{TDS} ::= {TZID}{YYYY}{A}{MM}{DD}T{HH}{MM}{SS}
{TZID} ::= {CC}/{ZL}T
{CC} ::= 2-alpha: Country Code (US | CA | MX | UK | FR | IT | DE | SP | JA | RU | CH | IN |
AU | ...)
{Z} ::= 1-alpha: Range of Time Zones for the Country (e.g., US = (E for Eastern | C for
Central | M for Mountain | P for Pacific) ... )
{L} ::= 1-alpha: Seasonal Adjustment Designator (D = Daylight | S = Standard)
T = Time
{A} ::= 1-alpha: A for "AD" ( Anno Domini ["in the Year of Our Lord," and not
"After Death"]) or else "CE" (for Common Era) | B for "BC" (Before Christ) or else "BCE"
(Before the Common Era)(Common Era notation ("BCE" and "CE") may be thought of
as an evasive euphemism, but it may be more politically correct from a secular point of view, as
it
leaves aside the religious issue of "Why invoke Christianity when it is not the exclusive religion
of
humans on this planet?" Regarding the origins of "BC/AD," the Monk, Dionysius Exiguus, is
said
to have coined this notation in the year 525 AD. On rare occasions, for the cognoscenti, one may
also find the abbreviation "EV" in place of "CE," which stands for Era Vulgaris, the
Latin
translation for "Common Era."
{YYYY}::= 4-digit Year, range = [0, 9999]*
{MM} ::= 2-digit Month, range = [01, 12]
{DD} ::= 2-digit Day, range = [01, 31]
{HH} ::= 2-digit Hour, range = [00, 24]
{MM} ::= 2-digit Minute, range = [00, 60]
{SS} ::= 2-digit Second, range = [00, 60]**
Comparisons can be made by offsetting to UTC (Universal Time Coordinated) or GMT
(Greenwich Mean Time) (otherwise known as "ZULU Time" in military jargon and is used by
the
US Air Force Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha, NE for ICBM targeting purposes).
So, for example, if today is "Monday, March 7, 2006 at 5:30 PM PDT," one would then
write the Time-and-Date Stamp as:
US/PDT2006A0307T173000
_________________________________
* The logic for using only four year-digits instead of five or more is as follows: If you go
backwards in time as far as you can (9999B), you effectively encompass all of human recorded
history. If you go forward in time as far as you can (9999A), it's true that you hit a "Y10K"
problem of sorts; but we should be willing to let our progeny deal with this problem, as they will
more likely adopt a new set of calendaring standards by that time anyway. Therefore, I suspect
that four digits represents a good compromise, at least for the time being. The abbreviation
ATB for After the Bang (in billions of years) is popular among
cosmologists for those who might find it useful, but it doesn't fit well with our current
definitions.
** There is no justification for increasing the resolution of the 2-digit seconds field unless one is trying to move a photo telescope or some such thing. But there are metric alternatives available (ms, microsec, ns [nano second], picosec, femtosec, attosec, zeptosec, yactosec, or through the use of scientific notation, which can command infinitely larger negative exponents) in the case where one needs to be even more precise.
*** Just in case one wanted to add Geometric Data (3-D spacial coordinates) to one's
Time/Date Stamp, so that, in principle, one could receive bar-coded correspondence from a far
off
location elsewhere in the universe, how might you do it? Well one method could use one's postal
mailing address [honorific title, name, organizational title, organization, street address, city, state
or province, zip code, and country, voice telephone, FAX, Cell Phone, Beeper, E-mail
address](e.g.,
Dr. L. Stephen Coles
Co-Founder
Gerontology Research Group
664 West Arbor Vitae Street, Suite 1
Inglewood, CA 90301-3160; USA
Voice: 310-412-7787
FAX: 310-412-7788
Beeper: 1-800-471-5431
E-mail: scoles@grg.org )
Continent ("North America")
followed by our Cosmic Address:
3rd Planet from the Sun ("Earth")
Solar System ("Sol")
Galactic Region ("Orion Arm")
Galaxy ("Milky Way")
Group ("Local Group")
Supercluster ("Local Supercluster")
Universe ("Local Universe")
However, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for someone (SETI are you listening?) to answer any request for an alien pen pal.
