Nah, the weirdest time zone is Africa/Addis_Ababa, which nobody in Ethiopia follows.
Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm).
Instead the locals offset the time by 6 hours. So the AM cycle starts at dawn (i.e. 6am), and the PM cycle starts at dusk (i.e. 6pm).
Positioning the beginning of a new day at noon, and a new year t a solstice, is just a technical convenience, because these are easy to detect with very simple astronomy tools.
Then shouldn't the start of the year be when the year is "born"? Or alternatively, the end of the year when the year "dies"? January 1 is neither.
It slowly grows after that and blooms later.
Which is exactly what we did.
I don't think anyone actually believes Jesus was born on Dec 25.
Now whether you yourself believe he was born then, another time or ever existed at all etc is another story.
I believe for example that everyone can believe whatever they want about those things as long as:
They leave me alone when I tell them I don't believe that and I don't want to be convinced
They don't try to kill me, enslave me, etc for being an infidel (yes that includes the Christian holy wars sort of thing but also current events)Children and people who have only a superficial knowledge of Christianity might very well believe otherwise. But they are poorly-informed.
Arguments against include:
a) Calendar dates are generally fuzzy from that period, particularly for events that are not formally documented. So the likelihood of anyone ever having known the correct date is very low.
b) The mythology around the birth does not match the seasonal expectations for late December (more likely springtime).
c) Dec 25 was chosen in 336 AD, by church decree. Prior to that, there was no holiday nor even a strong claim of any specific date.
d) Dec 25 was already a festival day for pagan celebrations of Saturn (Rome) and Mithra (Persia), which was likely a factor in the choice of date, to coincide with existing customs.
There are no substantial arguments in favor of December 25 being the accurate birth date of Jesus.
I don't think anyone actually believes ...
When this is pointed out, he explains why it can't be Dec 25th and that's all totally fine and correct but doesn't change the fact that yes indeed there are people that believe that, as well as lots of other things that can easily be disproved. It does not matter whether you can disprove it to us and others. These people that do believe it are in fact out there.
25 of December is close to the winter solstice (around 22nd), and I suspect it was ascribed to that day for astrological reasons; there are a few other astrological clues around that episode, most prominently, the Bethlehem Star.
Mar 31 - Aug 31 - Jan 31
Apr 30 - Sep 30 - Feb 28/29
May 31 - Oct 31
Jun 30 - Nov 30
Jul 31 - Dec 31
That highlights a few interesting cycles you can use to calculate dates from a simple count of days from the start of the year:
153 days every 5 months
61 days every 2
31 days per month
An "early reset" occurs every second month, jumping to the next 2-month cycle after the second day 30. Another occurs after every fifth month, jumping into a new 2-month cycle halfway through the last one of the 5-month. And of course, end of the year breaks the third "5-month" cycle WAY early, just before even its first 2-month is finished.
I won't try to detail the process of generating dates from this here, but I'm sure most of us here can work it out with just a little effort. Instead, here's a couple more fun facts to consider:
If you DO start the calendar from March, counting it as month 1, September (7) through December (10) map rather nicely to their own numeric positions. That seems a pretty strong hint, to me.
And I REALLY love this one:
The Gregorian cycle consists of four centuries. The first three are 36,524 days each: 100 years x 365 days + 24 days for the leap years. The hundredth year (ending in 00) is NOT considered a leap year, EXCEPT for every FOURTH hundredth. So that's 4 centuries * 36,524 days = 146,096, plus 1 more for the leap century, for 146,097.
That number is EXACTLY divisible by 7, which means the week cycle repeats WITH the Gregorian one. Good thing! Otherwise, we'd have to wait 2800 years!
- months are counted as 3, 4, 5, ..., 14, with 13 and 14 being January and February of the following year
- the contribution of the month to the day of the week is floor(2.6 * (m+1)) - the 2.6 comes from the 13 "extra" days (over the approximation 1 month = 4 weeks) in every 5 months.
That's why there frequent confusion about George Washington's birthday, along with other historical dates of that era: The New Year started in March when he was born, but changed to January during his lifetime (The British Empire switched in 1752). So being born in February, there's an ambiguity about the year, unless you specify which calendar you mean:
"George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, according to the Gregorian calendar. However, when he was born, the Julian calendar was in use, which would have placed his birth on February 11, 1731."
Peoples as diverse as Celts, Romans, Slavs, Babylonians, Hindus, and various peoples in China all used a variety of a calendar where the yearly changes were aligned around modern October-November and modern March-April.
