Posts by Paul Campbell
Last ←Newer Page 1 2 3 4 5 Older→ First
-
Several Species of Small Furry Animals Gathered Together In A Cave And Grooving With A Pict - is great for bored little kids in the car - as is flying the helicopters from We don't need no education as loud as possible down low over the back seat ....
-
well in the winter I start work at 5am, I guess I'm never that awake - I just assumed I was more listening to my grandmother's national radio ....
-
no - it was funny once but playing bad music all summer is so the year before last - I find myself hoping for the return of Jim Mora, which is a scary thought all by itself
-
Despite her bell our kitty has started finding tiny birds in the bit of native bush we have at the bottom of the garden, I despair that one day she'll drag in a kereru bigger than herself so yesterday she got another noisier bell - anymore of that and we're buying on of those things morris dancers wear
-
leap second? I got a whole leap DAY - on which I was required to work for free! (Like many people I'm paid the same monthly salary whether there's a leap day or not)
I think that leap day (or the closest Monday) should be a public holiday
-
by making the second the base unit we can keep our years (and days) synchronised to the sun by dropping in the occasional leap second (and leap day of course) - in the distant futire as I've pointed out we wont care about the sun (or we'll have different suns and planets with their own numbers to worry about)
-
well seconds USED to be 1/86400 of a day and then 1/31557600 of a year - but days and years aren't that regular (which is why we just got a new leap second this NYE). Now that a second is the base units for our (MKS) measuring system, we can't keep changing it just because the world's rotation is running down
-
second
-
it's like when we changed to decimal currency and didn't have to do math in 1/240ths or distance in power of 2 fractions of 63360 - we changed, we got used to it - what went away was that whole part of primary school where we had to deal with word problems like "I sold 4lb 7oz of gold for exactly 3 guineas and a half crown, how much could I buy for 5 pound 16 shillings thruppence farthing?" (hint it's a trick question, double hint because of the gold) - that was hard and obviously there's a whole portion of society who don't get timezones, much less DST ....
(you may think I'm joking - I genuinely got just those sorts of word problems in NZ primary school pre-decimalisation, I was also expected to know such arcane trivia as feet-in-a-furlong etc)
this is just the first step: generations from now when we all live in space and finish off what we started by switching to decimal time - we'll just deal with kS (about 20 minutes) MS (~12 days) LS (the Indian lakh will give us our day) ....
-
I think having us all switch to UTC would be a grand idea - as to which country gets to keep theirs - probably no one - even the UK which is nominally on UTC/GMT is on permanent summer time so they'd have to change too - all we'd have to do would be to change our work hours (and figure out when the weekend was since we'd probably lose/gain a day when we switched)