Re: religious concerns
Markus Kuhn scripsit: > > http://www.sabbatarian.com/Dateline.html > > It seems, the true quarrel of this particular community is more with the > Earth not being flat any more (as it obviously was when the Old > Testament was written) ... That seems to me by no means a sound criticism. Given the writer of the above page's relative values, it is indeed sensible for him to urge that the International Date Line be moved to the meridian of Jerusalem, and there are no arguments against this except sheer convention. He does not appear to quite recognize that the IDL is a product of local decisions rather than international agreement, but this is excusable. He gets the more fundamental points correct: the existing IDL is purely conventional, the historical Sabbath is Saturday, the earth is round and rotates. -- John Cowan http://www.ccil.org/~cowan [EMAIL PROTECTED] Be yourself. Especially do not feign a working knowledge of RDF where no such knowledge exists. Neither be cynical about RELAX NG; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment in the world of markup, James Clark is as perennial as the grass. --DeXiderata, Sean McGrath
Re: religious concerns
Steve Allen wrote on 2003-07-13 16:48 UTC: > TI without leaps turns day into night And? So does UT, for everyone sufficiently far away from Greenwich. That's why we have local time zones. A change from UT to TI would not change any of that. It merely would cause "Greenwich" to move slowly eastwards around the globe over the centuries and local time zones would slowly change their offset relative to TI. Britain's national pride in being the island whose local time is Weltzeit might be a legitimate concern against this idea, but I don't see, what your concern about "turning day into night" refers to. > Unfortunately, we don't really have any proposals. We have a lot of > internally generated hypothetical scenarios based on vague hints from > the SRG devoid of technical or social details and rationale. I guess, at least about half of the SRG is quietly listening here, which makes this a very suitable forum for sounding new ideas and refinements of earlier proposals. As an intellectual exercise, I made one specific proposal of what to do with a leap-free TI when "Greenwich" hits the international date line (near the year 5600). Apart from the weekday question, I haven't yet heard any argument on why it might not be one of the most feasible and desireable solutions. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
Re: religious concerns
On Sun 2003-07-13T09:17:11 +0100, Markus Kuhn hath writ: > I haven't seen any proposal here so far that would "turn day into > night". TI without leaps turns day into night, and my point is that the agrarian masses of the world and their legislatures may not be beholden to the ITU messing around with the way their great grandchildren will tend their cows. Unfortunately, we don't really have any proposals. We have a lot of internally generated hypothetical scenarios based on vague hints from the SRG devoid of technical or social details and rationale. At this point I prefer to await the results of the IAU GA meetings of Division I and Commission 31, or some other new external input, before hypothecating much further. -- Steve Allen UCO/Lick Observatory Santa Cruz, CA 95064 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice: +1 831 459 3046 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla PGP: 1024/E46978C5 F6 78 D1 10 62 94 8F 2E49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93
Re: religious concerns
Steve Allen wrote on 2003-07-13 06:51 UTC: > On Sat 2003-07-12T11:19:22 +0100, Markus Kuhn hath writ: > > It seems, the true quarrel of this particular community is more with the > > Earth not being flat any more > > Nevertheless, most of the people in the world have not traveled more > than a few hundred miles, have never crossed a timezone boundary (let > alone the International Date Line), and have not read Jules Verne. > It seems that the majority of people have been willing to accept the > creation of standard time zones by the railroads, and that they have > been willing to accept the biannual shifts of daylight/summer time. > Apparently those changes did not deviate enough from the pre-existing > notions of keeping time-of-day to cause widespread consternation. > A change which would eventually make day into night and Tuesday into > Wednesday does not meet that criterion. I haven't seen any proposal here so far that would "turn day into night". If we introduced TI, there would still be local time zones, and they would just start to wobble by +/- 30 min with a period of initially about a kiloyear, the interval with which their TI offset needs to be updated (which thanks to DST is a routine operation). The only deviation that is actually noticeable for the mere mortal, who is not into astronomy and navigation, would with my proposal be that one weekday is skipped when we drop the Gregorian