Re: The New Year

James Landau wrote:
> Where have you decided to start your new years, and in what seasons?
> The belief that the year should change with winter (or more precisely,
> ten days from the start of winter) seems arbitrary. Rosh Hashannah
> occurs in September, the Julian calendar if I recall began on April
> Fool's Day, and only the other day an episode of "The Simpsons" was on
> in which Officer Wiggum mentioned he had confiscated some fireworks
> from some Chinese people who -- get this! -- claimed they were
> celebrating New Year's in February! If anything, I would think the
> obvious time to start a new year would be with spring.
Which is where the Chinese New Year is.  :-)  But, they count the
Equinoxes and Solstices as the MIDPOINTS of the seasons rather than the
STARTS, thus, all of the longest 91 days of the year are in Summer,
while the 91 shortest are in Winter.  That's how my people do it, too.
Their calendar is lunisolar, with the 2nd new moon after the winter
solstice being the start of the year (at least in principle).

They live on a different planet, which has 3 moons.  They use the middle
moon for the calendar.  There are about 15 and a quarter cycles of
phases in the year.  There's no correlation with the Gregorian calendar.

> As for subdividing the day, what they talk about when they talk
> about <i>na enles</i> -- their equivalent of "o'clock", I'm thinking
> about dividing the day into sixteenths, because it would be easy to
> draw perfect halves on a sundial in the days before they had the
> compass and the protractor.
The Kassi divide the daytime into 2 halves, and the night into 2 halves,
so that the day itself has 4 quarters.  Each quarter is divided into 12
segments, so that there are a total of 48 "hours".  The day begins at
sunrise, which is 1st half daytime, 1st hour.  When mechanical clocks
were invented, they used summer solstice to set the clocks.

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