Musings on Random Musings

[Cancer]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

There is alleged to be a lot of politics around it as well.

[Enforcer84]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

I can see that.

[Enforcer84]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

A solar year is 365.24 days.

 

A lunar month is 29.5 days.

 

Let us assume, for historical and religious reasons, that a week must be 7 days.

 

In this new system, a calendar month equals exactly 4 weeks, or 28 days.

 

A year consists of 13 calendar months (13x28=364 days).

 

An additional day is tagged at the end of the year (call it an extra-calendar day, or month) and is set aside as a time of celebration. Every four years, a leap-day is added to the 14th extra-calendar month (following all the current rules about leap years, of course, necessary because the solar calendar just doesn't quite match up to the days).

 

So, instead of this whole "30 days hath November" crap, we have a monthly calendar that makes sense. If it's Monday, it's either the 2nd, 9th, 16th, or 23rd, every month. The lunar phase moves back 1.5 days every month, going through a complete cycle every... what, about 18 years or so? This is the most wonky part of the calendar, but not too many people rely on the phase of the moon anymore.

 

Also, we move the months back to their proper places. "October" means "Eighth Month," so it should be in the 8th place on the calendar. Same with September, November, and December.

 

IIRC this is how the Forgotten Realms calendar is basically set up; neato fantasy names aside.

[Cancer]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

A solar year is 365.24 days.

 

A lunar month is 29.5 days.

 

Let us assume, for historical and religious reasons, that a week must be 7 days.

 

In this new system, a calendar month equals exactly 4 weeks, or 28 days.

 

A year consists of 13 calendar months (13x28=364 days).

 

An additional day is tagged at the end of the year (call it an extra-calendar day, or month) and is set aside as a time of celebration. Every four years, a leap-day is added to the 14th extra-calendar month (following all the current rules about leap years, of course, necessary because the solar calendar just doesn't quite match up to the days).

 

So, instead of this whole "30 days hath November" crap, we have a monthly calendar that makes sense. If it's Monday, it's either the 2nd, 9th, 16th, or 23rd, every month. The lunar phase moves back 1.5 days every month, going through a complete cycle every... what, about 18 years or so? This is the most wonky part of the calendar, but not too many people rely on the phase of the moon anymore.

 

Also, we move the months back to their proper places. "October" means "Eighth Month," so it should be in the 8th place on the calendar. Same with September, November, and December.

Calendation is one of my sidelights, seeing as how nearly all calendars are astronomical in their ultimate basis. I think I have had lengthy discourses on calendars before on these boards, but I'll have to go looking for them. There's more than one way to keep track of days, as real-world humans prove.

 

That last means you are tying the first of the year to be the vernal equinox. Which has side effects, because for the year (Earth's orbital period, sort of*) as for the month (the Moon's orbital period, sort of*) there are not an integral number of days. So every so often you have to stick in an extra day. That is the whole point of the Gregorian calendar rigamarole. Julian calendar too, but Caesar didn't have all the data that the moderns had, so his schedule lost about a quarter day per century ... which added up over time to a significant discrepancy between calendar year-begin and actual seasons.

 

* "Sort of" means that calendar year is attempting to get the tropical year correct, and calendar month is trying to get the synodic month correct. Both of those are importantly different from the actual orbital period.

 

If you're really interested in this stuff, shoot me a PM. It gets arcane quick. OTOH, one of the things that can give your game-world extra depth is an unusual, long-standing calendar. Especially if your game-world cosmology isn't just a trivial copy of Earth+Moon+Sun+other stuff as all too many of them are.

[Cancer]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

Couldn't resist.

 

The best expression for the length of the tropical year is

365.2421896698 - 0.00000615359*T - 7.29*10^-10 T^2 + 2.64*10^-10 T^3

where T = (JD 2451545.0) / 36525, and JD 2451545.0 = 2000 January 01 12:00:00.0 UT (it is, in effect, the number of centuries from noon Universal Time, New Year's Day 2000).

