Art & All, The matter of the international date line has been settled by now. Confusion remains about the cave-dwelling lover.
> SÈrgio Garcia Doret <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > 1 - Assume the hours equals exactly 1/24th of the earth revolution time > > and suppose a disguster lover choose to retire into a cave, where > > daylight is entirelly shut off for a period of six months to the minute. > > ... What adjustment does his watch need? > > As pointed out by others, the assumption does not even come close to > the actual definition of an hour, but what the heck. The watch owner has > more important things on his mind. I see two answers, depending on the > type of watch: > > 1) If it the usual "stupid" kind, no adjustment will be necessary. 12 > o'clock is 12 o'clock, and the watch can't distinguish 12 noon from 12 > midnight. The guy obviously is an astronomer; why else would he have a watch reading siderial time? A 'neat' siderial watch should have a 24 siderial-hour face, as it is not easy to know in which half of the siderial day one lives at a given civil date and time. > > 2) If the watch has a date display, then it must be adjusted by 12 > hours, and it makes a difference whether you set it forward or set it > back because you wind up on a different day. The correct procedure is > to set it back to give the rotation about the axis time to make up for > the revolution about the sun. As the lover's watch still reads the correct siderial time after leaving the cage after 6 months, no adjustment at all is needed, I would say. > > --Art Carlson Kind regards, Frans Maes Peize, The Netherlands www.biol.rug.nl/maes/
