The perpetual calendar
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From: R H Draney on 5 Mar 2010 18:00 Adam Funk filted: > >On 2010-03-04, R H Draney wrote: > >> Adam Funk filted: > >>>Google groupers' FUs usually have a bunch of 0xA0 characters. >> >> And a "Show quoted text"/"Hide quoted text" skidmark....r > >Nice terminology! Did you come up with that, or have I missed a memo? It just popped into my -- er -- head while I was typing....r -- "Oy! A cat made of lead cannot fly." - Mark Brader declaims a basic scientific principle
From: Adam Funk on 7 Mar 2010 16:29 On 2010-02-20, Andrew Usher wrote: > On Feb 19, 6:07 pm, Robert Bannister <robb...(a)bigpond.com> wrote: >> If you are going to try to make it sensible, then please give us 13 >> four-week months with one or two specially named days at the end of the >> year to even it out. The first day of each month should be a Monday. > > Once again, I said that I excluded having days outside the week. And > the first day of the week is Sunday, not Monday - that is an > incontrovertible fact. > > Having 13 months, in addition, would screw up a bunch of things ; in > particular, 13 can't be divided. Many financial systems have a 13th month (well, usually called "period 13") every year for year-end closing transactions. Sometimes it even has a day in the calendar, and using it can be interesting... It has been noted that we have received a couple of journal entries with a December 31 effective date. This is a reminder that using that date will post the journal entry to Period 13. Period 13 is reserved for business unit collapsing entries and Corporate year end entries. http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Nobody-Does-Business-on-December-31st!.aspx -- I worry that 10 or 15 years from now, [my daughter] will come to me and say 'Daddy, where were you when they took freedom of the press away from the Internet?' [Mike Godwin, EFF http://www.eff.org/ ]
From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on 5 Mar 2010 13:43 > > > Perhaps the mathematicians and physicists should leave the linguistics > to the linguists. > It'll never get finished at that rate.
From: Transfer Principle on 14 Mar 2010 01:36 On Feb 24, 5:23 am, jmfbahciv <jmfbahciv(a)aol> wrote: > Transfer Principle wrote: > > As for myself, I'm of two minds on this issue. On one hand, > > what's wrong with having a biannual clock shift so that the > > hours of daylight actually match the hours I'm awake? On the > What is wrong is forcing the entire populace to go through > a jetlag twice a year. Their driving is more dangerous > and productivity falls until each person has adjusted his/her > internal time clock. Congress has been passing laws > about truckers getting enough sleep. OTOH, they pass clock > resetting laws which causes everybody to not get enough sleep. > What's wrong is that it's dangerous and unhealthy. Tonight is the night that clocks are to be set forward here in the United States, and so I respond to this post here. Here's a link to an article with echoes jmfbah's anti-DST opinion: http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/healthday/636934.html "In general, in terms of normal sleep patterns, daylight in the morning is better than light later in the day. Remember, our circadian rhythms were set eons ago to a rhythm that didn't include daylight savings time, so the shift tends to throw people off a bit," said Dr. Nicholas Rummo, director of the Center for Sleep Medicine at Northern Westchester Hospital in Mt. Kisco, N.Y. "Daylight savings time is anti-physiologic, and it's a little deleterious, at least for several days," he said, adding that research has shown that the rate of auto accidents goes up slightly in the days following the change to daylight savings time." In one of her earlier posts, jmfbah mentions how even moving westward in the same time zone, with no clock shift, still affected her. And we see how this is mentioned in the article: "Rummo said that people on the Western edges of a time zone, and those living in Northern areas, may be affected a little bit more because they already experience more darkness in the morning." Obviously, for such people, of the three choices given in my post (Year Round Standard Time, biannual clock shift, and Year Round DST), Year Round Standard is the best choice. Indeed, such people may even need reverse DST, where the clock is set back an hour from Standard Time (and kept there the entire year). In the summer, at the latitude of London (which is near where William Willett considered DST), the sun would rise at 3AM at the summer solstice under this plan, but this is harmless since morning sunlight is desired. At the winter solstice, under Year Round Reverse DST, the sun would rise at 7AM (around wake-up time) and set at 3PM. Children would have to go home from school in the dark (but under Year Round Standard Time, they go to school in the dark), but once again, what's desired is for the sun to be up when it's time to wake up. Dr. Rummo writes that circadian rhythms were set "eons" ago. Back before artificial lighting, people probably woke up and went to sleep such that noon (i.e., the sun at its zenith) was nearly halfway between wake up time and bedtime. Nowadays, most people are awake for far more hours after noon than before -- waking up around 7AM to go to work and staying up until 9PM, 10PM, 11PM, even midnight (and later, obviously, on the weekend). That's why Willett proposed DST in the first place, so that sun hours would match waking hours more closely. Since noon is closer to the midpoint of children's waking hours than adult waking hours, children and their families are the other major group who prefer Year Round Standard Time. Well, jmfbah, I hope that you were able to get enough sleep tonight on the shortest night of the year (according to the clock), and certainly one of your least favorite nights of the year.
