Here is the comment (with a few clarifications added) that I posted to Stefano's article:
Stefano— I like the idea of that smart-clock dawn-based time. In the Roman and medieval world, “dawn” referred to the beginning of Civil Twilight, not to Sunrise, and that’s what I’d suggest. But I don’t think it’s necessary or desirable to go back to the old “Temporary Hours” that divided the sunrise to sunset period into 12 equal hours. Maybe start the day at Dawn, and use the current hour-length. While “Dawn” is the fully-arrived beginning of Civil Twilight, “Aurora” in Roman and medieval times, referred to the *beginning* of the arrival of Dawn. Whereas Civil Twilight conventionally begins when the Sun is 6 degrees below the horizontal, Aurora is when the Sun is about 9.37 degrees below the horizontal. I don’t notice any advantage of Swatch-Time over GMT (UTC). About your map-projection advocacy: Robinson’s looks good, for a non-elliptical map. But compare it to the elliptical maps, Hammer, Aitoff, Mollweide and Apianus II. The 1st 3 of those are equal-area, and even Apianus II gives more accurate areas than Robinson. The ellipticals have a more realistic and accurate globular shape than Robinson. Their pole is accurately a point rather than a line. Their meridians accurately converge at that point. What, exactly, is Robinson’s advantage over the ellipticals? Robinson's popularity is largely a matter of current fashion. Robinson has one property: It’s pseudocylindrical. Better put, it’s *cylindroid*. A map is cylindroid if it’s cylindrical or pseudocylindrical. (A map is cylindroid if its parallels are straight horizontal parallel lines, each uniformly divided (uniform scale) along its length.) Why settle for just that one property?? Mollweide and Apianus II are cylindroid too. But Mollweide is equal-area, and Apianus II is linear (Y co-ordinate is linear with latitude and X co-ordinate is linear with longitude). There are many equal-area cylindroid maps. There is a variety of linear cylindroid maps, including Apianus II, Eckert III, and Cylindrical Equidistant. So there’s no need to settle for Robinson’s having only the cylindroid property. Why not have equal-area or linearity as well? …and combined with globular realism. But yes, as you said, a cylindrical map is more convenient for what you were doing. As for that website you linked to, with the line-drawings and comments about a few map projections, the author of that didn’t even mention any elliptical projections. And, basically, he was just expressing his allegiance to current fashion. Michael Ossipoff On Sat, Oct 24, 2015 at 6:22 PM, Dan-George Uza <cerculdest...@gmail.com> wrote: > > http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_world_/2014/02/21/how_wrong_is_your_time_zone_map_shows_how_far_ahead_or_behind_the_world.html > > Are you aware of any territories following official solar time? > > Dan Uza > > --------------------------------------------------- > https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial > > >
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