leap day 29. February 5600 in civilian time zones to get both local time zones back into TI +/ - 25 hours and also to correct at the same time for the residual error of the Gregorian calendar. Whether we should keep weekdays constant in either local time zones or in TI is, as far as I am concerned, still open for debate. I could give a long list of technical reasons for why it should be TI that carries along the uninterrupted weekday sequence (in a nutshell: date functions in computers remain simpler and compatible with today's implementation practice). Don't forget that there are also religious reasons for correcting the Gregorian Calendar eventually. More importantly, don't forget that the Gregorian calendar was introduced for the very reason that the religious communities were faced with the difference between UT and ET (ephemeris time) and decided that in a way ET (in the form of the long-term longitude of the sun) was of crucial importance in their calendars. TI, the long-term longitude of the sun, and the phases of the moon will deviate from each other many orders of magnitude slower than UT from TI. Therefore, moving to an atomic time base will also have clear advantages for those religious communities, where the solar year and the lunar cycle (both far more tightly linked to TI than UT) play important roles in their calendar, which seems to include most. It will increase long-term predictability of their calendar calculations. In your enthusiasm about arguing against getting rid of the leap seconds, please try not to get carried away too much into purely single-sided arguments. The argument that atomic times is incompatible with religious calendars turns against your agenda, once you look at the importance of ephemeridis time in the long-term evolution of many religious calendars. Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
Re: religious concerns
On Sat 2003-07-12T11:19:22 +0100, Markus Kuhn hath writ: > It seems, the true quarrel of this particular community is more with the > Earth not being flat any more Nevertheless, most of the people in the world have not traveled more than a few hundred miles, have never crossed a timezone boundary (let alone the International Date Line), and have not read Jules Verne. It seems that the majority of people have been willing to accept the creation of standard time zones by the railroads, and that they have been willing to accept the biannual shifts of daylight/summer time. Apparently those changes did not deviate enough from the pre-existing notions of keeping time-of-day to cause widespread consternation. A change which would eventually make day into night and Tuesday into Wednesday does not meet that criterion. -- Steve Allen UCO/Lick Observatory Santa Cruz, CA 95064 [EMAIL PROTECTED] Voice: +1 831 459 3046 http://www.ucolick.org/~sla PGP: 1024/E46978C5 F6 78 D1 10 62 94 8F 2E49 89 0E FE 26 B4 14 93
Re: religious concerns
> It seems, the true quarrel of this particular community is more with > the Earth not being flat any more Well, I tend to agree. > (as it obviously was when the Old Testament was written) ... The Greeks (at least, some Greeks :-) were well aware of the shape of the Earth, of course, if not its precise "context" in the universe. Others of the ancients (and the moderns, for that matter) were indeed less well-informed, or at least, less curious than the Greeks. The lack of a scientific world view, however, does not invalidate a stakeholder's concerns about public policy decisions. Observing the proper Sabbath (or the equivalent in other religions) is deeply important to billions of our fellow humans (likely including several on this list). It may not be possible for any public policy to satisfy everybody, but that is not an argument for trampling blindly over such stakeholders' concerns. Rather, it seems to this observer, it is an argument for even more careful attention to getting the details right. If any initiative to replace time-of-day with interval time as the basis for worldwide civil time is to succeed, public advice and consent - in addition to public education on a grand scale - will be required. Rob Seaman National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Re: religious concerns
Steve Allen wrote on 2003-07-12 00:56 UTC: > On Fri 2003-07-11T12:11:10 -0700, Rob Seaman hath writ: > > It may be that not a single religious sect anywhere on > > the globe will care about the secularization (pun intended) of the > > world's clocks. > > Profuse excuses begged for entering pedant mode, but > I offer these folks as a likely counterexample > > http://www.sabbatarian.com/Dateline.html It seems, the true quarrel of this particular community is more with the Earth not being flat any more (as it obviously was when the Old Testament was written) ... http://www.flat-earth.org/ http://www.cca.org/woc/felfat/ Markus -- Markus Kuhn, Computer Lab, Univ of Cambridge, GB http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ | __oo_O..O_oo__