 

The best expression for the synodic month is

29.5305888531 + 0.00000021621*T - 3.64*10^-10 T^2

where T has the same meaning in above.

[Old Man]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

Especially if your game-world cosmology isn't just a trivial copy of Earth+Moon+Sun+other stuff as all too many of them are.

 

Come on, most people can barely grasp the real solar and lunar cycles; you want to put in additional suns and moons too? Maybe with highly eccentric or inclined orbits? Because that would rock.

 

I wish I had a nickel for every time I got into an argument with someone over celestial mechanics. "That star up there is really the planet Venus!" "No it isn't, it must be Jupiter." "It's Venus!" "It's directly overhead and it's nighttime, therefore it cannot be Venus." "I still say it's Venus!" Sigh.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

What have you got against Venus?

 

Racist.

[Bazza]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

Planetist.

 

At least it wasnt Pluto.

[Enforcer84]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

What have you got against Venus?

 

Racist.

 

She chokes in the finals.

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

She chokes in the finals.

 

[tkdguy]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

IIRC this is how the Forgotten Realms calendar is basically set up; neato fantasy names aside.

 

Almost. IIRC, the FR has ten-day weeks, hence the name "tenday."

 

Come on, most people can barely grasp the real solar and lunar cycles; you want to put in additional suns and moons too? Maybe with highly eccentric or inclined orbits? Because that would rock.

 

I wish I had a nickel for every time I got into an argument with someone over celestial mechanics. "That star up there is really the planet Venus!" "No it isn't, it must be Jupiter." "It's Venus!" "It's directly overhead and it's nighttime, therefore it cannot be Venus." "I still say it's Venus!" Sigh.

 

I had a similar conversation with someone years ago.

 

Person: I have a really good method of stargazing.

Me: Cool! What is it?

Person: I decide what I want to see that night. Let's say I want to see Mars. So I look up and pick something that's shining. That's Mars.

Me: *facepalm*

[Logan D. Hurricanes]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

OK, I'm going to go on record with this. I know I'm committing heresy by saying this, but Bruce Springsteen is the most over-rated singer/songwriter ever, and he always has been. Seriously, I just can't see what people like about him or his music.

 

The stoning may now commence.

THANK YOU! I've been of this opinion for years, and I even brought him up specifically in a discussion of over-rated musical acts once. Of course I was soundly overruled, but I knew there had to be somebody out there that felt the same way!

[SteveZilla]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

We had the weekly team meeting today. I was watching one person talk when suddenly she no longer appeared quite human to me. For some reason' date=' I was mentally deconstructing her and seeing her in terms of a skull with layers of tissue over it like a very good animatronic character. I could almost see the construction that went into putting her head together. It was odd. I tried to see the others that way, and it worked on one but not the other. The two animatronic coworkers are extremely skinny, which may have played into it.[/quote']

 

Are you sure you didn't have on a certain pair of sunglasses?

[teh bunneh]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

THANK YOU! I've been of this opinion for years' date=' and I even brought him up specifically in a discussion of over-rated musical acts once. Of course I was soundly overruled, but I knew there had to be [i']somebody [/i]out there that felt the same way!

 

Solidarity, brother! :fistbump:

[teh bunneh]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

Calendation is one of my sidelights, seeing as how nearly all calendars are astronomical in their ultimate basis. I think I have had lengthy discourses on calendars before on these boards, but I'll have to go looking for them. There's more than one way to keep track of days, as real-world humans prove.

 

That last means you are tying the first of the year to be the vernal equinox. Which has side effects, because for the year (Earth's orbital period, sort of*) as for the month (the Moon's orbital period, sort of*) there are not an integral number of days. So every so often you have to stick in an extra day. That is the whole point of the Gregorian calendar rigamarole. Julian calendar too, but Caesar didn't have all the data that the moderns had, so his schedule lost about a quarter day per century ... which added up over time to a significant discrepancy between calendar year-begin and actual seasons.