___________________________________
If anyone wishes to recommend a refinement to these definitions, please let us know.
E-mail: scoles@grg.org
As the pace-of-living quickens with each passing generation, a complete understanding of things temporal still eludes us.
Even the perception of time's passage has been found empirically to accelerate with age. Explanation: The world appears to speed up with age secondary to a slowing down of our older biological (internal) clocks, even though, obviously, time ticks uniformly in the outside world for both young and old alike. The actual quantitative experiment that was conducted to prove this point was to use a standard stop watch as a control for both young and old people chosen randomly (on the street) asking them to say "Now!" when they estimated subjectively how long it took for exactly one minute to pass (without the benefit of any external cues to recalibrate themselves). The younger group said "Now!" at 50 seconds, while the older group (> 60 yo) said "Now!" at 59 seconds, on average. (Clearly, there must have been a cross-over point for middle-agers that was quite accurate in its 1-1 correspondence to the real world.)
[Ref.: Michio Kaku, Physicist from New York City and Narrator of "Time: Part II" BBC-TV (aired in the UK on January 20, 2006).]
The Swatch Company of Biel, SWITZERLAND has created a new time-keeping standard that breaks a day up into 1,000 units (.beats on the Internet).
If all of this seems very technical to you, consider the method that is used to calculate on what particular Sunday we should celebrate Easter (in the Western World). In 325 AD, The Council of Nicea (300 Bishops from around the world) established the following rule: "The first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of Spring (Vernal Equinox), unless that date falls on the first day of the Jewish Passover Festival, in which case Easter shall be moved to the following Sunday after that."
By the way, not everyone agrees that Christmas should fall on December 25th either. Certain cognoscenti/history-afficionados claim that there is evidence that the real birthday of the baby Jesus occurred at another, totally-different time of the year, and a late December day was cleverly chosen to upstage pagan holidays that always came with the Winter Equinox (think Stonehenge). Or, if you believe that certain events should fall on particular days of the week, why should Thanksgiving be the fourth Thursday in November but Halloween on every October 31st regardless of the day of the week (or without begging the question, why should All-Saints'-Day fall on November 1st?)? (Curiously, Canadians choose to celebrate Thanksgiving on the second Monday in October. And why is that? Probably, because it is cooler up there, and Fall harvesting necessarily comes earlier. Furthermore, Canadians have enough sense to celebrate their holidays [except Christmas and New Years] on Mondays, so they can have a three-day weekend.) And furthermore, who figured out this arbitrary and capriciousness business of how many days should each month have and why leap-year days should occur in February and not in December or some other month, anyway?
By adopting the Gregorian Calendar (named for Pope Gregory) to replace the older Roman Julian Calendar (named for Julius Caesar), an unanticipated but important problem was satisfactorily solved but with minor local transition problems for some at that time. The older Julian Calender was defective because it gained about three days every four centuries because the tropical year is just a bit less than the 365-days 6-hours long, which is assumed by intercalating an extra day exactly every four years (leap years). By 1582, when Pope Gregory finally decided to do something about this problem, the Vernal Equinox was creeping backward into early March. So, dropping ten days from the calender put the equinox back at March 21st, where it belonged, while the business of skipping leap years at Century marks (with the exception of every 400 years, when we need to have a "leap day" anyway, as in the year 2000; have you got that?) completed the change. So-called "Leap Seconds," are introduced into atomic clocks periodically, as they are needed. [In case you need to know why, The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) inserts a leap second periodically, every 500 days or so, to compensate for the slowing of the Earth's rotation due to tidal friction from the world's oceans. Otherwise, continuously running atomic clocks after a few years could potentially affect air traffic control systems or economic transactions, not to mention the tracking of communication satellites in orbit around the Earth or the pointing/alignment of telescopes for accurate astronomical observations. To be more precise, an angle expressed as the difference between a time scale measured by the rotation of the Earth ( UT1) and a Uniform Time Scale (or Coordinated Universal Time, as measured by an atomic clock)( UTC), which refers to the angular difference between the direction of the 0° meridian on the Earth and the direction to a point defined astronomically in space. Historically, some form of time, based on the rotation of the Earth, has always been the foundation for "civil time," while the measuring procedures depended on available technology and precision requirements. In our modern