Re: OT: the Monkey Year (wasRe: Religion and Holidays)

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> On Wed, Jan 07, 2004 at 05:36:46PM +0100, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > A constellation is basially a conical chunk of stars with the apex at
> Earth
> > with an arbitrary space angle. It has the same sort of physical existence
> as
> > has the piece of the Atlantic between degrees 23.5 and 31.9 North. Or as
> > Oklahoma for that matter.
>
> And the arcs used by Western astrologers have just the same sort of physical
> existence, as well.  The fact that they have names associated with
> constellations they don't contain is merely historical trivia.
With the, to my mind, fairly major difference that arcs are artefacts of the
Earth's motion, while the constellations would remain unchanged if the solar
system were blasted out of existence. In addition, the constellations are as
close to permanent things you get at that scale, while the arcs sweep around
pretty rapidly - their contents aren't remotely constant. They're rather more
parallel to a band sweeping across the Atlantic from north to south.

> > I must admit I fail to see how 36 connects to the #s of fingers and toes.
> The
> > Gods be subtle.
>
> Well, if it is the number of fingers out which counts, regardless of which
> ones, then you can count to 10.
>
> If the position of each finger on both hands is important as well, then
> you can count to 1,024 (or 1,023 if both hands closed means 0 instead of 1).
>
> In between those extremes, if it only the number of fingers out on a given
> hand is important, but it matters which hand, then you can count to 36
> (or 35 (55 base 6) if both hands closed means 0 instead of 1).

Ah ... I was trying to connect it too the numbers of fingers _and_ toes.

(I arrived at 1024 as 4^5 - ie the number of sets to the number of members of
each set.)

                                                      Andreas

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