No More Year Glasses
Tonight, as on the last nine New Year's Eves, a lot of people will be celebrating while wearing glasses shaped like the number of the incoming new year, with the two middle zero digits surrounding their eyes. It occurs to me that tonight is the last time this will happen, because the next year number with two zeroes in the middle is 990 years in the future. And I'm guessing that by then, objects to be placed on the face for purposes of modifying vision will be reduced to the status of historical or even archaeological curiosities, so it would occur to no one to emulate them with a year number.
But we wouldn't have to wait 990 years were we to change our calendar system from its present Anno Domini (aka Common Era) numbering. However, we would need to select an origin year that is sometime within the second AD millennium so that 1000 New Calendar could occur significantly sooner than AD 3000 (aka Y3K).
But do we even need to base our large time unit on the duration of Terra's Solar orbit? After all, our current solar days and years don't quite fit together as it is, so we have to add a Leap Year Day every fourth year except for those divisible by 100 but not 400 (making a year equal to about 365.2425 days, or 349.2 more minutes than are claimed by Rent's "Seasons of Love"). And even with that, we have to occasionally throw in a Leap Second, as is supposed to happen tonight, in order to keep things synchronized. So why not adopt time units derived from something more astronomically universal. Stardates, anyone?
So if we play with stardates, why not call our new system the New Cosmic Calendar? And instead of searching for some great event to mark the origin of our new time axis, why not just arbitrarily designate the time at which the system was adopted as "NCC 1701"? Okay, maybe that's a bit too geeky, but at least we would only have to wait another 299 stardate units to wear glasses with two zeroes in the middle.
Well, Happy New Year anyway, and enjoy those year number glasses for the last time in your life. (Unless 51 years from now you use a large "6" as the left eye hole.)
But we wouldn't have to wait 990 years were we to change our calendar system from its present Anno Domini (aka Common Era) numbering. However, we would need to select an origin year that is sometime within the second AD millennium so that 1000 New Calendar could occur significantly sooner than AD 3000 (aka Y3K).
But do we even need to base our large time unit on the duration of Terra's Solar orbit? After all, our current solar days and years don't quite fit together as it is, so we have to add a Leap Year Day every fourth year except for those divisible by 100 but not 400 (making a year equal to about 365.2425 days, or 349.2 more minutes than are claimed by Rent's "Seasons of Love"). And even with that, we have to occasionally throw in a Leap Second, as is supposed to happen tonight, in order to keep things synchronized. So why not adopt time units derived from something more astronomically universal. Stardates, anyone?
So if we play with stardates, why not call our new system the New Cosmic Calendar? And instead of searching for some great event to mark the origin of our new time axis, why not just arbitrarily designate the time at which the system was adopted as "NCC 1701"? Okay, maybe that's a bit too geeky, but at least we would only have to wait another 299 stardate units to wear glasses with two zeroes in the middle.
Well, Happy New Year anyway, and enjoy those year number glasses for the last time in your life. (Unless 51 years from now you use a large "6" as the left eye hole.)
Labels: Non sequiturs
posted by Steve | 2:04 PM
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