When should we really celebrate the beginning of the year? There is the numerical turning of New Year in the middle of winter (summer for the 'other' hemisphere.) There are either Solstice, Summer or Winter, there is the old argument for Spring as life begins, businesses have various and sundry random fiscal years. I would like to just go with my birthday, but that could get confusing for the other 364ths of the population. I also think that now that we have computers that would make it possible, we could have varying fractions of daylight and dark, so that the hour would be 1/12th of the day, and night. Work in the summer would be longer, but we could nearly hibernate all winter, turned around for night people.
How, in short, would you change the calendar?
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4 comments:
My child wants a day with hours according to the decimal system. She has a point. Twenty-four hours is awkward. I always like the 13 moons of the year, myself.
I like the rigid 12/24 clock, so I detest daylight savings time -- the whole point of laying a regular grid on nature, to my mind, is to be able to watch how much nature deviates from it. I would love to live a few years with a clock that really showed how the daylight was changing year round.
I'll ban analog clocks and make all digital clocks display 00:01. I'll change all calendars so that every day, month, and year is indicated by the numeral '1'.
That way, there'll be no avoiding the realization that I've just arrived, and no ignoring the evidence that all "memories" and "identities" and "truths" are perpetually confabulated between moment '1' and moment '1'.
No start, and no end. An infinite continuation of spring, summer, fall, winter.
Not terribly practical.
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