From: Transfer Principle on 14 Mar 2010 01:59
On Feb 24, 5:11 am, Cheryl <cperk...(a)mun.ca> wrote: > jmfbahciv wrote: > > What is wrong is forcing the entire populace to go through > > a jetlag twice a year. Their driving is more dangerous > > and productivity falls until each person has adjusted his/her > > internal time clock. Congress has been passing laws > > about truckers getting enough sleep. OTOH, they pass clock > > resetting laws which causes everybody to not get enough sleep. > > What's wrong is that it's dangerous and unhealthy. > What's stopping people from going to bed an hour earlier that night? > Anyway, that only works for one direction. The other time, everyone gets > an extra hour of sleep, and therefore should be more rested and less > likely to have accidents. I think the problem jmfbah has when we fall back is that she feels tired an hour before bedtime. That's why for her, Year Round Standard Time is the best. Cheryl points out how to her, the fall back clock shift isn't as bad as the spring forward clock shift. This reminds me of a classic joke about how to make springing forward feel more like falling back: http://www.netfunny.com/rhf/jokes/90q2/dst.html Although the idea of setting the clocks back 23 hours in the spring is mainly a joke, it's possible to make this into a legitimate calendar reform (going back to the original purpose of this thread, of course). Instead of having a 365-day calendar which falls behind by a day every year, one could have a 364-day calendar instead. Notice that many existing calendar reforms are already based on 364 days (due to its divisibility by the seven-day week), including the thirteen month, 28- day calendar that someone already mentioned in this thread. The net result would be that, since no one is really going to sleep for 23 extra hours on the day we set the clocks back by that amount, we'd really have a three-day weekend with a double Saturday that week, thus giving an extra day to adjust to the time change, and we'd have the bonus of holidays falling the same day of the week every year (i.e., a perpetual calendar). The writer of the link obviously isn't opposed to disrupting the seven-day cycle with a double Saturday, since he refers to occasionally dropping Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday in the link. The problem with this proposal is that the link is U.S.-centric (since it refers to Washington, Congress, etc.). Every country would have to change its clocks the same day, or otherwise we'd have countries that are suddenly 23+ hours off. (Places that don't change their clocks at all would still require an extra 24-hour Saturday every year.) The real problem would be in the Southern Hemisphere, where summer and winter differ from the north. They'd be setting their clocks 25 hours back in their autumn, and still setting it an hour forward in the spring! I'd argue that the majority of the world's population live in the north, but we can still compromise by putting the leap year day on the day that those Down Under set their clocks in the spring, so that about once every four years they can also enjoy the benefits of a second Saturday to adjust to the clock shift. It is now 1:59AM the morning of Sunday, March 14th (Eastern Standard Time), so in one minute it will be 3AM. Some people might wish that we could set the clock back 23 hours right now to 3AM, Saturday, March 13th! |