RE: The year of whose lord?
July 22, 2012 at 9:30 pm
(This post was last modified: July 22, 2012 at 9:37 pm by jonb.)
(July 22, 2012 at 7:59 pm)aleialoura Wrote: Is there any conventional dating system that makes sense?
In Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge they set a year Zero, which could be said to be accurate, but actually no system is accurate, even the actual time on the world differs from that produced by atomic clocks because of variations in the orbit of the earth, we live in a relative universe after all. The ancient Roman calendar was so inaccurate it is impossible to accurately date anything before the Julian or was it Gregorian calender came in, also there were riots in England, in the eighteenth century when the calender changed and people didn't like the idea of loosing ten days.That change did not happen in Eastern Europe as the orthodox church does not use the popes calender. In the French revolution they set up a calender with a year of !000 days a month of 100 days and a week of ten days but it was useless because it did not match the seasons.
Also Arabic numbers are the numbers we all use and they originated in Hindu India, not with the Arabs.
Actually I don't worry about AD/BC. Think of it this way its history, once people were forced to think made up things that were unsubstantiated, and now we have grown out of it. What better place for a bit of history to be stuck into than a calender.
Also July is named after Julius Caesar, August Named after Augustus Caesar. Incidentally these emperors wanted long months of 31 days so they robed February which is why it is so short.
The Islamic Calender is set by the moon and is a better system for working out time in tropical countries that do not, or hardly change in day length. The christian calender is set by the sun, so is better at predicting seasons and day length. The Ancient Celts had a reasonable calender which did both, but was complex, similar to what I have been loosely told of the Hindu calender, The ancient Germans had a calender that every so often they stuck an extra month in called Fogmoon. I do not know much about the east.
But whatever way you cut it there will be inconsistencies, leap years, and leap seconds which many computer companies try to get removed as it makes their programming so much more difficult. Also the earth seams to be gradually slowing down, so even if you set up a new way of measuring time over a few thousand years it would become out of kilter, and need rebalancing. So live with the fossils of the past, it shows how time has moved on.
