Rick Welykochy <r...@praxis.com.au> writes:
> Nick Andrew wrote:
>
>> Indeed. The Earth's rotational period does vary slightly (effect of
>> earthquakes notwithstanding). One reason time is hard to deal with
>> sensibly is our insistence on synchronising it to the mean solar day.
>
> // off topic Easter Time time ramblings
> Isaac Asimov figured it out years ago. From memory ...
>
> Create a new calendar with 52 weeks of 7 days = 364 days. Add one extra
> day, called World Day, at the end - 365 days. World Day does not have a day
> of the week. In this way, every date falls on the same day of the week in
> every year.
Note that this doesn't address the GMT/UT[C01] issue, which is all about the
relationship between local time and time-as-seen-by-astronomers, or perhaps
more clearly, time as it relates to the actions of things other than our own
planet rotating.
> For leaps years, add an extra Leap day after World Day. It too has no day of
> the week. To make things precise, every 100 years, there is no Leap Day, but
> every 400 years there is.
>
> That pretty well matches up the solar year to the earth's rotation.
I don't find this convincing, FWIW, since it doesn't address issues like
"every five days" in a terribly meaningful day. All it does is translate
those into one of two problems:
Either you have "every five days, except once a year when it is six or seven
days between instances", or "every five days, but which day changes every
year."
Unfortunately, we can't just stop the world for world day, which means that we
still have unpredictable day/date matching.
[...]
> I don't recall Asimov dealing with the tetchy problem of daylight time.
IIRC he thought it was a silly idea, as were the politically motivated time
zones. Both views are ... arguably true. :)
Daniel
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