practice, UT1 is defined using a fiducial direction defined mathematically in the celestial reference system, referred to as the Mean Sun. From the time of its inception, UTC's rate and/or epoch have been adjusted to keep it near UT1. The current practice is to adjust UTC in epoch by an integer number of seconds (called leap seconds) in order to keep the difference between UT1 and UTC less than 0.9 seconds. UTC is defined by the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR) Recommendation No. 460-4. It must differ from TAI (Temps Atomique International) by an integral number of seconds. TAI is an atomic time scale determined by the Bureau International des Poids et Mesures (BIPM) and the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Its units are exactly one Système Internationale (SI) Second measured at mean sea level.] Anyway, as our universal European standard calendar was being adopted in England a long time ago, there was a brief period when all Englishmen were required to lose ~10 days of their lives (not really), but the history of human timekeeping is filled with interesting tales of opportunism and exploitation and could easily fill a book. The Chinese still celebrate their own New Year sometime in February, while the Thais celebrate theirs in April, but not consistently on the same day from year to year. Whatever are the rules used to determine the exact days could only be discovered by consulting an informant with proper cultural expertise.
And why should months-of-the-year or days-of-the-week be named in Latin after mythological Norse, Roman, or Greek gods (or planets for that matter)? It's certainly clear that there were 5 + 2 = 7 non-twinkling distinguished heavenly bodies [Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, the Moon {Luna}, and the Sun {Sol}] known to our optically-challenged, native-sighted ancient astronomers and caveman predecessors [Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, etc. were not discovered until after Galileo first invented the telescope] at the likely time [around 1,000 BCE] that the days of the week were named that could match the modulo(7) day-count system and astrology was undoubtedly important to the clerics of that time)? The seven-day Judeo-Christian-Roman week has no astronomical basis, as does the day, the month, or the year, and was not formally adopted worldwide until the Roman Emperor Constantine so mandated it in 321 A.D. Curiously, in some languages, like Japanese, days-of-the-week are numbered from one to seven: "Oneday" = Monday; "Twoday" = Tuesday; etc. I always thought that that was really cool. But I don't even know why we have a seven-day week (except that I read in an Old Testament story called Genesis that it only took six days for God to whip up the universe, and on the seventh day, He rested (now called The Sabbath), and all the other religions figured out that it must be a good idea, even if they didn't invent it locally (NIH). Nevertheless, even before the time of the writing of the Old Testament, the ancient Babylonians and Sumerians established a six-day work week with an added day for recreation, so there was a precedent. Even today, people can't figure out when a weekend should start and stop; did you ever notice that? People are still fighting over when the work week should stop, like on Thursday afternoon, given that you have to work on Sunday in many parts of the world.) Why didn't we think of the Japanese (logical) method of naming days? And why perchance is a two- week interval called a "fortnight" (literally "14 nights")? Do we really need such a time unit in everyday speech? And if we do, why not name three weeks' a "twenight"?
Actually, it could have been worse. If there were eight days in a week, it might have matched up better with the phases of the moon (4x8=32), but that didn't work so well with the year being mod(365). And there were rival standards advocated by those ancients who didn't leave a written record as to why they choose their week to be mod(5), mod(6), mod(8), mod(9), or even mod(10), or why hours are mod(12)? Even some moderns amongst us chose different standards before they were soon extinguished. Agrarian societies sometimes chose mod(8) to insert an extra day for marketing. In Stalinist Russia they tried mod(5) or mod(6) for a while, while in Revolutionary France they tried mod(10) for a while. They didn't work either. But even if we were to adopt a universal mod(7) and standardized naming system, who is to say that everybody's "Sunday" would be synchronized around the planet. Well, people like Alexander the Great, the conquering Emperors of the early Roman Empire, and so forth, were probably to be given credit, given that taxes had to be collected while they simultaneously contributed their languages, their numbering systems, their coin-of-the-realm, their civil laws, and their religions to the infidels. Often, the second- and later-born sons of royalty were placed on loan at around five years of age to be raised by a heathen King and Queen in the distant provinces with the understanding that they were to be treated as their own son in their own court. The sons would then come back to Athens, Alexandria, or Rome, whatever, when they became 18 years of age or so. Then, they could serve as linguistically-fluent ambassadors to that foreign kingdom in the next generation of commerce.
