Rob Seaman scripsit: > One might suggest that the accommodation between civil time and legal > time is of more interest.
I'm not sure what you mean by "civil time" in this context. For some people, civil time is synonymous with standard time; for others, it means the time shown by accurate clocks in the locality. I try to avoid it, therefore. > The sun certainly came > up on that day and rose the following day about 24 hours later. Yes, but the day was labeled 1845-01-01 and the following day was labeled 1845-01-02. There was no day labeled 1845-12-31 in the Philippines. Consequently, the year 1844 had only 365 days there, and the last week of 1845 lacked a Wednesday. This was not a calendar transition, but a (drastic) time zone transition involving moving the International Date Line to the east. (The IDL at sea is a de jure line, but on land it is de facto and dependent on the local times chosen by the various nations.) > When they did that, what did they call it? "The day after December > 30, 1844?" "Next Tuesday?" (Which begs the question, of course.) They called it "New Year's Day" or "January 1, 1845" (in Spanish). > In any event, the case you are basically making is that in throwing > off the yoke of their colonial masters, the Philippines specifically > chose that their legal time should match their civil time and that > their civil time should agree with local solar time. Not at all and by no means. Rather, it was Spanish America that had ceased to be part of Spain; the Philippines switched to Asian time because they were still a colony (and remained a Spanish colony until 1898 and an American one until 1946) and were no longer trading heavily with the Americas; most of their trade was with the Dutch East Indies and China, and it was commercially useful to share the same day. -- Is a chair finely made tragic or comic? Is the John Cowan portrait of Mona Lisa good if I desire to see [EMAIL PROTECTED] it? Is the bust of Sir Philip Crampton lyrical, http://ccil.org/~cowan epical or dramatic? If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art? If not, why not? --Stephen Dedalus
