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Net Nerds
The Time of your life by Susan Ives, Alamo PC |
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Net Nerds
The Time of your life by Susan Ives, Alamo PC |
Let's start with a puzzle.
On a ship sailing from Hong Kong to San Francisco, a pair of twins is born. One twin is born early Friday morning, on January 1, 1965, at 1:00. Sixty minutes later, after crossing the International Date Line (and entering a new time zone), the second twin is born on Thursday morning, at 3:00, December 31, 1964. Which twin is older? (Answer at the end of this column.)About the only thing I know about time is that I don't have nearly enough of it. It struck me that if I mastered all of the ins-and-outs of time, I could conquer, or at least manipulate it. "Golly, that meeting was yesterday? You are using the Aztec calendar, aren't you?" "Am I late? I must have noted the time down in GMT." You get the idea. There are options. Calendars are controversial. They are bound up with culture, with religion with patriotism and with habit. There are more than 40 different calendars still in popular use, and dozens on the table seeking approval. My birthday was last month, so my first step was to determine some alternative birth dates. The site that is the most fun is Doug Zongker's "Today's Date" site. I converted my birthday into several other calendars:
One of the most depressing sites I visited was the Calendar Home. One of their features is a nasty calculator that figures out how old you really are. I calculated from my birthday until August 1st. My exact age is: 16,817 days, or 403,608 hours or 24,216,480 minutes 1,452,988,800 seconds. Once the numbers get into the billions, I lose interest. There are several sites that will give you insight into what these numbers mean. Start with Calendopaedia, an encyclopedia of calendars. It helps when dealing with the Mayan calendar, for example, to know that they calculated numbers in base 20, or that the major source of discontent with the French Revolutionary calendar was that each month contained three weeks of ten days so people had to work for nine days before having their day of rest. Another cool resource is Today's Calendar and Clock Page, which lists dozens of variations on the date. Want to know the Stardate? (July 15 was [-30]1462.99) Check out the goddess calendar? (My birthday this year was Usha 22, 2997.) There are more than a hundred links to different calendar systems. A fantastic introduction to calendars is offered by Bill Hollon in his calendar page. His site is easy to navigate, contains fascinating anecdotal information and is even footnoted - a rarity in the Internet! Bill tells us that in ancient Rome a priest would observe the sky and announced a new moon and therefore the new month to the king. The word calendar is derived from the Latin word calare , to announce solemnly, or call out. Bill also explains that although our current calendar was approved by Pope Gregory in 1582, Great Britain and the American colonies were among the last European nations to adopt it, not making it official until 1752. The Calendar Zone claims to bring order to all things calendrical. It contains religious calendars, regional calendars, celestial calendars, places to buy calendars and even a section of calendar quotes. My favorite: "Time is what keeps everything from happening at once. " Well worth poking into. I found the alternate calendars intriguing. One of the most persistent reform plans is the World Calendar, originally proposed in 1930. They claim that it brings harmony, order, balance and stability from chaos. The Gregorian calendar system that we now use is actually a cycle of 14 calendars. By inserting a blank day, called a World Day, every year, and an extra blank day added every leap year, the World Calendar folks whittle it down to one 12-month calendar that repeats exactly every year They have an organization, the World Calendar Association, that makes a persuasive case for reform. An even older proposal was the 13-month calendar, also called the positivist calendar, first proposed in 1849 by Auguste Comte, and later taken up by Moses Cottman in England and George Eastman (as in Kodak) in the United States. This idea was attractive to business people, statisticians and accountants, but the radical changes were met with horror by the masses. Especially galling was that the 4th of July would fall on the 17th day of a new month, Sol. Another take on calendar reform is not to reshuffle the years and months, but rather to recalculate the starting date. The one that makes the most sense to me is the Holocene Calendar. The premise of this reform is that the division between BC and AD, although of Christian religious significance, is not helpful in other human endeavors. A good starting point, proponents say, would be the approximate appearance of humans on the earth at the end of the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago. AD dates are converted to HE (Holocene Epoch) dates by adding 10,000 years. BC dates are converted by subtracting the BC date from 10,001. The extra year is necessary when converting BC dates because Pope Gregory left year zero out of his calendar. Our current calendar is a triumph of sentiment over logic. If you like puzzles, take a look at The Home Page for Calendar Reform, review what has already been proposed, and take your own hand to designing a calendar system that make sense. Date trivia abounds. If you want to find