Changing to a slightly different topic, it's still worse, that we can't even figure out what punctuation marks to use in our written languages --- like why don't we have an "upsidedown" question mark (¿) (or "upsidedown" exclamation point; [Hello, XML/HTML Standards Committees, are you listening?]) like Spanish writers have done since the beginning? ¿Don't you think that's really cool? But never in my lifetime have I ever heard of anyone (except me) propose to adopt this convention in English. And where is the Greek alphabet in html anyway? Maybe it's out there by now on the Internet, and my knowledge is too antiquated to locate it. Speaking of alphabets, why do continue to indulge the creators of our 26-letter Latin alphabet, so filled with useless redundancy. One could easily eliminate, the letter "c", for example, replacing it with "k" or "s", as phonetically appropriate (cat = kat; cycle = sykle, etc.), but would you bother to ask a random Latin ancestor what the logic was for such-and-so, when they did their arithmetic in Roman numbers instead of Arabic (which at least had the digit "zero")? (Big Roman numbers are routinely used today by movie studios to conceal the date of copyright from ordinary folk watching the credits roll at the end of a movie.) I still own a slide rule, but I never use it today. We should, for sure, eliminate the letter pair "ph", as in "telephone," replacing it with an "f". "Ph" was inherited from the Greek letter "phi" and shamelessly imported into the Cyrillic alphabet as a cognate phoneme for foreign words that have no counterpart in the Russian sound system (like "telephone"). English is capable of evolving somewhat (e.g., we no longer are "burdened" with the pronouns "thee, thou, and thine," except on occasion when reading/listening to Shakespear [or his King James contemporaries] [although the French retain their counterpart familial pronouns to good advantage to indicate social propinquity, e.g., one would never say, "I love you"; one would only say, "I love thee." Also, the French have very cleverly imported the word "Yes" from Spanish ("Si," rather than "Oui," but not the French word for "if") to serve as a contradictory affirmation to a presuppositional interrogative... e.g., Q: "You didn't finish your work, did you? A: Yes (Si), I did." used to properly disabuse the asker of a false assumption. This "yes" particle, unfortunately, has no English counterpart. Too bad. Why not?]) How can we get things fixed when they're so conspicuously screwed up, and we don't even seem to know that our language is in such serious disrepair, since none of your English teachers ever seemed to care? Can we ask a computational linguist what could-have-been/should-have-been/could-still-be? The inventors of Esperanto and George Bernard Shaw had their go at it in the last century but didn't come away with any applause for their efforts, as I recall. Simply importing just a few symbols from mathematical logic into everyday written English would make our language so much more effective and I can't imagine why we don't even suggest it; every time you read a newspaper story about an event, for example, but most people, sadly, don't even know that these symbols exist, let alone what they mean when they are shown them. Even though the language can evolve from old (Beowulf) English to modern English, there seems to no will to even let it evolve (in my own lifetime), except through the mechanism of teenage slang or Valley Girl Talk (e.g., "Like I was so angry, when he said that!") which I find to be syntactically rebarbative (I always wanted to find a good use for this beautiful word, which means "repellent").
