Anselmo Pérez Serrada wrote:
Then I tried to explain him this curious fact by saying "Imagine you
could see the Earth from the Sun: then, the Earth
spins around itself not every 24h00m but every 23h56m, blah, blah, blah
As the Earth's axis is tilted towards the North Star,
you do not see perfect halves of the Parallel Circles, but sometimes
more and some others less than this, blah, blah, blah" .I'm afraid I wasn't quite successful and I still wonder if there is a
better way to explain these things to common people,
maybe by drawing circles in a bowl as Fer de Vries did or some other
way. Any suggestion?
I too have recently attempted a "simple" explanation to a similiar
question, that being why one must use an EoT chart when reading a longitudinally
corrected vertical sundial. I found out (after reviews of my explanation
by several good sundialing friends) that in my efforts to oversimplify
I had sacrificed scientific accuracy in the process.
I believe that the simplified explanation of these concepts is very important. Complex scientific overloading, however accurate, can easily intimidate the casual user of one of our creations, to the point of actually making them give up or lose interest in understanding the concept at all. Not everyone, obviously, is looking for that level of information. An elegant, simple explanation for some of these basic concepts - the ones they must confront in order to understand and use the dial they are standing in front of - is what is needed to welcome the uninitiated to the concept, and for that matter, to dialing as a whole.
I too am trying to figure out how to explain these things, and I hope that by doing so I might even increase our ranks by sparing my customers the initial intimidation of the subject matter. If the mountain does not look too steep more people may be inclined to climb it, so to speak. I wonder what the "party definitions" would be to some of these basic dialling concepts, such as EoT?
Jim Tallman
Artisan Industrials
