The perpetual calendar
in [Math]
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From: Robert Bannister on 8 Mar 2010 19:17 Jared wrote: > On Mar 5, 10:56 am, Jonathan de Boyne Pollard <J.deBoynePollard- > newsgro...(a)NTLWorld.COM> wrote: >>>> (Why isn't there a word 'decension'?) >>> Because there's no need for a word to contrast with "descent" with a >>> special meaning. >> There is, of course, a word "descension", and has been for some >> centuries, making the above rationale for its non-existence somewhat >> amusing. Oy! Denizens of sci.astro! Wakey wakey! This is (in part) >> your technical terminology. > > I misread this as 'declension'. So did I, but I quickly realised it didn't fit the declension patterns in my grammar book. -- Rob Bannister
From: Jonathan de Boyne Pollard on 11 Mar 2010 08:47 > >> >> It is OK to use CE to stand for Christian Era, as long as the readers >> will know that. >> > Which is unlikely, since those who know it at all will likely know > that it stands for 'Common Era'. > Here's one for the mathematicians and astronomers: Mark Elvin (professor of Chinese history at ANU) translates "gongyuan" (公元) as "common origin" rather than "common era". This rather implies the idea of an origin, i.e. a year zero, in the BCE/CE coördinate system.
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!
From: Transfer Principle on 14 Mar 2010 03:24
On Feb 24, 1:43 am, "PaulJK" <paul.kr...(a)paradise.net.nz> wrote: > Brian M. Scott wrote: > > I'm not sure that 25 hours would be quite long enough. > I agree, it wouldn't. I just didn't want to sound like some kind > of an extremist. 28 was mentioned by some other posters. > That would do me rather well. Yes, 28, that would be perfect. The reason that some posters mentioned the 28-hour day is that it can be implemented simply by taking one of the 24-hour days of the week and divide it into sixths, giving four hours each to the other six days of the week. The first website to give this proposal is actually the following link: http://www.dbeat.com/28/?dupe but the xkcd webcomic made the idea more well-known. Notice that the dbeat plan has the waking hours matching the daylight on the weekend, while the xkcd plan has the waking hours matching the daylight during the week. Obviously, DST would be awkward and thus eliminated. Not only that, but one might even abolish _time zones_ as well, since the waking hours would no longer be tied to daylight. There might be one clock for the entire world. If one side of the world (say Greenwich) set up the clock according to the dbeat plan (i.e., the weekends are set up so to maximize the amount of daylight that Londoners receive on the weekend), then this would result in New Zealand having the xkcd plan (darkness during waking hours on the weekend), and vice versa. It's necessary for a calendar reform to accompany the 28-hour plan, since there would be six days in a week instead of seven. Someone mentioned a 13-month calendar earlier in this thread -- each month in that calendar would still have four weeks, and so it would have only 24 days per month rather than 28. A 12-month plan is also possible, with each month having 26 days. This would truly be a perpetual calendar, with the same number of days in every month. As 13 months with 24 days each or 12 months with 26 days each still adds up to only 364 nychthemera, we still need a blank day. In order to maintain the relationship between daylight and day of the week (whether via the dbeat or xkcd pattern), it would be better to have a leap week instead. Any leap week pattern mentioned back in the Usher posts (a 62/124-year cycle, etc.) would work. |