Before the adoption of Standard Time in 1883, America was a laissez-faire country as far as time keeping was concerned. Farmers got up at dawn where ever they happened to live. City- dwellers also kept their own time. If it was 11:32 AM in Buffalo it might be 11:41 AM in New York City. And so what? (Think of the liberating effect of not caring what time it was in other parts of the country.) But the railroad industry became increasingly frustrated by the capricious local time-keeping customs of different cities along their tracks. After all, how could passengers figure out (without being a savant) when they had to leave in order to have a reasonable chance of making an appointment elsewhere? So Standard Time was adopted by law. Efficiency eclipsed the sun (God's time) as America's time keeper. Accordingly, the U.S. was divided into four "Time Zones": Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific. Borderline cities and counties in different states were permitted to choose their preferred time zone, so long as it was contiguous. Later, other non-intuitive problems had to be solved with the reconciliation of US time zones (our four continental zones plus new ones for Hawaii and Alaska) with the natural geographical boundaries of individual states. For example, why should Nevada be in Pacific Time but not in Mountain Time? Is it because Las Vegas needs to be close to Los Angeles, it's main source of economic revenue?
Another curious problem is the location of the International Date Line (IDL). Zigzagging across the waters of the Pacific Ocean near the 180° Meridian, it is plotted on today's charts and globes to indicate the boundary line between 'today' and 'tomorrow.' Despite its name, its precise location was never really fixed by any international law, treaty, or agreement. Although its exact location would seem to be a matter of little concern to most people, it did become a serious issue during the recent years of 1999 and 2000, as this would determine which of the numerous islands straddling its course across the Pacific Ocean could claim itself to be the first to inaugurate the new Millennium. The Circumnavigator's Paradox is another problem that arises by considering a hypothetical race between two individuals traveling in opposite directions around the Equator one going East and the other going West, who then meet at their point of origin. The winner of contest might be the one who crossed the International Date Line in an advantageous direction and thereby gained a day. The earliest known reference to this paradox can be found in the works of the Syrian Prince and geographer/historian Isma'il ibn 'Ali ibn Mahmud ibn Muhammad ibn Taqi ad-Din 'Umar ibn Shahanshah ibn Ayyub al Malik al Mu'ayyad 'Imad ad-Din Abu 'l-Fida [1273 - 1331]. In his Taqwin al-Buldan, Abu 'l-Fida described how a traveler, depending on his direction of travel, would either lose or gain a day at the completion of his trip. But we can safely forget this particular problem, since it has no practical application.
Another temporal curiosity is the twice-a-year shift from Daylight Savings Time (DST) in the Spring and Standard Time in the Fall. According to a new book, Seize the Daylight, by David Pereau, the Father of DST was the English architect William Willett, who campaigned for its adoption in the first decade of the 20th-Century. Willett made the case that extending Summer daylight hours would allow for more enjoyable leisure time after work and save money on energy. He published his ideas in a 1907 pamphlet titled The Waste of Daylight, which was reprinted in several different languages. But despite Willett's efforts to convince the UK Parliament to change English clocks, he did not succeed by the time of his death in 1915 at age 58. The year before Willett died, World War I broke out in Europe. On April 30, 1916, Germany, Britain's enemy in the war itself adopted DST to save money on fuel. Spurred on by the Germans, Parliament enacted the Summer Time Act of 1916 on May 17th, which pushed clocks forward one hour. Many Englishmen referred to the change as "Willett Time."
In America, Cincinnati businessman E.H. Murdock was intrigued by Willett's idea. He even discussed it in a White House meeting with President William Howard Taft in 1909. However, Murdock was unsuccessful in moving the cause from idea to reality. As in Europe, it was World War I that pushed America to act. President Woodrow Wilson signed DST into law on March 19, 1918, 11 months after declaring war on Germany. After the Great War was over, farmers, who hated DST, convinced us to revert back to Standard Time all year. Then, during World War II, it was readopted. Finally, the Uniform Time Act of 1966 established DST as the national standard, but there was an idiosyncracy in the law. Legislators left it up to individual states whether they ought to comply. The Act set DST from the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October. In 1986, an amendment changed DST to its current format starting at 2 AM on the first Sunday in April to 2 AM on the last Sunday in October, and that's why Trick-or-Treat on Halloween night always seems darker than normal. See Michael Downing, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Times, (Shoemaker and Hoard; 202 pages; List = $23; ISBN: 1593760531; 2005); David Prerau, Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Savings Time (Thundermouth Press, Inc.; 2006 ); and Mark Peteres, "Some Say Daylight Saving Time Is Just a Waste of Time: Springing Forward Doesn't Conserve Energy, Says One Author, Because a Later Sunset Lets People Do More," The Los Angeles Times (March 10, 2007). Also, activating DST on Sunday, March 11, 2007 proves that the first Sunday in April is no longer considered a sacred time to start the process. This led to a lot of computer glitches.
