Yes...and even fewer people care.
lol
--Mike
On Sat, Jan 2, 2010 at 1:51 AM, Mike Palij 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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