Sunday, May 18, 2008
Times
Following the discussion of areas on 21st April, have now moved into times, my classical dictionary having happened to fall open on an interesting discussion of same. All reasonably straightforward, after the event. I suppose I had never thought about it before.
So we have three natual units of time - the solar day, the lunar month and the solar year, with the year being important for agricultural purposes and with these three quanities being incommensurate, causing the ancients much grief. So a month is about 29.5 days and a year is about 365.25 days. The number of months in the year was a bit of a problem, solved in various ways in the Old World by having various numbers of extra months of various lengths. The famous reform of Julius Caesar to a system of 12 roughly equal months, rather longer than lunar months, with occasional leap years was based on an Egyptian reform which dated at least as far back as 238BC. A good system for those with pencil and paper, but not so good for those without.
Just to be differant, in the New World, the Mexicans went it for a much more complicated arrangement with one sort of year being made up of 20 13 day weeks (the 260 days being thought to be the product of some solar recession phenomenum) and the other sort being our sort. The interaction of the two sorts of year resulted in a 52 our-year cycle to which they attached much importance. Presumably people who understood all this in a largely innumerate soiciety also had much importance.
Hours and weeks are rather arbitary divisions of days and months and only settled down relatively recently. Helped along by both Jews and then Christians going for a festival every seventh day, seven being a well known number of power. Other arbitary decisions were deciding at what point in the day counted as the start of a new day, deciding at what point in the solar year to have the new year and deciding when to start counting years from. An interesting factlet on this last being that historians go straight from 1BC to 1AD whereas astonomers like to have a 0AD in the middle. Maybe their sums work better that way.
A useful by-product of all this was the solution of the Common Prayer Book puzzle which has been outstanding for some time. What on earth do the annotations in the calendar at the front mean? The things like "11 Cal." and "Pr. Id.". I now know this derives from the Greeks dividing their variable length months into three unequal parts. Very roughly, new moon (kalendae) to nine days before full moon (nonae), from nine days before full moon to full moon (idus) and from full moon to new moon. In the English Church calendar, days are numbered backwards from these three points, on the fudge that our months are actually lunar months. So the first of the month is always "Cal." and the 26th of the month might be "7 Cal.", that is 7 days before the full moon. Or it might be 6, depending on the number of days in the month. Early in the month we have "Non.", the day before is "Pr. Non." and the day after is "8 Id.". And the day after that "7 Id.". All perfectly straightforward when you get the hang of it. I suppose the Church ran with all this as part of accommodating the pagan arrangements they were superseding - or onto which they were superimposing their own.
Innumerate takes me onto illiterate and SATs. My mother claimed - on the basis of long experience in secondary (rather than primary) schools - that around 10% of people will have trouble reading however hard you work at it. More recently I have read that maybe 20% of people in this country cannot read very well, despite our having had universal education for a long time. So how does this fit in with SATs which are supposed to be on an inexorable upward trend? It is a pity that in our guilt and performance indicator ridden age, things like SATs, which are probably quite useful tools for monitoring the progress of individuals (I believe the story that things like SATs are quite good predictors of life-time outcomes), seem to have become more important as tools with which to beat bog-standard schools with. More importantly, if the 10% is true, what is best done about it? Would we do better to try and pretend that it was not, so as not to hurt peoples' feelings? Or should we call a spade a spade and be thinking more constructively about how the 10% might be better occupied than sitting in a class room doing A-levels in tourism and photography?
Now time to trim the hawthorne.
So we have three natual units of time - the solar day, the lunar month and the solar year, with the year being important for agricultural purposes and with these three quanities being incommensurate, causing the ancients much grief. So a month is about 29.5 days and a year is about 365.25 days. The number of months in the year was a bit of a problem, solved in various ways in the Old World by having various numbers of extra months of various lengths. The famous reform of Julius Caesar to a system of 12 roughly equal months, rather longer than lunar months, with occasional leap years was based on an Egyptian reform which dated at least as far back as 238BC. A good system for those with pencil and paper, but not so good for those without.
Just to be differant, in the New World, the Mexicans went it for a much more complicated arrangement with one sort of year being made up of 20 13 day weeks (the 260 days being thought to be the product of some solar recession phenomenum) and the other sort being our sort. The interaction of the two sorts of year resulted in a 52 our-year cycle to which they attached much importance. Presumably people who understood all this in a largely innumerate soiciety also had much importance.
Hours and weeks are rather arbitary divisions of days and months and only settled down relatively recently. Helped along by both Jews and then Christians going for a festival every seventh day, seven being a well known number of power. Other arbitary decisions were deciding at what point in the day counted as the start of a new day, deciding at what point in the solar year to have the new year and deciding when to start counting years from. An interesting factlet on this last being that historians go straight from 1BC to 1AD whereas astonomers like to have a 0AD in the middle. Maybe their sums work better that way.
A useful by-product of all this was the solution of the Common Prayer Book puzzle which has been outstanding for some time. What on earth do the annotations in the calendar at the front mean? The things like "11 Cal." and "Pr. Id.". I now know this derives from the Greeks dividing their variable length months into three unequal parts. Very roughly, new moon (kalendae) to nine days before full moon (nonae), from nine days before full moon to full moon (idus) and from full moon to new moon. In the English Church calendar, days are numbered backwards from these three points, on the fudge that our months are actually lunar months. So the first of the month is always "Cal." and the 26th of the month might be "7 Cal.", that is 7 days before the full moon. Or it might be 6, depending on the number of days in the month. Early in the month we have "Non.", the day before is "Pr. Non." and the day after is "8 Id.". And the day after that "7 Id.". All perfectly straightforward when you get the hang of it. I suppose the Church ran with all this as part of accommodating the pagan arrangements they were superseding - or onto which they were superimposing their own.
Innumerate takes me onto illiterate and SATs. My mother claimed - on the basis of long experience in secondary (rather than primary) schools - that around 10% of people will have trouble reading however hard you work at it. More recently I have read that maybe 20% of people in this country cannot read very well, despite our having had universal education for a long time. So how does this fit in with SATs which are supposed to be on an inexorable upward trend? It is a pity that in our guilt and performance indicator ridden age, things like SATs, which are probably quite useful tools for monitoring the progress of individuals (I believe the story that things like SATs are quite good predictors of life-time outcomes), seem to have become more important as tools with which to beat bog-standard schools with. More importantly, if the 10% is true, what is best done about it? Would we do better to try and pretend that it was not, so as not to hurt peoples' feelings? Or should we call a spade a spade and be thinking more constructively about how the 10% might be better occupied than sitting in a class room doing A-levels in tourism and photography?
Now time to trim the hawthorne.
# posted by Jim @ 5:39 AM 
