turn of the century there was a fear that the formatting and storage of calendar data on computers would be corrupted, the issue was called the Y2K Problem or the Millennium Bug. A lot of date formats in computers noted the year only using the last two digits and it was feared that computers would record the year 2000 (00) as 1900 (00).

I hope you have a great weekend with fun events on your calendar, but don’t forget to have fun exploring the theme of space in between.

Share what you learn with us on Twitter by tagging us and using #SaylorAssignment or start the conversation on Discourse.