Hey, We're sort of back to repeating the same points.
> > Nothing happens in the natural world 24 times in a solar day, > > The sun transits 15° of longitude 24 times during this rather natural > occurrence; which, as you rightly say, is a solar day . > > The solar day is one complete rotation of the Earth and is equal to > 360°. Few people would dispute that this is not normal or natural. It > is as predictable and natural as the sun rising in the morning ;-) > The divisions of the rotation of the Earth into 24 segments is a human > construct and one designed to be in practical usable units The > rotation of the earth is the same (360°) regardless of how many or few > marks you make upon its surface. All of this seems "natural" or "inevitable" so long as you accept the circle being divided into 360 degrees as "natural". In fact, it's completely arbitrary and invented- scholars pretty much agree that it was originally a somewhat-less-than-accurate attempt by pre- agricultural nomads to determine the length of the year in days. Not to denigrate the pre-agricultural nomads, as always when dealing with the ancients they did considerably better than we, "modern" man would in the same circumstances, with the same tools. Determining the length of the year was critical for them, since nomads didn't really "wander", they followed circular paths in which their survival depended on keeping a pretty rigid schedule- crop recovery for the herds, etc... but it also doesn't mean that we have to be bound by historical constraints forever. 360 is a convenient number, in that it is (for a while) evenly divisible by multiples of two, and evenly divisible by multiples of three. That's nice for playing with angles (manually), but somewhat less important for time, unless you're a sailor facing an 8-hour watch on deck that has to be accurate to fractions of a second. > The sun rises at exactly the same, > natural time, each day, sunrise. > Cows, birds and especially worms;-) know this natural fact While the > duration of sunlight varies during the seasons the natural time of > sunrise does not. Sunrise is always precisely at sunrise. Cant' address that, since I don't know what the point is. It's a tautology, impossible to contradict as 1=1, but about as useful for inference... if your fixed point of reference is sunrise, then your fixed point of reference doesn't change (quel suprise!). If it's midnight or noon, then sunrise certainly does change. > Any attempt to impose any man-made artificial divisions such as a > binary, decimal, hexadecimal or other absolute system to mark this > duration will fail. Since the duration of light and dark varies every > day, throughout the year, any system of units of equal value imposed > in any way as a measure of time references only itself. 360 degrees is no less "artificial divisions" than 1,000, we're both advocating artificial systems. You seem to be advocating yours for all uses, I'm not quite so bold- I think SIT is useful for coordinating Internet events, which will become less often asynchronous with increases in bandwitdh. Local time will persist for at least generations yet, and no doubt the nonsense of a microwave oven running for longer when you key in "80" than when you key in "110" will too. > One minute of one degree at the equator is a nautical mile which as I > said to you before is essential in navigation. I've done a fair amount of navigation, and aside from the equator, it's convenient to have a nautical mile equal to a degree of the "great circle" anywhere for the sake of spherical trigonometry... but again, it's based on the artificial construct of 360, and we don't measure time in nautical miles either. > Not only does this relationship between time, distance, angles and > velocity (all with the same accuracy) hold true on Earth; but, extends > to the very limits of the Universe itself. I'm going to take that as tongue-in-cheek hyperbole. There are relationships between time, distance and velocity that hold true, none of them dependent on units of measure. Our current timekeeping system is so parochial that we have difficulty saying on what date we first set foot on our own moon; it was one "day" in Florida and a different "day" in Greenwich. Like many of our inventions and many local wines, it doesn't seem to "travel well". > Using such units would undo thousands of years of accumulated > knowledge, require a whole new mathematics and possibly bring human > progress to a halt. The decimal system hardly requires a whole new mathematics, and it doesn't seem to have impeded human progress so far. It also GREATLY simplifies calculating elapsed times and intervals. There simply is nothing intrinsically "natural" about 24x60x60, or 360x60x60, systems in which 1:10 is not 110 but 70. It will always be awkward and cumbersome to deal with. > By the way I can't thank you enough for creating the NET time stamp > and clock for me. You're more than welcome, glad I could help. I don't have any problem with people disagreeing with me, and on this subject in particular it's a minor triumph to find someone willing to even think seriously about it, and I hope I remain open to counter-arguments. I'm happy to include New Earth Time in future versions as long as anyone expresses interest in having it. In the (probably very) long run, may the most useful system win. However, I confess to hoping that sometime in the 22nd or 23rd Century, someone far from Earth is not STILL keying "90" into some device, and still befuddled when it runs LONGER that way than when they key in "120". It's the sort of "grand historical legacy" we can do without. ;-) T. --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TiddlyWiki" group. To post to this group, send email to TiddlyWiki@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to tiddlywiki+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/TiddlyWiki?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