So what's the problem? After 1945, those states and cities who capriciously choose not to
comply with the change might cause the hour to flip back and forth several times in a matter of
traveling a few miles. Even today, Arizona, Hawaii, and parts of Indiana still resist the change.
Indiana, in particular, is an egregious example of shameless horological schizophrenia.
The Capital, Indianapolis, follows EST all year without observing Daylight Time, while
Evansville in the Southwest corner of the state follows CST but does observe Daylight Time.
Therefore, within the same state at some times of the year it's the same time, while at other times,
it's not!
[Note: As of April 2006, we will no longer be able to exploit the state of Indiana as a poster child
for temporal stupidity. In May 2005, the governor of Indiana signed legislation in Indianapolis
implementing daylight saving time. Efforts to make the statewide switch had failed for more
than two dozen times before lawmakers narrowly approved DST last month. The measure will
leave just Hawaii and most of Arizona in the embarrassing predicament as the only states to
ignore this obvious measure.] I, personally, back in the year 1957, discovered that a military base
(Eglin Air Force Base in Florida) remained on standard time while all the surrounding part of
Florida went on DST, which caused our party to be exactly one-hour late for a very important
appointment that was missed after two days of travel needed to get us there.
Sir Arthur Clarke's has complained vociferously but to no avail to the Cylonese government to adopt a form of Daylight Savings Time that will move the clock twice a year by 60 minutes instead of 30 minutes. Imagine trying to conduct business on an international telephone call with this additional «-hour constraint! Sri Lanka Time (SLT) is a special time zone just for Sri Lanka. It is 5 1/2 hours ahead of GMT/UTC (UTC+5:30). Hello. What's going on? Sri Lanka Time reverted on April 15, 2006 00:00 to match Indian Standard Time calculated from the Allahabad Observatory in India 82.5 longitude East of Greenwich; UK, the Reference Point for GMT. The entire country shares the same time. Since 1880, Ceylon or Sri Lanka Time has varied between GMT+05:30 to GMT+06:30 hours. (Gasp!)
Most recently, the Bush Administration is seeking in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, a Bill that won approval in a joint Senate/House Conference Committee but is not yet signed as law, to extend DST by four weeks starting in the year 2007 (starting three weeks earlier and ending one week later [the 1st Sunday in April > the 2nd Sunday in March; while the last Sunday in October > the 1st Sunday in November]) on the grounds that it would save more energy in a time of tight oil supplies. Consider Halloween with an hour of additional light! But worse, we don't use oil to make electricity where the potential savings are supposed to come from (we use coal and nuclear primarily for electricity). And still worse, there would be a trend toward driving for additional leisure activities after coming home from work, which would actually make it counterproductive as far as oil savings is concerned! Oh well, is there logic for the government to ignore the cost of fixing all our computer chips that automatically change the hour for us? This would be another "Y2K Problem"' of sorts, much worse than the "leap second" problem in which astronomers attempt to keep Greenwich Mean Time synchronized with the moon's relationship to the Earth and Sun. [The sidereal month or time period for one lunar revolution around the Earth is ~27 days, 7 hours, 43 minutes. (For the cognoscenti, there is also a synodic month of ~29 days, 12 hours, 44 minutes, defined by the "phases" of the moon {full, gibbous, half, quarter, new, etc.