Tag: math

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A Coincidence of Sentience

The cycle of the moon aligning with the menstrual cycle acted as a first concept of measurement

Shreya Prasad, via Athabasca

Inspired by conversations with Olya and Shreya around Shreya’s Goddesses in Mythology course. (Unrelated, I also took a course from Athabasca once…)

Our Period is a Clock

Olya Jaworsky

An HourGlass Shape, the Glass of HOur Shape

U A, M.

Were women the first timekeepers because they had periods that almost lined up the period of a moon cycle? And was timekeeping necessary for humans to jump into our level of intelligence?

A lunar cycle, 29 point 5 days
A point, a period, 28 or so days
Seven divides it to give a week
East and West, North and South
7 days in a week remain

Both 29.5 and 28
So close to each other
And close to 30, dividing 360
And neatly gives 12, a highly composite number
Such numbers divide better than anything below them
And we humans love division

A revolutionary cycle, 365 point 25 days
So close, so close to that highly composite 360
And so close to being just 365
But off by just a bit
That tiny imperfection requiring leaps of years to fix
We humans yearn for perfection

But still, but still
Despite imperfections, we went with 12
Again and again and again
Solar or Lunar, Gregorian or Indian
12 months in a year and 12 hours in a day’s
So highly composite, we can divide
Into halves and thirds and quarters

12 months in a year
But only 10 fingers on our hands
Giving birth to a base 10 system
Thus cursed were we with more imperfection
And yet, and yet
These tiny closeness-es, may have forced us
To develop our greater mathematical intelligence

We loved our highly composite numbers so much
We put 60 seconds into a minute
60 minutes into an hour
And 12, and 12 again, hours into a day
For a total of a highly composite 24
And yet, our biological clocks
Are so close, so imperfect again
For instead we found it slightly longer
24 hours and 11 minutes, give or take

While I theorized before
That our intelligence arose from interactions
With plants and fungi around us
Perhaps one more jump was needed
A biological coincidence, an astronomical coincidence,
And a mathematical coincidence, to tie them together
And these coincidences of timekeeping
Of composite numbers
Of tiny imperfection
And of closeness
May-be what’s needed
For a human level of sentience