Rob Seaman said:
As I've said before, eventually the notion that the solar day contains
24h of 60m of 60s will have to be abandoned. It'll be awfully hard
to maintain when an hour involves two human sleep-wake cycles,
out in the limit when the Moon is fully tidally locked and 1 lunar
month =
John Cowan said:
Historians aren't exactly consistent on the question. In European
history, dates are Julian or Gregorian depending on the location;
dates in East Asian history seem to be proleptic Gregorian.
Even worse, Julian can have more than one meaning.
In the UK in 1750, there were
On Jun 7, 2006, at 2:01 AM, Clive D.W. Feather wrote:
Actually, the evidence from experiments is that the natural sleep-
wake
cycle is about 27 hours long, but force-locked to the day-night
cycle (it's
easier to synchronise a longer free-running timer to a shorter
external
signal than
Poul-Henning Kamp scripsit:
I belive this was because the year followed the taxation cycle of the
government whereas the day+month followed the religiously inherited
tradtion.
Indeed. For that matter, the start of the U.K. tax year was left alone
when the calendar changed, and is now 6 April
Tim Shepard replies:
Also hard to imagine how one gracefully transitions
from one to two sleep cycles a day.
It is already the norm in some places:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siesta
Thanks for the chuckle. One is then left wondering whether our far
future, Clarkeian Against the Fall
Rob Seaman scripsit:
References for this? Your explanation makes a lot of sense and I'm
prepared to be convinced, but have been skeptical of experimental
design as applied to questions of human behavior since participating
in studies as a requirement of undergraduate psychology coursework.
