h a l f b a k e r yThe leaning tower of Piezo
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The day is currently inconveniently fixed to the concept of Earth's rotation. Whereas this may seem sensible, those of us who live fairly near the poles are used to it being dark during the day and light at night, depending on the time of year. In the meantime, we have to put up with an elegant but
rather complex calendar which doesn't divide exactly by twelve. Also, the Martian calendar is based on days of a different length than ours. Both problems can be addressed by imposing a standard day twenty-one minutes longer than our current solar day and sixteen minutes shorter than the Martian sol. The first day starts on January the zeroth. On approximately the ninth of March, the day has shifted by twenty-four hours. However, consider this. Every sixty-eight days from third of February onwards and for a while either side of those dates, it's daylight at midnight, even in the middle of the winter, and conversely, for several days close to the summer solstice, it's dark at midday and we would actually be able to sleep and in the winter we can avoid getting depressed by the dark evenings.
Throughout the year, there are an extra twenty-one minutes in each day to spend as a lie-in or to get extra stuff done.
The planet moves almost exactly one degree a day in its orbit, which is neat.
There are no more leap years. Months and weeks can divide exactly into a year and the day of the week is always the same. There is only one calendar. The drift would be a few seconds per year.
Meanwhile, Mars and Earth have the same length of day, making it easier to adjust when travelling between them.
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One of the planks of my presidential campaign platform has always been to slow the earth's rotation such that we get thirty hour days. Two more for work, two more for play, two more for sleep. |
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I seem to remember that in human circadian rhythm experiments, in the absence of external time cues, subjects tended towards a day longer than 24 hours; so this may work very well. A colleague and I experienced 22 hour days for a couple of months while monitoring each other's mosquito experiments (ironically, I was looking at their circadian rhythms using simulated day/night cycles). That was weird but OK. |
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(Edit) Human circadian period is 24 hours and 11 minutes ± 16 minutes, according to Wikipedia. |
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So, that would work better than the current length in that way too. I thought circadian rhythm was twenty-seven hours. |
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+ OK - can I have the contract for making new calendars? |
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That would be rather a short-term thing, [xandram]. There'd be a glut of orders shortly before the first year followed by virtually nothing ever again. People would end up only replacing calendars when they wore out. There would have to be new trends and features to keep people interested enough, or calendars would have to be made to fall apart after a year. Some of them are already made that way, of course. |
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I applaud the notion but there may be some organizational benefit to working more granular, for example, lengthening the minute by .875 seconds. Or perhaps even lengthening the second itself. |
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Maybe we should habitually throw things (or sneeze) to the east a lot to slow down Earth's rotation then. By the way, interesting number. In the Dan Dare universe, there was a civilisation on Mars at that time. |
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I was thinking, in an idea slightly reminiscent of my relative [eleventeenthly], that we should all face the sunrise and get it to trigger off a photic sneeze. Oh, and [tatterdemalion], sorry i missed that and i utterly concur. |
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\\Also, the Martian calendar is based on days of a different length than ours.\\ Stupid Martians. |
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There is a Martian calendar, in fact there are several. All of them assume the real length of the Martian sol. Six hundred and sixty-nine of them to the Martian year. This system would make that six hundred and seventy-seven and a small bit, which is closer to a whole number than the sols are, but further than terrestrial solar days are. |
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Greatness. In a world of 1st, 2nd and 3rd shift, daylight does become irrelevant. I would expect an angry outcry from the agriculturalists, but as they would be doing it in the middle of the night (according to the new calender) no one would notice. |
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My only regret: That I have but one bun to give. |
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//All of them assume the real length of the Martian sol. Six hundred and sixty-nine of them to the Martian year.// |
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With the summer holidays that far apart, that might explain why all the Martians emigrated to more convenient planets. |
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This idea is a lot more sensible than I expected from the title. In fact, I think its sensibility is about the same in magnitude but opposite in sign to my expectation. |
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It would result in more people working at times unrelated to the solar day/night cycle, and probably the same would go for clock time too (people staying sunc with the solar day, e.g.). This would help more people understand and accept my lifestyle, and would therefore make it easier for me to find a job or school program that my body is compatible with. |
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// People would end up only replacing calendars when they wore out. // |
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Or got full of writing. You wouldn't want to mix up your appointments this year with your appointments last year. Still, we can expect the calendar publishing lobby to oppose this proposal. |
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// I would expect an angry outcry from the agriculturalists, but as they would be doing it in the middle of the night (according to the new calender) no one would notice. // |
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For them and anyone else who has a need to stay on the solar day/night cycle, there could be dual-system calendars (especially easy to do in software form) that would let you schedule events in either the old or the new system and see where they fall in the other. |
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