When the big hand says Thirteen Moon Calendar

Canada Free Press ^ | 8-27-04 | Judi McLeod

[bk1000]

Just imagine how many more federal holidays we would have! Not to mention an extra guvmint check each year.

[LNewman]

I have a more urgent situation needing immediate fixing:

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.

Have you tried contacting the UN? ;)

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Unless you're a surveyor or doing astronomical observations, for all practical purposes UTC, Greenwich Mean Time, and Zulu Time are the same.

Irony is lost on some people. Actually UTC and ZULU are exactly the same thing. Converting from UTC to ZULU is like converting from Hertz to Cycles per Second. The U. S. Naval Observatory denigrades the term GMT. It is imprecisely and ambiguously defined. So unless you're a news reader for the Beeb, you shouldn't use the term < affected snotty Oxbridge accent > Greenwich Mean Time. < /affected snotty Oxbridge accent >

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

What's the only fundamental physical constant defined by an artifact?

[Chemist_Geek]

Hey, I like the affected snotty Oxbridge accent! It grates less on me than DanPeterTom... ;-) Too bad the Beeb doesn't like shortwave anymore.

[boris]

I was going to say the candela: "The candela is the luminous intensity, in a given direction, of a source that emits monochromatic radiation of frequency 540 x 10¹² hertz and that has a radiant intensity in that direction of 1/683 watt per steradian."....but upon reflection I say the kilogram.

The candela would have been (sort of right) before it was defined in more definite units than its original (historical) definition...

[boris]

Shall we discuss Mach's Principle and confuse everyone (including ourselves?)

[Larry Lucido]

I'd have an eleven month calendar, and get rid of February. Too cold. And too hard to spell.

[chs68]

Hey.....

Here's an idea.

Instead of dividing up the year into 13 "months", maybe we could divide it into 10 months.

We could name the months according to the type of weather each has.

For instance, July could become "Thermidor".

[boris]

"For instance, July could become 'Thermidor'."

Baked Alaska?

==============================

Once my company put out a calendar that was filled with errors. Wrong number of days in some months. Weeks beginning on Monday. Etc. So I wrote a poem (which did not endear me to the company prez, who had personally OK'd the calendar:

Forty days hath Octember;
Napril, Skoon, and Precember.
All the rest have thirty-nine
Save February, which has 30 days--
Or so says "Yo-Yo Dyne".

--Boris

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

The candela is not a fundamental physical constant.

I assume you are not serious about redefining other physical constants to make the speed of light come out sort of even. There is at least one instance in which a physical unit was (more or less arbitrarily) redefined. In the United States the relationship between traditional units of length (inch, foot, yard, fathom, rod, furlong, mile, league...) had been established at 39.37 inches per meter. For some reason this was redefined to be 3.28 feet per meter, a difference of about 2 parts per million. Since a lot of existing surveys had already been done using the old standard, there arose two different kinds of measures: the "survey foot" and the "statute foot", the former retaining its old relationship to metric units.


Of course, you are perfectly free to us any definition of the speed of light that suits you. (Do you know what a "radar mile" is, btw? I think someone took a cue from you.)

[boris]

"I assume you are not serious about redefining other physical constants to make the speed of light come out sort of even."

Yes. You must become accustomed to my unique sense of humor.

BTW, 1/39.37 = 3.280833333...and my HP calc gives 3.28083989501. Hm.

But I still use (355./113.) for pi, so what do I know?

--Boris

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

My bad, 0.3048 meters == 1 statue foot.

From http://physics.nist.gov/Pubs/SP811/appenB.html


B.6 U.S. survey foot and mile
The U. S. Metric Law of 1866 gave the relationship 1 m = 39.37 in (in is the unit symbol for the inch). From 1893 until 1959, the yard was defined as being exactly equal to (3600/3937) m, and thus the foot was defined as being exactly equal to (1200/3937) m.
In 1959 the definition of the yard was changed to bring the U.S. yard and the yard used in other countries into agreement. Since then the yard has been defined as exactly equal to 0.9144 m, and thus the foot has been defined as exactly equal to 0.3048 m. At the same time it was decided that any data expressed in feet derived from geodetic surveys within the United States would continue to bear the relationship as defined in 1893, namely, 1 ft = (1200/ 3937) m (ft is the unit symbol for the foot). The name of this foot is "U.S. survey foot," while the name of the new foot defined in 1959 is "international foot." The two are related to each other through the expression 1 international foot = 0.999 998 U.S. survey foot exactly.

[boris]

"My bad, 0.3048 meters == 1 statue foot."

You mean like this?

[NZerFromHK]

I happen to be ethnically Chinese, and I posted information about traditional Chinese calendar on a related thread on the Religion forum. Here's what I wrote:

---

Traditional Chinese calendar is built with both lunar and solar cycles in mind. Months reflect moon cycles, with a 13th month added approximately every three years to take account of disprency between solar and lunar cycles (If we base the calender purely on lunar cycles, the result would be like Islamic calendar which is useless for agricultural purposes - all special days (not holidays) in Chinese calendars are based on weathers).

Years are usually formed with a 60 year cycle with a combination of two words. In conjunction traditional year name of the emperor is also used with the year name (so we will say Fifth year of blah blah blah, year blah blah in traditional Chinese calendar). Since 1912 with the successful Revolution overthrowing the Qing dynasty and the proclaimation of the Republic of China, China has formally been on Gregorian calendar (except that very often year names were written in xth year of the ROC. This practice has effectively ended with the Communist People's Republic of China in power). However, the old calendar's new year day is still a formally recognized statuatory holiday in China.

[Salvation]

BTTT of the page.

[Salvation]

Discussion over here.

[lightman]

Very informative; thank you.

[patricktschetter]

Why not just make the speed of light be how we define 1 unit of distance in 1 unit of time? Physics would be easier! :)

[68 grunt]

earth charter crap found here;

http://www.earthcharter.org/innerpg.cfm?id_menu=19