On Fri, 4 Jan 2002, John Carmichael wrote:
> As a former beginning dialist I know how Judith feels. While interesting to
> the List, all of the ideas about transparencies, lasers, an auxiliary dials
> probably just confused poor Judith.
>
> As it turned out (in my opinion), her original idea was correct.
>
> John
As others have said, this was a very good brainstorming discussion, with
multiple purposes. I also believe Judith's main objective - introducing
solar timekeeping to younger students - will be best served by the simple
and obvious technique of marking the hours at various times during the
year. It clearly indicates how the ancients kept time, building their
markers over long periods of time, perhaps generations. For those of us
with a bent towards nitpicking detail :{) the auxialiary methods discussed
introduced some possibly novel ways of solving a difficult layout problem,
and a good brain exercise.
The possible problem of a Winter hour point lying on the far wall, does
suggest it would be best to use more than two dates. If she were to
include the point in Spring where the EOT is zero, there should be two
points on the ceiling, at least. Extend the lines from the June points
through Spring, to where they intersect the ceiling/wall joint, then from
there to the Winter points. That should complete the mean-time line,
filling in the break.
Dave
37.29N 121.97W
