Re: The duration of the year

Frank King wrote: > > I have often pondered an even more primitive question: I am dumped on a > desert island and I want to count the days since I arrived. What > discipline should I follow? > > I could, of course, cut a notch in a stick every morning when I first > wake up but

Re: Leap Second Quiz Question

Frank King wrote: > The U.K. telephone-service speaking clock gets it right too but only by > a fudge. You hear: > > At the thiiird stroke... > > with a bit of noise in "third"! The recording I have heard has the usual three pips, but with two seconds between the

Re: Permanent DST

Frank King wrote: > > You can get out of bed whenever you wish on any day of the year > so it is... Well, lucky people can, but many people have externally imposed constraints on their timetables - school times, shop opening times, working shift times, delivery restriction

Re: It's still summer in Sydney (or is it?)

Michael Ossipoff wrote: > > In the U.S., our astronomers have proclaimed that summer begins with the > summer solstice, and that spring begins wit the spring equinox. > ...proclaimed with absolutely no justification. It's become our national > definition of the seasons. I

Re: Map required

Frank King frank.k...@cl.cam.ac.uk wrote: To be sure the projection distorts sizes so Greenland appears about the same size as Africa but the UK is pretty small and the distortion is minimal. I do not understand Linda's map! As John Foad didn't quite say, this is decidedly an Alex Salmond

RE: Greenwich Meridei Redux

Geoffrey Thurston thurs...@hornbeams.com wrote: The dial was still in place and intact in August 2011 according to Google Street View. For details of where to find it see: http://www.thegreenwichmeridian.org/tgm/location.php?i_latitude=52.185750 It turns out to be easier to find with the

Re: sunrise/set/twilight calculators ?

Thibaud Taudin Chabot tcha...@dds.nl wrote: for my coordinates 52.30N 4.85E sumwait gives the times using the Western European time. However on the continent for this longitude the Central European time is used. It just uses your computer's timezone setting - it doesn't have a geographical

Re: sunrise/set/twilight calculators ?

Rob Seaman sea...@noao.edu wrote: I'm looking for an (open source) unix/linux command line tool that calculates sunrise/sunset and civil/nautical/astronomical twilights for a particular location and date. http://risacher.org/sunwait/ Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch d...@dotat.at

Re: BBC bans The B.C. and A.D.

John Carmichael jlcarmich...@comcast.net wrote: Britain's BBC has banned the use of B.C and A.D. when refering to dates! Please don't propagate tabloid lies. http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/reality-check-with-polly-curtis/2011/sep/26/1 Tony. -- f.anthony.n.finch d...@dotat.at

the nature of time, was RE: UTC Conference

Bill O'Neill bon4rea...@verizon.net wrote: Sundials however will never have time problems because they indicate the position of the earth and sun. As such they do not measure time. A clock draws a conclusion but a clock attempts to follow what is displayed by the sundial. The sundial follows

Re: Future of UTC / leap second

Wolfgang R. Dick wd...@astrohist.org wrote: Some time ago, there was a dicussion here on the future of UTC and theleap second. Therefore I think that this announcement could be of interest to some members. See also this preprint from American Scientist. Note that the people involved in both

Re: Earth movements

On 13 Mar 2011, at 13:44, J. Tallman jtall...@artisanindustrials.com wrote: I just saw on the news that the recent quake in Japan shifted the earth's axis by 4 inches and that the main island of Japan moved nearly 8 feet. Could someone on the list put this into perspective? As an example,

Re: standard meridian list

On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, Donald Christensen wrote: I'm trying to find a list of cities and the standard meridian they set their clock to. The thing to look for is time zone information. http://www.twinsun.com/tz/tz-link.htm http://efele.net/maps/tz/world/ http://nationalatlas.gov/mld/timeznp.html

Re: The future of time keeping

On Tue, 1 Mar 2011, Brent wrote: I suppose that with people around the world chatting on the the internet maybe we will see a cyber time or a virtual time common to the entire earth. We have had Universal Time for over a century. People still prefer to use their own local time. There is a

Re: moon shadows and Pluto

On Wed, 26 Jan 2011, Richard Mallett wrote: The IAU definition of a planet as an object orbiting the Sun that has cleared its neighbourhood seems to me to be seriously flawed, as it excludes :- extra-solar planets (which don't orbit the Sun) Earth (because there are near Earth objects)

Re: Calculating days and dates (was: Re: 360 degree/Fabian)

On Tue, 25 Jan 2011, John Pickard wrote: If you need to check days of weeks for arcane dates, JoneSoft Date Calculator is a free program that will give you the day of the week for just about any date, and the number of days between two specific dates. You only need about two lines of code to

Re: 360 degree/Fabian

On Thu, 20 Jan 2011, Brad Lufkin wrote: I think having the JDN change at noon UTC avoids a lot of confusion. Consider this: when is Thursday midnight? Is it the instant between Wednesday and Thursday or the instant between Thursday and Friday? With the current definition, it's crystal clear

RE: 360 degree

On Tue, 18 Jan 2011, Tom Laidlaw wrote: Sorry about that, 400 gradients in a circle by British military. Grads originated in the French Revolutionary metrication project. Centigrads correspond to kilometers because in both cases there are 10,000 between a pole and the equator. There is a