Posts by Chris Waugh
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Farmer Green,
Yep; this 365 1/4 days to get around the sun is the problem.
Surely we've screwed around enough with our planet without adjusting its orbit to make our calendars more rational as well?!
And chuck out daylight saving while we’re at it.
No argument from me there. One of the added bonuses of living in China is not having to deal with that nonsense. And getting up in time to get my wee one to kindy by 7:30 so I can be in class at 8am is so much easier when dawn comes around 4:30am.
As for calendars and weeks and months and days and stuff, the French revolutionaries tried rationalising all that. Got them real far.
There are many calendars out there, from the purely lunar like the Islamic one - this year Muslims in the southern hemisphere had it sweet with Ramadan being in mid-winter. I imagine not eating or drinking from dawn to dusk is a hell of a lot easier when there aren't quite so many hours between the two - to the more or less solar but with obviously lunar influences (like months - at least the Chinese are honest and use the same character (月/yuè) for both, though I should admit that it's easy to specify whether it's moon or month you mean (月亮/yuèliang/moon, 月份/yuèfèn/month). I'm not expert, not by a long shot, but it seems to me that the Chinese calendar traditionally lacked weeks, weekends, sabbaths, and all that. There are festivals, of course, some religious, some agricultural, some some kind of obscure mixture of things lost in time, but that have left some interesting stories. Today is Mid-Autumn or Moon Festival, the day in the year that the moon is supposed to at its roundest and may, perhaps, be as close to earth as it gets in its orbit. Those curious about the story may wish to google Chang'e. I guess there's a harvest element to the festival, but it's hard to know in urban China and my in-laws never bothered to say much about it. The Chinese calendar also features 24 Solar Terms which mark seasonal changes, including the start of each season, but also smaller changes within the seasons.
Ben, somehow I think an awful lot of sailors, fisher people, surfers, divers, and other coastal workers/dwellers/players would disagree quite strongly with your insistence of the irrelevance of the moon and tides. And didn't somebody already point out that 7 is a quarter of 28, and therefore a convenient breaking-up of the cycle of the moon.
Farmer Green, I'm intrigued by your earlier statement that farmers and foresters still work by, or at least take into account, the phases of the moon, but I haven't had time to look into it more.
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Hard News: Moving on, in reply to Keir Leslie,
NZ Broadcasting
NZBC?
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Farmer Green,
that Asian cultures are using the Sun calendar to determine the seasons
Farmer Green, I really can't answer any of your questions, having pretty much zero expertise in the area of calendars. All I can say is that last I heard the Chinese calendar is lunisolar, that is, a basically lunar calendar adjusted (unlike, from what I've heard, the Islamic calendar) to keep time with the solar year. What you say of the Celtic definition of Spring certainly seems to jibe with the Chinese definition. What we get on the Chinese calendar is leap months to rejig the calendar to keep pace with the sun rather than the moon. Why we don't get a leap Dragon Boat Festival when we get a leap 5th month I don't know, but that's ok, I don't much like zongzi and I can't imagine leaping dragon boats being all that great an idea.
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And the louder you shout, the truer it gets.
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Hard News: Friday Music: History, motherfuckers, in reply to Heather Gaye,
My current rule of thumb when reading his work is (literally, this is true) to assume that he is 100% wrong.
[...]..& yeah, he wrote about Dresden Dolls,
Heh, wow, so I had a little search for Dresden Dolls and it seems the "100% wrong" rule works quite well.
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Hard News: Moving on, in reply to Simon Grigg,
Same, and it was a great way to understand the nuances of what was going on at home when offshore.
Yup, me too. At least we've still got PAS to keep us informed.
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Paul Williams,
Steinlarger.
The All Blacks have bigger stones? Bigger than who?
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
The health costs to the recreational rugby player is pretty ….huge!
As I'm sure are the health benefits of people playing sport.
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Sofie Bribiesca,
Eager for the weekend?
Surely it should be tomorrow's Mid-Autumn/Moon Festival they're looking forward to? Now, if I could score me some of those dark chocolate-and-ice-cream mooncakes like we had last year....
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