 

* "Sort of" means that calendar year is attempting to get the tropical year correct, and calendar month is trying to get the synodic month correct. Both of those are importantly different from the actual orbital period.

 

If you're really interested in this stuff, shoot me a PM. It gets arcane quick. OTOH, one of the things that can give your game-world extra depth is an unusual, long-standing calendar. Especially if your game-world cosmology isn't just a trivial copy of Earth+Moon+Sun+other stuff as all too many of them are.

 

I'd love to talk about it. I'm not much good with math, but I do loves me some calendars.

 

The best expression for the length of the tropical year is

365.2421896698 - 0.00000615359*T - 7.29*10^-10 T^2 + 2.64*10^-10 T^3

where T = (JD 2451545.0) / 36525, and JD 2451545.0 = 2000 January 01 12:00:00.0 UT (it is, in effect, the number of centuries from noon Universal Time, New Year's Day 2000).

 

The best expression for the synodic month is

29.5305888531 + 0.00000021621*T - 3.64*10^-10 T^2

where T has the same meaning in above.

 

OK, let me ask you this: We've got a system right now for determining when the leap year falls, right? Because the solar year is out of whack with the day/night cycle. So could we use the system I proposed above, keeping the way we determine leap years? (keeping in mind that no system is perfect, seeing as we're going out 10 decimal places to measure the year...)

[Cancer]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

If you want to apportion days into months and weeks in some other way that doesn't interfere with the tropical year cycle (that is, the length of the cycle of seasons), anything could work, as long as you work it out sufficiently. Looking at Earth's calendars, "sufficiently" seems to be "good enough that the calendar gets stuff right for at least twenty generations, and preferably a thousand years". With a little computer programming work, you could find by exhaustion an arrangement that's good for that long for whatever sort of thing you wanted.

 

As the example people here are familiar with, the existing Gregorian calendar system works out to using a 400 year cycle with 146097 days. (146097 happens to be divisible by 7, so the days of the week recur: that is, the Gregorian calendar cycle repeats itself after 400 years.) 146097/400 = 365.2425 days per year, so the Gregorian cycle will accumulate one full day of error with respect to the actual tropical year in about 2500 years.

 

The thing is, calendars are never created with a single purpose in mind; for instance, the week. As far as anyone can tell, the seven-day week rotation has been in continuous use without losing a day since the Hebrews set it up (or adopted it from neighbors) in Biblical or perhaps pre-Biblical times. The Gregorian calendar reform (which began in 1852) did not mess with that rotation; the "early adopters" had [Gregorian] Friday, 15 October 1582, immediately following [Julian] Thursday, 4 October 1582. The Catholic Church has indicated that it is open to further reform of the calendar, with the sole proviso that the progression of the days of the week is obeyed without a break.

 

There are differences between "civil calendar" and "ecclesiastical calendar" and the astronomical phenomena on which the calendars are based. Historically in the West, the calendars were all done by religious authorities for ecclesiastical purposes, but with the rise of nation-states, civil authorities now are in charge of calendars, and aside from the abortive French revolutionary calendar, no one has done much messing with the Gregorian calendar. But if religion is important in your game-world, then the ecclesiastical calendar is something to think about too. Again the familiar example: a huge part of the Christian ecclesiastical calendar is getting the dates of Easter and the other moveable and immoveable feasts right (and the Hebrew calendar has a similar set of mechanics for setting the date of Passover). Easter and Passover are tied to a combination of Moon and Sun cycles; Easter is the first Sunday after the first Friday after the first ecclesiastical Full Moon (which is approximately the same as the astronomical Full Moon, but again some one-day discrepancies creep in occasionally, and if that happens in late March, that can throw the date of Easter a month) after the vernal equinox. Because the vernal equinox is not always on March 21 (there's a day or so of jitter), as well as the complexities of the lunar cycle, that gets crazy in a hurry.

