Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Lilith __,
If you come up with a new way, then perhaps we can discuss it.
I came up with several suggestions already. Let's keep this discussion in good faith, please.
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Farmer Green,
No . The 7 day week thing is irrelevant and mostly ignored by farmers, as is the concept of weekend
Sure, but farmers are not everyone, not even close.
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Lilith __,
I don’t think the 12-month year and 7-day week are hurting anyone, are they?
The 12 month year much less than the 7 day week. The month is not much of a milestone at all, mostly just marking a pay cycle in it's annoying irregular way. But 12 is a convenient number, being divisible by the first 4 natural numbers, and 6. The 7 day week, though, who knows? If you can't even consider what life might be like with a different system, then sure, don't have a discussion about it. Let tradition dictate not only the way you work, but also the way you think. Personally, I like to consider how things could be different sometimes. It entertains me, and sometimes other people.
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Rich of Observationz,
LOL, Nah, we should make them metric. 10 hours per day, 10 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.
ETA: Also, rename them to second, centond, millond. If we had 10 days per week, and 10 weeks per month, we'd be reaching the limits of what we could do with it.
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Lilith __,
You may not wish to bother, but our ancestors did. :-)
I'm discussing rationalizing the calendar. Explaining it was already done. "Because History", which is incidentally also an explanation for sexism. There's really only 2 things we couldn't feasibly discard - the solar year and the solar day. The fudgy not-even approximation to moon cycles becomes meaningless extremely fast, so that anyone wanting to know where the moon will be in advance simply has to look it up in a table or do a lengthy calculation anyway. But we've got a system that gives a very accurate approximation to when the seasons will be in the solar year, and that is of importance to nearly everyone, second only to the day/night importance. It means we can plan things years in advance, with a very good chance knowing what the weather will be like, without needing to be astronomers, and a great many fixed festivals will have predictable weather.
Not that I think we should change the calendar. What the divisions within the year are is completely arbitrary, so the historical division has an advantage simply because it involves no change. The length of a week is an extremely strange artifact with huge importance to daily life of humans. Somehow the way we work and rest got dictated by the moon? How often is the moon really relevant in your life? Is there anything else you plan according to the moon for any non-superstitious reason?
I say this because there are plenty of other examples of such artifacts in our measurements, but we have often rationalized them and gained quite a lot of advantage by doing it. It's worth considering, anyway, why we need to have the entire way that we work and rest dictated by moss growing on trees or by tides, or hiding from werewolves, or whatever it was all for once upon a time.
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Regarding calendars, it’s impossible to fit lunar cycles exactly within the solar cycle, and any calendar which respects both is a mathematical compromise.
Well, a compromise in so far as one of those will get lip service only. So why bother with the moon? It's only real importance to earthly affairs is its effect on tides which is limited to affecting coastal people, and it's entirely regular in that effect, you get two highs and two lows every day spaced nearly the same time apart, and changing when they are within the day. The importance of trying to make any kind of milestones around that is far less than the fact of what the climate is like, which affects everyone with a regularity that applies around the planet.
But which day is the "first" day, is not really that important at all, except symbolically. So it's not something that is really worth the huge cost of changing.
The most important completely arbitrary time division I see is the week. Why 7? It's actually really, really important when and where we put our work/rest cycles. Why do we have this particular one? For historical reasons. But the inertia to change in that idea is cultural, and massive.
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Hard News: Event Season, in reply to Lilith __,
Not everyone is a farmer, but the seasons are still important to pretty much everyone.
Our familiar 4 seasons are particular to temperate latitudes.
That is true, but regardless of what kind of seasons you get, they're going to follow the same cycle relative to the solar year, so that one makes sense from a universal point of view. You can mark whatever are the significant dates on your calendar, and they'll be the same dates next year, roughly. But where to mark the significant points is clearly going to be different for everyone, so it's very much arbitrary.
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So long as the year is lined up with the circumnavigation of the sun, the choice of starting day is pretty much arbitrary. The choice of months being roughly a lunar circumnavigation is of little use really, and the choice of 7 days per week seems to be entirely religious.
Not everyone is a farmer, but the seasons are still important to pretty much everyone. No matter what day the solstices are farmers will still work around them rather than the names of the days, and most people will still prefer to holiday in the summer and work in the winter if their work isn't related to the seasons. Since the timing of the seasons is opposite on the different hemispheres, there's no way the start point can be universal.
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One of the comments is priceless:
Wow, a whole hundred milliwatts? I could power my cell phone!
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Hard News: Moving on, in reply to Russell Brown,
Me as Barbosa’s straight man.
Well you best not be filming on Friday nights then.
Sorry to hear it's coming to an end.
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