> -----Original Message----- > From: Beni Cherniavsky [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Arthur wrote on 2005-02-20: > Also, the Islamic holiday cannot always coincide with a Jewish holiday > because the Islamic calendar constantly drifts relative to the Sun > (having no leap monthes it misses about 11 days per year). Some years > from now it will occur in the summer, while Adar is always in the > winter. So he could only mean the coincidence to have some meaning at > this specific year. > [Pardon me if I'm explaining the obvisous, when I'm don't know the > correspondent's level I tend to err on the side of too much details] Well I am Jewish, and the explanation as to Adar is interesting, and new, to me - so I doubt you are stating the obvious to a more general population. Though I did know that Purim is a holiday where the faithful are supposed to let loose a bit and have one (or two) too many - a vestige of old school religion - intoxication as a religious rite being core to religious experience to, say, the American Indian but outside the experience of the Christian and Islamic faiths, as far as I am aware. The issues of calendar (and more particularly time) synchronization happens to be of current interest to me. I am the kind of Jew who celebrates High Holy Days, in some manner - and not much more. Ekrem and I used to work at the same firm, He is more observant in his faith than I am in mine, and therefore keeps with him a calendar which gives the prayer times on a daily basis. I would ask him for the time of sundown on holidays I do observe (in my way) - knowing that probably even on the question of the time of sundown our faiths depart, but that his time was good enough for my purposes. The history of science being a keen interest of mine - I had just picked up the book: Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps by Peter Galison just out in paperback. Have not gotten too far into it, but I think Galison is making and following the point - as to Einstein - that it is no small matter that he was working at a Patent Office in Switzerland when formulating his ideas - the accuracy of clocks and the synchronization of time among clocks being a very active concern of the applied technologists of his time, and particularly within his jurisdiction - which Galison thinks, logically, helped provoke Einstein's thinking. Of course Anna will nail all this down for us with her presentation at PyCon: """ The Time of Day """ walking us through, I think, the Python tools available for keeping ourselves in sync. Art _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
