After one of those mornings when one wants to clobber the next human being brave enough to enter one's office with yet another picayune "problem", you serve as a tonic to the intellect.

Thank you.

Actually, I understand the first water clocks did have variable hours.

(There's no reason I can think of that a pendulum or gear clock couldn't use that same cone system to regulate the hours either, but I don't know if any did.)

(Easily findable on Web, but http://www.digitalsundial.com/videos.html
gives you the idea.)

Thank you.

I had this terrible feeling that I was the only one wandering the planet (not that I make a habit of wandering. Perhaps I should.) and having to explain that turn of phrase to the unenlightened. Now I know I'm not alone.

Each year they made Daylight Savings Time longer, until one day it lasted the whole year round. Then it was spring forward, always spring forward, and never fall back, until noon was where midnight used to be and midnight lost in noon.

In the end it did no good.

The world grew darker, and darker, and darker still.

Likewise the newspaper column will give Cancer as something like June 22 to July 21, during most of which time the Sun will actually be in Gemini, while at the Solstice itself it will be two houses along in Taurus.

Here's a nice analemma picture from Delphi.

We have too much time on our hands.

Michelle: if you used a sundial, you would no longer have too many hands on your time... (assuming you swing analog, of course)

But I have never seen a good noncircular definition of time, per se. Maybe one of these days (as it were :-)

I once read a book called Runic Astrology by Nigel Pennick. His rants about the evilness of time zones and Daylight Savings Time were something to behold. He was all about Local Apparent Noon.

Interestingly, that means there are only two latitudes (the tropics) on Earth where the sun is directly overhead exactly once during the year. All other latitudes get two (between the tropics) or none (outside the tropics). But of course they move around from year to year, longitudinally-wise-speaking, as my favorite radio personality would put it.

It would be interesting to map the places where the sun is directly overhead (i.e. the point where LAN coincides with the Solstice on a tropic, and interpolated for LAN corresponding to the appropriate declinations elsewhere). My instinct says it would be a big sinusoidal curve, not phasing with its overlap (since the solstices and equinoxes vary quite a bit by time of day). But I don't know, and the calculations are beyond my abilities at this time.

Another exercise to baffle the mind: for a given point between the tropics, how long is it between times when the sun is directly overhead? Make reasonable assumptions about the size of a "point" and degrees to use for the orb of noon.

What do you suppose all this means in terms of those of us who don't wear a watch?

This will mean that civil time will begin to drift away from solar time; given long enough, the sun would rise at midnight. It will take about 600 years for the difference to reach an hour.

(The dire consequences are outlined at http://www.ucolick.org/~sla/leapsecs/dutc.html )

Of particular interest to me as an astronomer would be the failure of telescope pointing systems between 2025 and 2027 (depending on the value chosen for the deceleration of the Earth); of particular interest to this thread would be the "failure" of analemmatic sundials (being off by more than 2 minutes) between 2083 and 2116.

Absent new adjustments such as a leap hour, noon would become midnight by 5033.

We recently heard a talk on this issue in the astronomy department; it was the opinion of the man giving the talk that there's nothing we could do about it, as the decision was being made by shadowy committees somewhere and well-funded telecommunications firms were backing the change.

(I note in passing that the Director of Time, at the US Naval Observatory, has the coolest job title in the world.)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4271810.stm describes the British opposition.

Other than that, I hooted (and "which in your case you have not got", among other places).

TK

I was reminded just now by the television mounted to the wall behind my desk, that on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, they ring a loud bell every day at 4 o'clock. Perhaps to allow the traders to set their watches.

Dating myself here: Does anybody else remember the Feiffer cartoon on Nixon's DST extension during the early '70s energy worries? "Today we're going to show you how to keep warmer in winter by cutting a foot off one end of your blankets... and sewing it onto the other end. We call this Daylight Savings Time!"

And more exact than the quarter of an hour no human needs to know the time. All those minutes and seconds are just overexactitude which hinders rather than helps.

(And thanks for reminding me that I need a sundial on the house.)

anyway, it loses a lot in the translation, but in the right hands/mouth it is a very good KY story.

Here, for your amusement, is a picture of the Time Ball in the port of Hamburg: http://www.fremo.org/betrieb/images/timeball.jpg

What's an example of famous authors playing Jeopardy!?

Chartres dates back way before the Templars or the "modern" Gothic cathedral; its religious significance goes back to the Druids, who seem to have worshipped there before Julius Caesar came, saw, and conquered.

My dad, who worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, would refer to "railroad time" as late as the 1960s. Though standard time had been in force for several decades by then, "railroad time" in Dad's day was more in reference to daylight savings time, or the lack of it: back then some communities started and stopped observing daylight on different dates than others, or not at all, and not just Indiana either. Dad had to keep the time the railroad did, which I believe was as you say, Philadelphia time.