 

The lunar cycle, for predicting when the phases of the Moon will happen, is approximated by something called the "Metonic cycle", the coincidence that 235 mean synodic months is 6939.688 days, while nineteen Gregorian years is 6939.6075 days, so the dates of the phases of the Moon in one year is just about the same as those nineteen years later. There are further ecclesiastical rules to keep the 0.08 day difference from accumulating.

[Enforcer84]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

Almost. IIRC, the FR has ten-day weeks, hence the name "tenday."

 

 

 

I had a similar conversation with someone years ago.

 

Person: I have a really good method of stargazing.

Me: Cool! What is it?

Person: I decide what I want to see that night. Let's say I want to see Mars. So I look up and pick something that's shining. That's Mars.

Me: *facepalm*

 

That's it 3 ten day weeks

[Enforcer84]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

THANK YOU! I've been of this opinion for years' date=' and I even brought him up specifically in a discussion of over-rated musical acts once. Of course I was soundly overruled, but I knew there had to be [i']somebody [/i]out there that felt the same way!

 

He's overrated but he does have some catchy tunes.

Though some I like better when performed by others....Blinded by the Light and For You, for example were much better performed by Manfred Mann.

I am also amused that Born in the USA which was an indictment of the Vietnam War became a flag-waving GOP song.

[Old Man]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

He's overrated but he does have some catchy tunes.

Though some I like better when performed by others....Blinded by the Light and For You, for example were much better performed by Manfred Mann.

I am also amused that Born in the USA which was an indictment of the Vietnam War became a flag-waving GOP song.

 

I think Springsteen was less overrated when he was starting out. Back then his bluesy, blue collar style was novel. Today he's kind of generic.

[Enforcer84]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

I think Springsteen was less overrated when he was starting out. Back then his bluesy' date=' blue collar style was novel. Today he's kind of generic.[/quote']

 

Right, he set the standard. It's like derriding Iron Maiden for being Metal Stereotypes...they invented the stereotype.

even though I don't like Springsteen's music as much as say...Sammy Hagar; I can accept his place in the pantheon based on his originality. You must have done something right if there are a bunch of clones.

[Klytus]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

Right, he set the standard. It's like derriding Iron Maiden for being Metal Stereotypes...they invented the stereotype.

even though I don't like Springsteen's music as much as say...Sammy Hagar; I can accept his place in the pantheon based on his originality. You must have done something right if there are a bunch of clones.

 

I can't go so far as to call him over-rated: he was pretty unique in his early days, and as Chad observes, if he has folks emulating his style, he must have been doing something right. You also have to give the man serious credit for still doing 3-hour long shows at his age. All that having been said, his music just doesn't really do a thing for me. Never has.

[Cancer]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

He was an amazing performer in live concerts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when he kept his career going by touring without having albums out (since he had a bad recording contract and simply didn't make records to get back at the company). He never did much for me, I will agree, but then again I never saw him live, and I was much more interested in a different musical genre back then.

[SteveZilla]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

Solidarity' date=' brother! :fistbump:[/quote']

 

While there are a couple song's of Bruces that I like, I also tend to agree that his fame is bigger than his (good) body of work.

[James Gillen]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

I can't go so far as to call him over-rated: he was pretty unique in his early days' date=' and as Chad observes, if he has folks emulating his style, he must have been doing something right. You also have to give the man serious credit for still doing 3-hour long shows at his age. All that having been said, his music just doesn't really do a thing for me. Never has.[/quote']

 

I LOVE Bruce Springsteen.

Up TO Born in the USA.

Ever since then his work is largely a bummer to me and he seems to be trying too hard to be Woody Guthrie. Which is interesting in that Springsteen started out influenced by Bob Dylan, who had to work to NOT sound like Woody Guthrie.

 

JG

[Old Man]

Re: Musings on Random Musings

 

While there are a couple song's of Bruces that I like' date=' I also tend to agree that his fame is bigger than his (good) body of work.[/quote']

 

Keep in mind also that Springsteen wrote more hit songs than he actually performed. His songwriting ability is what actually put him on the map, before he had any real success performing.