time

It's that time of the year again: last night, the clocks were turned back one hour to return back to the normal time. Despite all the effort and promises we don't deem to be getting rid of the daylight saving time anytime soon.

Planetary week sounds astronomical, like something goes around something in certain amount of time. But in fact the planetary week has it's root in astronomy instead.

The names of the days in a week are based on the classical planetary model where the seven known planets or celestial orbs orbit the earth. The "planets" being the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus and Saturnus corresponding the days from Sunday till Saturday. And of course the order doesn't seem to make any sense!

The most common amount of days in a week is seven originating from the planetary week where the weeks are named after the seven known (at the time) planets. This also conveniently aligns with the biblical week. What however is not that universal is the first day of the week. Over the different cultures using the seven day week the first day ranges between Friday and Monday.

After the latest update and change from cowriters to writelier it seems I have been writing posts from the future. For some reason the posts show the next day as their publication date. I haven't checked whether this is only an issue with posts written later in the evening (which would kind of make sense) or all posts regardless the actual time of writing.

One of the hardest thing in software development happens already before any code is being written. Estimating how much development time some feature might take is, at it's best, a guesswork.

No matter how generous estimates are being made they are still almost always too optimistic. Even after the original developers estimate is doubled. Twice. On the other hand, on those rare occasions when the estimates are being beat they are being beated big time. In a longer project these are almost enough to compensate all the underestimates. 

When you are having fun the time flies while having nothing to do feels like being stuck in an anomaly in space-time where time doesn't move at all. While there might be some physical possibilities for time to move on a different pace that however requires either some extremely massive object being nearby or moving at relativistic speeds. And I doubt no amount of fun can make you move that fast.

We are entering the Month August tomorrow (which here in Finland is just about an hour away). I've previously written about the history and etymology of the month. But besides those interesting tibits it  also has some curious numerical properties.

The first day of August is never the same weekday as any other month's first day, except during a leap year when it falls into same day as February.

Where does the summer end? After my vacation has been over and the weather hasn't "seem" like summer for some time now it somehow feels that the summer is over already. I've already spent my three weeks of summer. I even got lucky and got some warm and sunny days included.

But the summer is nowhere over yet. Not even our famously short Finnish summer. We are roughly half way through, depending on how you count.

Somehow the post vacation time always feels like a new year even more than the actual new year in January. In the middle of the winter nothing really changes, but in the autumn there is usually a lot of new beginnings. It's the start of a new school year and it's usually also when all the new projects start at work. Nobody wants to leave anything unfinished before heading off to their summer vacations.

We here in Finland live at EEST timezone aka UTC+3 (during summer/standard time). That means for most of the world we live in the future. There are fifteen timezones behind us. Sure, there are also eleven timezones ahead of us as well (yes, there is actually 26 timezones all the way up to UTC+14). So we are actually living quite close to the middle after all.