A calendar with the year starting in January and with astronomically (more) precise years was promulgated by Julius Caesar in -46. (I suspect the introduction of the concepts of Babylonian astrology to Rome a century before may have played a role in the desire to align the calendar to stars and not to earthly affairs.)
And before that they they started years from 1st of March, which is much closer to one of the Equinoxes, which is what all sane people (including french revolutionaries) consider to be the proper start of a year.
I live far from the equator - "Dawn" is sometimes after breakfast, and "Dusk" can happen before I get off work.
Then you get above the Arctic Circle, and there are days with neither. :D
The beauty of the "English clock", which isn't English at all, is that it simply defines a way to refer to the same point in time with a number (never mind that Daylight savings" nonsense) and you can refer to it whether you are a farmer, a software developer, a waiter, you live Africa or the arctic circle all the same.
If you live on the 45th parallel like I do, it isn’t logical at all since the length of a day is constantly shifting.
7 AM is 1 Saac ( Hour 1)
6 PM is 12 Saac ( Hour 12)
7 PM is 1 Saac
6 AM is 12 Saac
> 7 PM is 1 Saac
How do you distinguish AM/PM? How does one say that something will happen 19:00 specifically, and not 07:00?
https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...
In a place with considerable skew in daylight hours between the summer and the winter, this would be quite unintuitive, because daylight hours would become longer (and night hours shorter) during winter and spring, and the opposite for summer and autumn.
Either that, or a fixed conventional notion of "dawn" which only corresponds to the sun rising around the Equinoxes. Either way would be unintuitive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_calendar
The Ethiopian calendar has twelve months, all thirty days long, and five or six epagomenal days, which form a thirteenth month.
I like that Tolkien’s legendarium got the first mention here though.
Sometimes priests moved these days to suit political shenanigans.
Caesar ended this madness and "rationalised" the system, coincidentally making his year-long consulship last for 446 days.
The west inherits from the Romans, and Julius Caesar standardized away the Roman intercalary month by glomming it into Feburary. Before that a "priest" (the pontifex maximus) (in scare-quotes because it was a political office) would add that month on an ad-hoc basis. Not so different!
That must have been fun for the Romans here in Scotland - an hour would be roughly two and a half time as long in winter as in summer!
Mechanical clocks in Japan were designed to handle those situations:
> Adapting the European clock designs to the needs of Japanese traditional timekeeping presented a challenge to Japanese clockmakers. Japanese traditional timekeeping practices required the use of unequal time units: six daytime units from local sunrise to local sunset, and six night-time units from sunset to sunrise.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_clock#Temporal_hours
Look where the sun is, remember where it is at sunrise/-set (much easier if you're outside every day) and then mentally divide the sky into segments and just ballpark it.
Well, maybe that was another problem with Scotland... ;-)
No wonder they built a few walls and retreated south....
Ethiopia is one of the ancient Christian countries, the second of officially convert and the Ethiopian Ortodox Church still seems prominent. I assume that's the reason why.
FWIW, the English-speaking world used to switch years on March 25: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_(New_Style)_Act_1750#...
Neither of these are technically things that tzdb can even talk about. They're concerned with civil time, not calendars or other "reckoning" problems.
I object to the latter since software is not the source of truth, the social practices it aims to encode are. It is perfectly reasonable to say that this particular practice is so rare that it is out of scope, but this makes tzdb a not quite correct approximation of reality, rather than reality an approximation of tzdb.
There are people who want to end any other human to ever live homeless in starvation or any kind of poverty and there are people who want to eliminate anyone they judge as threat or a nuisance while reinforcing there feeling that they dominate everything that will ever matter in the world and the rest.
Software can help all kind of purpose.
Let me define "local snoozing time" (LST): it's set to my local standard timezone as of today, but every time I hit the snooze button on my morning alarm it shifts 9 minutes backwards (the length of the snooze). By definition, I wake up at 8am in LST, regardless of what the world is doing.
If the time shifts by more than one hour compared to the prevailing timezone, LST shifts forwards by a whole number of hours on Saturday morning, 2am LST to minimize that difference.
This timezone is "boring" but uncomputable, since it depends on unpredictable events.
This would also give a nice 3-part division to the day that matches their use: 1st 8 hours for the morning, next 8 hours for the afternoon, and the next 8 hours for evening/night. Currently, morning alone is 12 hours, and afternoon is like 6 (or less) and the evening takes the rest.
But I guess the current noon time is chosen for when the sun is highest in the sky, so maybe to preserve noon as the transition point, morning should start from 4:00 hrs, then the afternoon starts from 12:00 hours, and evening would start from 20:00 hours.