As for the three ornery states: Hawaii doesn't need daylight time as much, because in the tropics the difference in the lengths of days and nights are much less. In Honolulu, for example, sunrise on June 21 is 5:50 a.m. and sunset 7:16 p.m., less than an hour and a half, compared with, say, Boston's 5:08 and 8:25, more than three hours (I adjusted the Boston times to Daylight Time). Arizona is (a) conservative as all heck and (b) far enough south that they can get away with it. And Indiana is a case unto itself. For one thing, some parts of the state feel they're in the wrong time zone. (I love the fine distinction in this line from the Wikipedia article: "Technically, during the summer months, this meant most of Indiana was on Eastern Standard Time, but functionally most of the state was on Central Daylight Time.") But yes, they are pretty much "buckling in" on DST as of next year.

Terry, as for your nit, officially you're right, but everyone says "daylight savings" anyways. :-)

Footnote: I wanted to say "being not as bold as love", then cross out "bold as love" and add "tilted," but couldn't get a strikethrough to show.

I know most people say savings, but (as with the adverb) I shall fight a rear-guard action to defend it.

Everybody needs a windmill.

Or - what time zone would Verizon use (WTZWVU?)

For navigation, ships want their timepieces as accurate as possible. The astronomers had several important observations to make at noon, so every day at exactly 1.00pm, the time ball on top of the tower would drop to signal the correct time to the city and harbour below. At the same time a cannon at Fort Denison (on Pinchgut Island) was fired. Although the cannon no longer fires, the ball drop continues (I think).

The rather sad story of the Sydney southern star catalogue: David King and Nick Lomb, Proceedings of the Royal Society of New South Wales (Vol 116, p 53).

Should I assume you're joking?

On the chance that you're not, this is a nonviable idea. Understand a basic principle of time: the only times that matter to you, as an individual, are when things happen and how long has elapsed/is remaining until those instants.

Understand that we never had "continuous time zones." We had places setting the town clock by an approximation of local solar noon, and waiting for it to gain or lose enough to be noticeable.* Towns that might have been exactly a solar hour apart might, in terms of local time, be anywhere from thirty to ninety minutes -- probably some odd number in between. Standard time was created not because the town clock didn't serve the town adequately, but because commerce and communication required that you know, exactly, what time it was down the line.

With the system we have, everyone has the same minute count (with the very few exceptions of 30-minute subzones, which are frankly more a local notion of solar propriety than something necessitated by the system). There are now twenty-four discrete hour differences, but those are (relatively) easy to correct for, and more importantly, they are fixed. Constantly "correcting" one's watch for local solar time would mean, in the temperate zones, moving by about a minute every time one went ten miles east or west. (It would vary by latitude, which makes it worse.) In other words, it would be impossible to compare watches with anyone who wasn't exactly on your meridian, and as you drove east or west trying to get to an appointment, your timepiece would slip backward or forward. To arrive on time, you'd have to know the time differential to the nearest minute, and set an elapsed-time side counter to figure out how close you were to making it.

In short, nobody would have any useful knowledge of what time it was. This may be swell if you're a particle and Werner Heisenberg is looking for you, but it's not much good for human society. If you actually wanted to simplify matters and be "futuristic," have everyone, everywhere, keep GMT and accept that local sunrise might come at 1800. Those of us who are already dissasociated from the day-night cycle wouldn't care. Just remember that you're still going to need an International Date Line somewhere.

*The old story of The Caliph's Clock is applicable here.

Precession is cool. You can demonstrate it with a top or gyroscope, and the idea that the whole Earth is doing that wobble every 26,000 years is also cool.

There's a star map of the Northern Precession Circle here.

I don't know about famous authors, but Rick Cook won a decent year's income on Jeopardy some years back.

It also is played for about a half hour every day, at 11:45 am and 3:45 pm. Since it doesn't have a full keyboard of chimes this can produce some interesting renderings of songs...

It can be heard for some distance. When I lived within a mile of campus you could hear it striking the hours and quarters during the quieter hours of the night.

Lori

A quick google search for the phrase turns up little else, excepting references to a story called the Caliph's son, and some flakey erotica.

Having never read it, I am wicked-curious, Mr. Ford, do enlighten!
-R

OK, but I was referring to the idea of Chaucer answering Asimov, when he lived 300 years before. Thus Jeopardy, where the answer comes before the question.

“It changes from Wednesday to Thursday at midnight, doesn’t it?” Hugh had begun.

“Sometimes,” said Balbus cautiously.

“Always,” said Lambert decisively.

