Yes...and even fewer people care.
lol
--Mike
On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 1:51 AM, Mike Palij m...@nyu.edu wrote:
I think that few people actually think about why the calendar is
structured the way it is and even fewer think about how to make
the calendar more rational (e.g., each month having a fixed
number of days, thus making the month an interval scale of time
measurement) or consistent with the astronomical and seasonal
events that were originally set up to reflect but, with the passage
of hundreds of years, small errors accumulate to distort the calendar
(e.g., making spring come weeks earlier in the calendar). A news
article in the Wall Street Journal reviews these issues as well as
some of the proposed solutions; see:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126212850216209527.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_RIGHTInDepthCarousel
Because of the intimate connection between the calendar and
religious activites (e.g., December 25 is celebrated as Christmas
by people who follow the Gregorian calendar while those who
still follow the Julian or old calendar celebrate on January 7;
I believe that Armenians traditionally celebrate Christmass on
January 6 according to their reckoning based on the oldest
gospels in Christianity -- perhaps it would be easier to simply
make the fourth Thursday in December Christmas Day).
This raises a question that has been highlighted recently by
Norad's following Santa Claus around world as Christmas
crept across the globe as well as video showing celebrations
in China and Australia and elsewhere as New Year's Day
crept across the globe:
Given that Christmass/New Year's Day has arrived somewhere
on the planet should we:
(a) have a simultaneous celebration around the world given
that the planet has achieved that event
or
(b) continue to have local celebrations and ignore that fact
that what is being celebrated has already occured elsewhere
(for the North and South America, they are really late to the
celebration).
What should it be? Think globally or think locally?
-Mike Palij
New York University
m...@nyu.edu
P.S. To make this relevant to teaching, which should be preferred:
the traditional semester system or the quarter system?
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