Re: CHAT: Timezones was The English/French counting system

"Mark J. Reed" wrote:
> > China I believe has a single time zone - Beijing standard-- even though it
> > extends over many degrees of longitude.
>
> Yup.  If it works for them I don't see why it shouldn't work for everyone
> else. :)
Yeah, but they don't extend over 24 hours.  :-)  How much difference is
there in sunrise between westernmost China and easternmost China?  A few
hours, I believe.  Also, the population is heavily concentrated in the
east, the west being fairly sparsely populated.  Not nearly the same as
extending a single "time zone" over the entire world!

> One mean day is approximately 31 hours, 49 minutes, and 15 seconds in
> Earth units.  Their mean tropical year is 346.027063 of their days, which is
> in Earth units 458 days, 18 hours, 20 minutes, 51 1/6 seconds.
>
> I haven't worked out what their equivalent of a month will be; perhaps
> a logical subdivision of the year, or perhaps there is some astronimical
> phenomenon that will take the place of the phases of the moon for this
> purpose.
My planet's day is a little under 28 hours, with almost exactly
378-10/27 of their days in a year; a calendar based on that figure is
accurate to something like 1 day in 6000 years - that accuracy is
entirely coincidental as I came up with the day and year separately, and
thus discovered that remarkably close fit only after I worked out the
number of local days in a year - 378 would also work very conveniently
for any humans who might happen to settle there :-) being exactly 54
weeks, and allowing for an alternation of 31 and 32 day months.

The month is based, in the Kassi calendar, on the movement of the middle
moon, which divides the year into a bit less than 15-1/4 lunar months.
They use a lunisolar calendar with 9 years of 16 months out of every 38
years, and a little less than half of the years having an extra day
added to the 10th month.  There were extra complications to make sure
that no two years of the exact same length follow each other.  Years can
be 372, 373, 397, or 398 days.  Some cultures use the outer moon, which
divides the year into 7 and a fraction months, I forget exactly how long
that one was.  The Kassi later switched to a 16-month solar calendar (10
months of 24 days and 6 of 23), with a leap year (adding an entire 6-day
week to make 16 months of 24 days) in multiples of 16, or possibly 5 out
of every 81 years (more accurate, but a little more complex, too)

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