“Sometimes,” Balbus gently insisted. “Six midnights out of seven, it changes to some other name.”

The less obscure one, of course, is "Around the World in Eighty Days," by Verne, which was written earlier.

Meaning that people on Stockholm time would be early for their trains, instead of the Gothenburgers missing theirs.

I revised my judgement of this from "annoying" to "convenient" when I lost my watch last week; it means I don't need to find a clock as long as I know the time within an hour.

Maudlin Reminiscence Theater over, I know the story has broader provenance -- a Google brought up a mention that someone's doing it as a student opera -- but it seems to be rarer than I'd thought.

Anyway: A Caliph, who is fascinated by new things, and his Vizier, who for the first time in such tales is not a scheming bastard, accept the visit of a Yankee Peddler, who sells the Caliph a fine chiming clock. The Caliph installs it on a marble pedestal in his garden, and decrees that from now on, the clock's time is the official time of the country, and none other is to be followed for any purpose public or private. (Issues of prayer are not mentioned.)

The clock, as you might guess, begins to go off, and gradually the daily cycle of the country slips out of sync with the Sun. "When all the world was as black as your hat, the Caliph and the Vizier were watering the plants in the garden." The Vizier tries politely to point out that something must be wrong, somewhere, but the Caliph refuses to believe that an object of such fine manufacture can be in error.

Finally, one night, the clock winds up to strike as usual, but instead it gives a great, rending metallic BONG and stops still. This wakes the Caliph, so to speak, and without any fuss the clock becomes a garden ornament, and the country returns to its usual cycle.

There probably should be an expression for the assumption that a story one knows very well from childhood must also be known by everybody (at least, everybody of a broadly similar ethnosocial background). Nonisoapheisis? Suitably unintelligible, but not even very good as a first approximation.

Analemma over ruins of ancient Nemea

Martian Analemma

Sunrise Analemma over ruins at Delphi

Analemma of the Moon

Analemma over Ukraine (No ruins!)

Any programmers out there?

(re: the notion of Chaucer citing Asimov)

Far too subtle for me this week.

And time travel makes my head spin in charming strange directions at the best of, er, moments.

The astronomers had several important observations to make at noon, so every day at exactly 1.00pm, the time ball on top of the tower would drop to signal the correct time to the city and harbour below.

That's a better explanation than the one they give at Edinburgh Castle. The ball drop at the observatory on Calton Hill across the way used to trigger the One O'Clock Gun. (It's now triggered by a wee man with a watch.) Why not noon, ask tourists on the official tour.

"Well," say the guides, "if we fired it off at noon we'd have to shoot off twelve shots. But we Scots, we're more careful wi' our money than that..."

This message is officially cleansed of all Questionable Content.

Love it.

Circa 1970 in my Pittsburgh suburb, the volunteer fire station down the hill let off their siren nightly at 6:00. It was a good bet that any household with kids had dinner at ten or fifteen minutes past 6.

One sentence from a long-ago article in Smithsonian has stuck with me for years. It asserted that "There was no such thing as 7:02 until the invention of the railway timetable." Some truth to that.

Another sort-of-science-fictional story wherein the International Date Line comes into play is THE ISLAND OF THE DAY BEFORE by Umberto Eco (technically, a historical, I guess, or "literature", but I at least find Eco's discursions pleasing to my sensawunda), wherein the protagonist is stranded on an abandoned ship moored within eyesight of an island, yet (by his calculations) on the other side of the Date Line. This is a source of considerable philosophical anguish to him.

The Summarians/Babylonians used base 12 as their numbering system, instead of base 10 as we do (it works quite well until you start serious multiplication & devision). They also had quite an elaborate calendar, and divided the day into twelve hours (because they divded everything into twelve) and then the hours into sixty minutes.

The Greeks and the Romans inherited the hours and the "lore" about the minutes and seconds, but without clocks or a religion that hung on the calendar, didn't really keep much track of them. The Romans at least were quite comfortable with the idea that hours could change their actual time -- summer day hours were longer than winter hours, and winter night hours were longer in winter.

Medieval alchemists, in their attempts to regain the ancient wisdom of the Chaldeans, timed their experiments in turning lead into gold by "Chaldean time": 12 hours in a day, sixty minutes in an hour, sixty seconds in a minute. This established the idea that an hour was a standard length of time, unlike a day, and as part of their equipment they created elaborate clocks. Since alchemy was at least partly a hobby of the rich, the clocks got pretty fancy.

Next thing you know, clocks with twelve hours, sixty minutes, sixty seconds were toys of the wealthy, to be displayed upon the marble mantle of your chateau.

And thus modern time was born.

Alas I haven't a cite for this. But this is a pretty literate crowd -- check your medieval history of the alchemists, that's where it should be.