#901
10:06 pm, Friday, September 7th, 2007I was just thinking how screwed up our month names are. It’s September now, right? But “septem” is Latin for seven and this is the ninth month. (Of course, before the Julian calendar reform of 46 BC, the year started in March and September really was the seventh month.) So we should be calling September November (since “novem” means nine). Following this system, we’d have to change October to December, November to Undecimber… actually, while we’re at it, we might as well redo the entire calendar, right? It doesn’t make any sense to only give the last four months number names. Here’s my improved system:
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I’ll admit, some of those don’t really roll off the tongue. And “Sexber” will probably generate more crude jokes than our seventh planet has. But won’t you sleep better knowing we have a throroughly rational calendar month nomenclature? Someone start a petition.
Anyway. We made corndogs last night and the night before. They were better than the last ones we did. This time we used Ballpark Franks, a slightly different batter recipe (more corn meal and spices), canola oil for deep-frying (instead of vegetable oil), and Alton Brown’s double chopstick method (our last ‘dogs were stickless). The result:
Wednesday was a big day. Besides making corndogs, we got haircuts (apparently men’s cuts are discounted $3 on Wednesdays at Fantastic Sam’s), ate at Golden Teriyaki for the first time (it was okay), and got a family membership at SNAP Fitness. SNAP Fitness is a new 24-hour gym that just opened on Grand Ave. towards the end of August. It’s really well-equipped in terms of variety and quality of the machines, maybe even moreso than the $37 million Student Rec Center over at WSU. I went last night at 1 AM so I could avoid people (it’s surprisingly crowded at 9:30 PM). The family membership is a pretty good deal, BTW. No contracts, $49.95/mo. (compared to the single membership @ $34.95/mo.). Works out to, like, 83¢ per day for each of us.
I’d go on, but I’ve gotta clean the house up a little. My parents are coming to visit Andi and I tomorrow morning.
September 7th, 2007 at 11:10 pm
why not do the days of the week too. Okay, that’s stupid, they already make fairly good sense. But Duober sounds too much like do over. Wait, is that what the movie “Groundhog Day” was really trying to tell us? Damn the clever Bill Murray.
September 7th, 2007 at 11:35 pm
No, no, I think you’re on to something. The days of the week don’t make a lot of sense sequentially — sun, moon, Mars, Woden… there’s no innate order to that.
If we use the Latin cardinal numbers for the months, we could use the ordinal numbers for the days of the week… so it’d go Primusday (Sunday), Secundusday (Monday), Tertiusday (Tuesday), etc. Actually, the Portuguese already do this (sort of) — frex, they call Wednesday “quarta-feira” (fourth-day). Quick, someone start a second petition…
September 7th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
July and August weren’t originally in the ten-month calendar. They were named for Julius and Augustus Caesar.
September 8th, 2007 at 12:18 am
Might as well redo the whole Gregorian calendar since months (moons) don’t really correspond anymore. We should switch over to the Lunar calendar, which lines up correctly with the moons where the 15th of every month is a full moon and 1st is the beginning of a new moon.
September 8th, 2007 at 5:35 am
Re: Paige: Well, they were /sort of/ there –they were just called Quintilis and Sextilis at the time. The ones that were added later (circa 713 BC) were Ianuarius and Februarius (which we now call January and February).
Re: Krunk: Ah, but then you’d have to redesign the mechanical watches that show the month and day. (Whereas with my scheme you just have to scrape the ink off and relabel the dials/rollers.) ;P
Besides, if we’re doing an overhaul that major, I say we throw it all out and go hypermetric. No more weeks, months, or years — just decadays, hectodays, kilodays, etc. Then we can say things like “I’m 9.1 kilodays old!” Of course, we’ll have to redefine a “day” as its exact length… 23.93xx hours or whatever it is. Which will mean redoing our time system too…
September 8th, 2007 at 11:27 am
which brings up another point. . . . . time in space travel. One thing that always bugged me about Star Trek was the way they told time. What the hell is the “Captain’s Log” system all about? They race around and X warp speed and make no compensation for time?! I don’t know, I think we still don’t know enough about time. What was that old song lyric: “Does anybody know what time it is, does anybody really care, about time.” Now my brain hurts.
September 8th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
No good can come of trying to apply real logic or science to Star Trek… :P
As for the stardates, I heard most of them were just random numbers the writers thought up.
September 9th, 2007 at 1:03 am
I’d chime in about the whole calendar discussion…
but those corn dogs look tasty! :D
(And yeah, I know I haven’t blogged in forever.)
September 10th, 2007 at 7:24 am
Haha, ty Peter!
September 11th, 2007 at 3:50 pm
Since the order of the months isn’t actually terribly important, how about we go the other way, get rid of the numbered months and /name/ them?
Or, hell, we could just use the Xanth Calendar.
(Saptimber, Octogre, Noremember, Dismember)
The days of the week are fine. I think there actually is a stardate system.
And the reason they rarely account for time dilation in Star Trek is that time dilation /doesn’t happen/ at integer warp factors. It makes sense. The only way you could possibly go faster than light without violating causality would be to somehow circumvent time dilation.
September 13th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
I read a thought experiment on Slashdot that showed FTL anything (communication, travel) would violate causality. It was offered in a discussion about quantum entanglement as a reason why information can’t be sent that way. I’ll have to dig through the articles/threads sometime and see if I can find it…