Re: CHAT: The Elven (or Techian) calendar

Jake X wrote:
>I heard something about how much more sense it would make if we just had 35
>ten day weeks a year and five days of some kind of new year celebration.
>The
>problem with any calendar system is that it tries to make a correlation
>between three distint phenomena: Earth's rotation (day),  the cyces of the
>moon (month), and Earth's orbit around the sun (year). The three things,
>originating from multiple time systems, just aren't scientifically related.
>I think that anyone making a conculture should just trash that whole system
>and start afresh. If it takes place on an 'alien' world, perhaps make a
>more
>even system that divides better. For example, 360 days/year and 36 days/
>month, with ten months.
>Our calendar is not a convention anyone needs to put very much weight in.
The problem with a integer number of months in the year etc is that it takes
all the fun out of calendar design!

I'm actually not much into calendar design myself, but the Tairezans, being
spread over a decent chunk of the galaxy, have their own weirdities in this
regard: For administrative purposes everybody use a standard calendar based
on the Earth's rotational and orbital periods*, but, obviously, seasons, day
length etc are dependent on the local corresponding periods. So almost every
planet also has a local calendar**, forcing ordinary citizens to deal with
two (at least) different calendars in their daily lives. On some planets,
particulary ones with inconvenient rotational periods, people have simply
given up and organize their life after what's basically the solar time in
Greenwich, Earth,*** and don't give a damn about whether the local sun
happens to be up or not.

* To be exact, on what the Earth's rotational and orbital periods was some
millennia ago, so the planet has spun somewhat out of sync.

** Most of these local calendars are very simple: Each local day, defined
relative to the planets own zero meridian get a number, and the day count
restarts at one every time the official, terran year changed during the day
before. The they is then devided into a certain number of subunits,
frequently ten thousand. A few planets have much more complex local
calendars, of which their inhabitants may be fiercely proud.

*** That's it, nobody's ever got around to changing the Greenwich meridian.
Why should anybody - it's been around since the dawn of civilization, more
or less.

                                                          Andreas

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