}.) The orbit of the moon is slightly elliptical with a perigee (when the moon is nearest the Earth) of about 227,000 miles (365,000 Km), and an apogee(when the moon is farthest from the Earth) of about 254,000 mi (409,000 Km). The angle of declination of the Moon's orbit with respect to the plane of the ecliptic (where all the other planets live) is about 5o However, over long periods of time, the distance from the Earth to the moon is increasing because the moon is slowly moving away from the Earth. And, why is that? Ocean tides (the twice-daily rise and fall of sea level) are caused by the flow of water toward the two points on the Earth's surface that are instantaneously directly beneath the moon and directly opposite the moon. Because of frictional drag, the Earth's rotation carries the two tidal bulges slightly forward of the line connecting Earth and the moon. The resulting torque slows the earth's rotation, as mentioned above, while increasing the moon's orbital velocity. As a result, our 24-hour day is getting slightly longer (as discussed above) while the moon is slowly drifting farther away from the Earth, over time, at the rate of 3.8 cm per year. The moon also raises much smaller "tides" in the solid crust of the Earth, regularly deforming its shape slightly which also generates heat. The tidal influence of the Earth on the moon is what was responsible for making the moon's own period of rotation and revolution equal, so that the same side of the moon always faces the Earth (so, the only way to see the back side of the moon is to photograph it while going around it during a space mission. However, the moon does not have a "dark side" as does the planet Mercury. Indeed, the moon like the Earth is uniformly illuminated by the sun over time, but if you were living there you wouldn't see a colorful sunset or sunrise, since the moon as no atmosphere. As a curiosity, the planet Pluto and its moon Charon are mutually locked in a gravitational sense, so that they tend to move around the sun as though they were attached to one another by an invisible thread {dumbbell}.) The moon appears larger to us when it's near the horizon than when it's near its zenith simply because of an optical illusion caused by the Earth's atmosphere. Similarly for apparent colors at different times of the year, like the so-called Harvest Moon (the full moon at the time of the Autumnal Equinox in the Northern Hemisphere) or Hunter's Moon (the full moon one month later). So, now you get a small feeling for why the ingenious ancient astronomers (without telescopes), who were trying to predict the exact location and time of full and partial eclipses of the sun and moon, had a difficult time of it and why today being a professional astronomer calculating orbits for precise "soft" landings on different celestial objects is not a business for amateurs.]
Conclusion: Despite all our modern cities, science and technology, landing on the moon, and such, we are burdened with this huge invisible infrastructure of arbitrary and irrational nonsense that we just can't seem to shake. Americans can't even switch to the metric system, presumably for the same reason that we can't junk the "QWERTY" keyboard (which is conspicuously/demonstrably inefficient); and god forbid that we would ever attempt to rationalize our language (like phonetic spelling, the regularizing of the idiotic past tense of a numerous irregular verbs, or the systematic elimination of ~100 homonyms [I have compiled a list, if only you were to ask.]). I'm not asking for grammarians in high school to rely on BNF (Backus Naur Form), which are used in formal computer programming languages. Is it too much to ask that British and Americans agree on how to spell a few dozen words (favor = favour? center = centre? (French?)) in their common language. It's not exactly "which side of the street to drive on" (which has a lot of hysteresis, as a multiple-lock-in phenomenon). And don't get me started on the irrational method that professional musicians have used for centuries to express notes on paper with bass and treble clefs and using sharps and flats, etc., which is really pathetic. Or why was there ever such a monetary unit as the Guinea (Gn)(valued at 21 Shillings) instead of the Pound Sterling (£)(valued at 20 Shillings). In Victorian times, only artists, doctors, and lawyers (barristers, solicitors, attorneys) requested their clients to pay them in guineas on their invoices. Everybody else found pounds to be quite adequate, thank you. Mercifully, the English decided to do away with this archaic unit in 1971 when they finally decimalized their currency. Someday, the British may even adopt the Euro, as the rest of Western Europe has done a few years ago.