out what happened on a particular date, the History Channel invites you to enter any day and month and get back several pages of information, from historic events to famous birthdays. Scope Systems also has a wonderful historical date finder. You can enter a specific day and month (such as July 16) or a month and year (such as July 1952) and get extensive lists of important events and shared birth and death days. If you are of a literary bent, you might check out the Literary Hyper-calender, and movie buffs can look at This Day in Movie History. Hours, minutes and seconds are just as confusing as years, days and months. When I was in the army, we used "zulu" time but I never knew why it was called that. There are 25 time zones. Each one is 15° of longitude from the prime meridian at Greenwich. The military designations use each letter of the alphabet (except 'i') and are known by their phonetic equivalent. Greenwich Mean Time, at the zero meridian, is z or zulu ; San Antonio is in foxtrot time, which is GMT-6 hours. I learned this from the Greenwich 2000 home page. This is an excellent resource for anyone interested in time and how it is measured. Their timeline of time is especially interesting. Greenwich will be ground zero for the new millennium. They are expecting more than 12 million visitors to their Millennium Dome, and all of the details are here. The National Institute of Standards and Technology has a website that provides a concise chronology of time measurement advances. Clocks were not used, they say, until about five or six thousand years ago, when the civilizations in the Middle East and North Africa developed a need for precise time measurement to regulate their religions and bureaucracies. The description of water clocks was fascinating and gives me a believable new reason to be late - my clock is running slow because of the aquifer water restrictions! If you need to know the time in any place in the world, there are dozens of Internet sites that will deliver. Start with WorldTime, a service featuring an interactive world atlas, information on local time as well as sunrise and sunset times in several hundred cities, and a database of public holidays worldwide. Other time zone resources are at the World Time Zone, Local Times Around the World, The Date and Time Gateway or the Time Zone Page. Time is complex. Two good resources to help you understand the vocabulary and concepts are A Summary of the International Standard Date and Time Notation, based in Germany and Time of the Internet, an Italian site. I didn't realize that Greenwich Mean Time was discarded in 1972 and replaced by Universal Time (Coordinated), abbreviated UTC. The two are almost identical, except twice a year UTC adds a leap second to compensate for a slowing down of the earth's rotation that causes a slight incongruence between solar time and atomic time. If leap seconds get you excited, you might want to ensure that your computer clock is accurate. John Woody recently reviewed a shareware program called Netdate that he recommends. I am using a program called Atom Time, which is a $10 shareware program (hint: an older version is still available as freeware for cheap obsessives.) Both programs use the Internet to connect to an atomic clock and automatically synchronize your computer to it. A wrinkle in time is Daylight Savings Time, called summer time in many other countries. I had forgotten that the government canceled DST in 1973 in an attempt to save energy during the oil embargo. This is also a hot topic. A great index to the pros and cons is on the aptly named Daylight Saving Time Page. If you are installing a sundial in your garden, be sure to check the Sundial Generator. According to its author, most commercial sundials are laid out to be accurate for anyone living on the 45th parallel. San Antonio's latitude, according to the page's handy index, is 29d25m37s, which would make an off-the-shelf sundial inaccurate here. The automatic generator will print a horizontal or vertical sundial pattern for your specific area. I'm tempted to try it myself, and it would make a great project for kids. This site also has an extensive list of Sundial links, plus suggestions of foreign words and phrases to use when searching for sundial sites in other countries. There are two conflicting opinions on the start date of the new millennium. January 1, 2001 is officially endorsed by the U.S. Naval Observatory, The Greenwich Observatory, Encyclopedia Britannica, and the World Almanac, but technicalities aside, most of the big parties are planned for January 2000 Celebrate both! Be sure to visit the Eiffel Tower, designated by the French government as the official worldwide observatory for the year 2000. It has a wonderful historical section, debunking stories of First Millennium hysteria, and a futurology section full of fascinating predictions. Also look at the mega-site Everything2000, and the Center for Millennium Studies, both excellent. As always, the addresses for the Internet sites mentioned in this
article are on the Alamo PC web site at www.alamopc.org/nerd.htm.
Possible Answers to the twin puzzle: A. The first twin is older, because she was born 60 minutes earlier. B. The second twin is older, because the time on her birth certificate (3:00am December 31, 1964) precedes that of her sister's (1:00am January 1, 1965). Counting down from August 1, Susan Ives will be the President of Alamo PC for another 5,270,400 seconds.
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