Posted on 08/29/2004 5:12:51 PM PDT by Salvation
Unfortunately Mr Arguelles became convinced of his identity as a reincarnated Pacal Votan (Lord of Time) and created another system of Mayan glyphs called the Dreamspell. Dreamspell is not based on the pure interpretation of the Mayan Tzolkin. It is an invention that detracts from the original Mayan teachings.
Another calls his "research" incoherent and unsupported:
I wanted to give this book a chance, and wish I hadn't bothered. It reads like an acid ramble -- cosmic assertions tumble over startling insights, with no notion sustained beyond two sentences, properly connected to others, or backed by evidence. I kept waiting for him to settle down and present out some facts and build his case, but he just keeps laying bricks on air. I researched some of the more checkable facts, and found him generally wrong: for example, Isamu Noguchi's "The Sculpture to be Seen From Mars" looks nothing like the "face on Mars" (which was an illusion anyway), which he says shocked him into realizing the transmission of universal information. The irony is that despite savaging Western science as unable to understand the Maya, he is so absorbed in his own insights and revelations and discoveries that he never tries to see the Maya through their own eyes, as any good scientist would, and so fails to truly respect the subject he supposedly exalts.
There are positive reviews, of course, but quite possibly from "woo-woo" readership.
An extra page in every cheerleader calendar!
Who cares? If you go Metric, the phrase "A miss is as good as a mile" loses its meaning. Some things would have to be adapted.
Easy conversions among most calendars is to find the Julian date. Some desk calendars have them written as days since year began, or days remaining in year.
More complicated is converting to a decimal form, but that would be much like converting from Celcius to Fahrenheit (and for God's sake, don't get me started on Fahrenheit!!!)
We'll need to do conversions long before we travel between the stars. NASA is already dealing with the problem as it communicates and navigates the robots on Mars. The fourth planet has a different day length, different seasons, et cetera.
When we have settlements on Mars, and someone has a birthday, break out the calculator first!!
That's an easy adjustment. More payments, but lower payments.
A similar instance is choosing to make your payments, for mortgage or car, on a two-week cycle. Makes a lot of sense if you get paid every other week! That gives you twenty-six mortgage payments a year!! But they are less than half the size.
Pity the people in Pope Gregory's time. They had paid their rent, and then they lost eleven days! They wanted them back, too!!
Are they also proposing changing the 7 day week since it too is of Biblical origins?
It is always summer in Springfield...
Nam Vet
Not only is this Christian-bashing, occultist swill, but it's stupidly inefficient by virtue of its length. Modernization usually entails making things shorter, smaller simpler. This rewrite ADDS a letter and a word to the syntax. Which just shows how determined they are to obliterate all evidence of Christ from society.
I've told our children if they ever write C.E. or B.C.E. on a school paper I will burn it. I've told their teachers the same thing.
So far, so good.
We've already got Coordinated Universal Time, used by the military and amateur radio operators and other people. It's one time, wherever one is on the Earth.
Not quite. Not even close. Lunar-solar calendars are unworkable. The average synodic month is approximately 29.5806 days, the average solar year is about 365.2422 days. They are in a ratio of about 12.368280 to one. They require very long cycles (like the Mayan calendar) to represent even approximate integer ratios. Regardless to of the length of the cycle, they require occasional intercalary days to come back into step with the sun, like the Mayan calendar.
One enormous advantage of the Gregorian Calendar is that dates fall very nearly on the same point in the solar cycle year to year. We don't need to consult an almanac to decide whether to plant our gardens in April or December. We don't need to look up the date of the Solstice to decide how to adjust hotel rates at seasonal resorts, for instance. (The Islamic calendar, being a purely lunar calendar, the name of the month gives no clue to solar cycle, months drift by about 11 days per year, so if Muharram was in the middle of winter one year, it'll be in the middle of summer in 16 years.)
A second advantage is simplicity. While "30 days hath..." and "Once every four years unless divisible by 100, except when divisible by 400..." is daunting to some, it is relatively simple to make up a Gregorian calendar for any date in the foreseeable future and as far back as one wants up to the date of it's adoption. (Maybe not that simple, Excel thinks that 1900 is a leap year.)
I believe that hostility to the Gregorian Calendar stems from its origin in the Christian Church. More precisely the Roman Church. The Catholic world adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1588, the anti-papist English resisted until 1754. Most of the Orthodox world did not accept the Gregorian Calendar as a civil standard until the early twentieth century. (Hence "Red October", the November Revolution took place in October on the old Russian civil calendar.) The revolutionary French and Soviets both had "rational" calendars, but in truth the hostility to the Gregorian Calendar is cultural, not scientific.
How to you convert form UTC to ZULU?
Unless you're a surveyor or doing astronomical observations, for all practical purposes UTC, Greenwich Mean Time, and Zulu Time are the same.
Only the powerful can change a calendar. The UN believes it is all powerful.
The so called new world order is about power and it comes from the UN not Rome today. The UN is saying the Christian Era is OVER.
The question is who is using the UN for their own powerful agenda?
What Is This C.E. / B.C.E. B u s i n e s s ?
The "Common Era" (i.e. nowadays)
Well, an awfull lot of people don't realize what AD stands for or means. "Anno Domini" is Latin for "in the year of Our Lord", referring to Our Lord Jesus Christ.
That is, "AD 1996" literally means "in the 1996'th year since the birth of the Christ."
Now not all the world is Christian, so it makes no sense for a Jew, a Moslem, a Hindu, a Witch, a Druid, or an atheist to refer to the date as being in the year of "their Lord" when they don't follow him.
The speed of light is 2.9979x108 meters per second.
We need to change either the meter or the second to make it come out to 3.000000x108 m/s. Nobody (much) would notice and it would stop irritating me.
--Boris
I prefer The Clock of the Long Now. It has a cool design and the cam that embodies "The Equation of Time" is extra-cool. Check the gallery.
--Boris
I'm not quite clear. Is this talking about a lunar calendar or a 28-day month calendar? The word month comes from moon and was originally based on the cycle of the moon. I already keep the biblical lunar calendar, which can be either 12 or 13 months to a year, but this sounds like they are talking about fixed 28-day months.
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