The perpetual calendar
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From: Hatunen on 24 Feb 2010 13:38 On 24 Feb 2010 09:31:13 -0800, R H Draney <dadoctah(a)spamcop.net> wrote: >Evan Kirshenbaum filted: >> >>"Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim(a)verizon.net> writes: >> >>> But since we know it's a tall tale, we know that it is not "true" or >>> "reportage." What the story tells us is that the most recent teller >>> has a low opinion of American Indians, Irishmen, or (in my >>> hypothetical), African Americans. >> >>What's "reportage" is the "I've heard it commented". If Dave, living >>in Arizona, has heard it told about Indians, then that's the tale he's >>reporting having heard. And the choice of ethnicity is an interesting >>part of the tale, giving insight into the attitudes of those who tell >>it (as distinct from those who merely report having heard it). > >Knowing some of these peoples, I can imagine the Apache telling such a tale >about the Papago*, or the Navajo telling it about the Hopi....r > >* Yes, they're "Tohono O'odham" now, but in the world of the joke, the old >politically incorrect terms continue to flourish.... Just to be fair here, I heard it when I was living in Ohio... -- ************* DAVE HATUNEN (hatunen(a)cox.net) ************* * Tucson Arizona, out where the cacti grow * * My typos & mispellings are intentional copyright traps *
From: Evan Kirshenbaum on 24 Feb 2010 13:39 Mike Barnes <mikebarnes(a)bluebottle.com> writes: > Evan Kirshenbaum <kirshenbaum(a)hpl.hp.com>: >>Mike Barnes <mikebarnes(a)bluebottle.com> writes: >> >>> Transfer Principle <lwalke3(a)lausd.net>: >> >>>>Here's the original purpose of DST. In certain higher >>>>latitudes (including most of the UK), the length of the >>>>daylight at the summer solstice was around 16 hours. With >>>>the period of daylight centered at noon GMT, this would make >>>>the sun rise at around 4AM, before most people awake. And >>>>so we set the clock forward in the spring. The reason we set >>>>it back in autumn is because if we didn't, the sun wouldn't >>>>rise at the winter solstice until around 9AM, after most >>>>people need to be at work or school. >>>> >>>>In other words, the only way to avoid _both_ objectionable >>>>sunrise times (4AM and 9AM) is to have a biannual clock shift. >>> >>> Here those extreme sunrise times would be 3:40 and 9:20. I can see >>> the objection to 9:20, but what's the objection to 3:40? >> >>You don't have to get up with the chickens, do you? But I believe >>that the main objection was that people had to spend money on light in >>the evening when there were hours of daylight just going to waste >>before they got up. > > Messing with the clocks seems like overkill. ISTM it would be > simpler to leave the clocks as they were and for anyone trying to > minimise their lighting costs to go to bed an hour earlier. leaving fewer hours between getting off work (or school) and going to bed. Unless you compensat by moving the time that work and school ended. And, presumably, start. Which means you'll probably have to move the train and bus schedules, as the commute hours will have changed. And the prime radio and TV hours. Essentially, what you wind up with in places with clocks and schedules that run on them is a choice between spending more time in darkness (and sleeping during light) or essentialy saying "Everything that would have happened at five now happens at four" for part of the year. Which is essentially what's done, by the simpler expedient of redefining the hours and allowing everything to continue to take place at the same nominal time. > The same goes for anyone who has to get up with the chickens or > whose life is otherwise locked to solar time. Being locked to solar time isn't bad as long as you're not also locked to nominal time. -- Evan Kirshenbaum +------------------------------------ HP Laboratories |ActiveX is pretty harmless anyway. 1501 Page Mill Road, 1U, MS 1141 |It can't affect you unless you Palo Alto, CA 94304 |install Windows, and who would be |foolish enough to do that? kirshenbaum(a)hpl.hp.com | Peter Moylan (650)857-7572 http://www.kirshenbaum.net/
From: Skitt on 24 Feb 2010 13:57 Evan Kirshenbaum wrote: > tony cooper writes: >> As far as I can tell, the only employers that are closed on >> President's Day are government offices, schools, and banks. To the >> rest of the working stiffs, President's Day is just another >> work-day...a busier work-day for retail employees, in fact. > > It's a company holiday at HP (in the US). Our holiday calendar is > > New Year's Day (or the first weekday thereafter) > Martin Luther King Day > President's Day > Memorial Day > Independence Day (or the closest weekday) > Labor Day > Thanksgiving Day and the day after > Christmas > > and one "company-designated floater", typically used to make > Christmas, New Years, or the Fourth of July into a four-day weekend. > (This year it's 12/31.) Before we got MLK Day, we got a "Spring > Holiday" that always fell on Good Friday. You're being robbed. At Lockheed, when I was still working, we got an average of 13 paid holidays per year. Most of them were the days between Christmas and New Year's (inclusive, of course). The others were Memorial Day, Independence Day (and the adjacent day if there was only one day between ID and a weekend), Labor Day, and Thanksgiving Day and the Friday after it. The days off at Christmas time varied in number, as there was usually an extra day or two thrown in, depending on what day of the week the actual holidays fell. A long time ago, we didn't get the time off between Christmas and New Year's. Then the company realized that no one did any actual work during that period and decided to institute the holiday schedule I described above. Everyone liked that, and the company saved a lot of money, practically shutting down all the plants. <snip> -- Skitt (AmE)
From: Skitt on 24 Feb 2010 14:22 Peter T. Daniels wrote: > It's really annoying this year -- Vancouver is only three hours ahead > of us (i.e., they've already had their morning events by the time it's > morning here), so lots of what NBC is showing us on tape could easily > have been done live. (The first night of figure skating had the magic > notation "Live," but it disappeared since -- presumably so they can do > time compression and eliminate the waits between performance and > score, and between performances. They even broke in the other day to > show the last minute of the US-Canada hockey game, which was being > shown live on MSNBC for those with cable, instead of their prepared > piece on the day's [yawn] two-man bobsledding.) Aren't you in the New York area? If so, when you wake up and have your coffee, the people in Vancouver are probably still sound asleep. Morning comes three hours later in Vancouver than it does in New York. > Do the Pacific states get the same coverage we do? We Californians are in the same time zone as Vancouver, but a lot of the coverage we see in prime time is tape from an earlier event. I can see many results on the Web before I watch them on TV. -- Skitt (AmE)
From: Brian M. Scott on 24 Feb 2010 14:26
Mike Barnes wrote: > Brian M. Scott <b.scott(a)csuohio.edu>: >> On Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:57:11 -0800, Skitt >> <skitt99(a)comcast.net> wrote in >> <news:hm18ef$9gh$1(a)news.albasani.net> in >> sci.math,sci.physics,sci.astro,sci.lang,alt.usage.english: >> >>> Brian M. Scott wrote: >>>> Skitt wrote: >>>>> PaulJK wrote: >>>>>> We invented DST to set clocks back one hour in summer >>>>> forward >>>> That's the usual terminology, at least in the U.S., but it >>>> does depends on one's point of view. >>> Deciding whether a clock runs forward or backward, you mean? >> No. When you push the time from (say) 10 to 11, you can see >> this as pushing it away from you, just as you might push an >> opponent back. When you let it go from 11 to 10, you're >> then letting it approach you, i.e., come forward. > > That's true only before the event. Afterwards, going from 11 to 10 is > receding. > > But I have some sympathy with your confusion. No confusion; I was simply pointing out that more than one understanding is possible. Brian |