It my considered opinion, the most egregious, ghastly, grotesque, reprehensible, detestable, pernicious, odious, insidious, and infuriating misuse of units of measurement is not the use of furlongs for distance at the race track, fathoms for depth of the ocean by mariners, or carets for weight in sizing precious stones, but Troy ounces for weight in the context of measuring quantities of precious metals, like gold, silver, platinum, palladium, etc. on the commodities exchange (by the bar = bullion; rather than by the coin [e.g., South African Krugerrand]). (Think Fort Knox.) Why? Because it's a totally gratuitous distinction in which 1 ounce = 1/16th pound (technically an avoirdupois ounce), while 1 Troy ounce = ~1.1 (avoirdupois) ounces; i.e., a Troy ounce is about 10 percent heavier (Troy, by the way doesn't come from the Greek city of Troy but the French city of Troyes during the Middle Ages). Curiously, 1 Troy pound contains 12 Troy ounces (not 16). So what accounts for the intensity of your complaint, you ask? Certainly not weirdness. There's already a lot of weirdness out there that you choose to ignore. For example, you didn't get all emotional about the resolution of stock trades on the Dow Jones when the finest resolution was simply changed by agreement from a fraction of a dollar (1/8th) to a penny (a decimal system) on one particular day after more than a century on the old (stupid) system. The answer is that I perceive Troy ounces for gold to be a legally-sanctioned conspiracy by rich people to keep poor people (non players) out of their club. You can only be ripped off as an intelligent poor person seeking to buy gold, if you're not an insider. Say you weigh your bar of gold on a bathroom scale and then try to calculate what it's worth by looking at the day's exchange rate in USDollars/oz in The Wall Street Journal, not that you'd buy it in a garage sale. But anyway, having a Ph.D. in physics, would still allow you to be exploited by the financial conspiracy, if you get my point, since this is something which is never taught in any school leading to a degree in science, as far as I know. I guess the institutional players feel that you don't need to learn it in school, since you'll learn it on the job, if you ever need to know it. Real players are taught by their parents or their bosses, not by going to school or by being smart and picking it up on your own. So, you don't know our rules; we'll happily eat your lunch, Mr. Smart Alec.
If Western Civilization marched (in an approximately westward trajectory) from Thebes to Babylon to Athens to Rome to Venice to Madrid to Paris to London to New York (or Bos/Wash = Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Miami), and most recently to Los Angeles (San/San = San Diego, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Jose, San Francisco), over a period of 8,000 years, where are we going to go next? Is it so hard to connect the dots on a sphere?
Oh well, while we're at it, let's not forget that 1 Hubble Time is another unit for the "BIG BANG!" Have a nice "day" (24 hours?). Where did I put my sundial?
Refs.:
1. Pascal Richet, A Natural History of Time (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL;
2007).
French Geophysicist Pascal Richet makes the point that ancient men lived their lives with a
perception of time as a seasonal or cyclic reality; precise linear quanta of time moving
relentlessly from past to present to future is a relatively recent concept, giving us the ability to
synchronize our watches and set a time and place for a future meeting. At one point, tribes
allowed for a variable number of minutes in each hour to ensure that there would always be a
fixed number of hours from dawn to sunset no matter what the season. That sounds cool. A
peculiar calculation for the age of the Earth came in 169 AD, when the Bishop of Antioch
declared that "our world has been in existence for 5,698 years plus a few odd months and days."
It was not until the mid 18th-Century that scientific evidence from astronomy, biology, and
geology began to accumulate, and much longer time scales could be appreciated. Even today, the
Biblical chronology of creation holds sway over a large portion of our population, and the literal
believers have no clue as to the true age of the universe -- billions of years.
2. "Venezuela: A Decree for the Clocks," The New York Times , p. A9 (August 21,
2007).
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has decreed that his country's clocks be moved forward by
half an hour at the start of 2008 to help the metabolism and productivity of his citizens. This
will also be accompanied by a move to a six-hour work day. [Gasp!]
3. Andrew Robinson, The Story of Measurement (Thames and Hudson; 2007).
4. Ian Whitelaw, A Measure of All Things: The Story of Man and Measurement (St.
Martin's Press; 2007).
5. Ian R. Bartky, One Time Fits All: The Campaigns for Global Uniformity (Stanford
University Press, Stanford, CA; 2007).