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What Are You Doing for New Year's Eve?
southendmd:
Lots of changes to reflect upon this new year's eve. Friends made, friends lost. Pets lost, new ones adopted. Friends'/family's serious illnesses to cope with. Wonderful travel. New interests discovered. Weight lost and gained. :-\ Despite facebook, we're still here!
Looks like a quietish Cape Cod new year's eve this year. Our Santa Cruz friend stayed the week, and left yesterday. Doing lots of projects around the house. Warmish, about 50*, and drizzly here.
Dinner menu: start with beautiful pink salmon caviar on flatbread with Veuve Cliquot Brut Rose; then beef Wellington, creamed spinach with a Rodney Strong Alexander Valley cabernet sauvignon, followed by my homemade key lime pie with Perrier Jouet Grand Brut by the fire. No tv. Maybe a jaunt out to the Porch Bar if I'm still awake!
southendmd:
[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSq1cez_flQ[/youtube]
She's ok, but could he be more adorable???
Aloysius J. Gleek:
--- Quote from: southendmd on December 31, 2011, 01:20:53 pm ---[youtube=425,350]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aSq1cez_flQ[/youtube]
She's ok, but could he be more adorable???
--- End quote ---
Adorable!!!
And how adorable is this pic??
8) 8) :D :D ;D ;D
Jeff Wrangler:
--- Quote from: southendmd on December 31, 2011, 01:17:33 pm ---Looks like a quietish Cape Cod new year's eve this year. ... Warmish, about 50*, and drizzly here.
--- End quote ---
Last I checked the Weather Channel, it was even warmer here, 55*. No drizzle, though.
--- Quote ---Dinner menu: start with beautiful pink salmon caviar on flatbread with Veuve Cliquot Brut Rose; then beef Wellington, creamed spinach with a Rodney Strong Alexander Valley cabernet sauvignon, followed by my homemade key lime pie with Perrier Jouet Grand Brut by the fire. No tv.
--- End quote ---
Sounds lovely. Much simpler menu here. Steak. Spaghetti. Salad. Maybe some biscuits if I get out to the store to buy them this afternoon. ::) Coffee and a whoopie pie for dessert. ;D
(Of course, tomorrow there will pork and sauerkraut with mashed potatoes. ;D )
Then out to my usual hangout to wish a happy new year to my buddy Barry, the security guy (Doorman sounds undignified for a retired police officer, and he does so much more than watch the door, anyway).
Not too much to drink, though. Since I was away for Christmas, I'd like to make church tomorrow morning.
--- Quote ---Maybe a jaunt out to the Porch Bar if I'm still awake!
--- End quote ---
You should go to the Porch Bar. Say hello to it and have a good scotch for me. :)
Happy New Year! :)
Aloysius J. Gleek:
"What Are You Doing for New Year's Eve?"
What if it's ALWAYS a Saturday night? It was this year, and that was nice, but--always forever?
Hmmmm. How about 'Moveable Feasts'??
I'm a stick-in-the-mud. I don't want to always have my birthday on Thursday, forever. (Well, until I drop dead, anyway! :laugh: )
Phooie! Sorry, Professor, I don't like it!
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45828666/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/it-time-overhaul-calendar-profs-have-plan/from/toolbar
Is it time to overhaul the
calendar? Profs have a plan
New Year's Day would always be on Sunday
if 'permanent calendar' takes hold
By Stephanie Pappas Senior writer
updated 12/30/2011 4:52:27 PM ET
Richard Conn Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University,
has long argued that a "permanent calendar" would make more sense
than the current calendar, which shifts the lineup of days and dates
each year. Henry has gained an ally in Johns Hopkins economist
Steve Hanke, who also advocates the change.
Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before.
Their proposed calendar overhaul — largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today — would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week. New Year's Day would forever come on a Sunday. So would Christmas.
"The calendar I'm advocating isn't nearly as accurate" as the Gregorian calendar, said Richard Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years. "But it's far more convenient."
The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar would stay the same every year,
but every five or six years, an extra week called "Xtr" would be added
to adjust for seasonal drift. For a larger version of the calendar, check
http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendar.html
New versus old
The trouble with designing a nice, regular calendar is that each Earth year is 365.2422 days long, leaving extra snippets of time that don't fit nicely into a cycle of 24-hour days. If this time isn't somehow accounted for, the calendar "drifts" relative to the seasons, and the next thing you know, Christmas Day is coming after the spring thaw.
The Gregorian calendar deals with this by adding an extra day (Leap Day) to February about every four years, correcting for the seasonal drift.
"It's really incredible that in the Middle Ages, they were able to invent a new calendar that was so accurate," Henry told LiveScience. What bothers him about the Gregorian calendar, though, is the frustrating tendency for days of the week to jump around. Because 365 is not a multiple of seven, 7-day weeks don't fit evenly into the Gregorian calendar. That means that each year, dates shift over one day of the week (two during leap years).
"Everybody has to redo their calendars," Henry said. "For sports schedules, for schools, for every damn thing. It's completely unnecessary."
Under the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar (named after Henry and Steve Hanke, a Johns Hopkins economist who also advocates calendar overhaul), every date falls on the same day of the week — forever.
The calendar follows a pattern of two 30-day months followed by one 31-day month. That means the old rhyme, "30 days hath September, April, June and November," would need to be revised to "31 days hath September, June, March and December."
To account for extra time, Hanke and Henry drop leap years and instead create a "leap week" at the end of December every five or six years. This extra week, dubbed "Xtr," would adjust for seasonal drift while keeping the 7-day cycle on track.
"The new calendar can be fairly often off as much as three days on the seasons, but looking out, could you tell?" Henry said. "Of course you couldn't tell."
The economics of time
For Henry, the new calendar is worth it because of how much time and effort goes into revising the calendar each year. He first got into the idea of calendar reform while having to yet again update lecture dates and syllabi for his students. He quickly discovered that there were calendar-reform advocates with suggestions on how to do away with that problem, he said.
"My heart sank, and I thought, 'Oh my god, I don't want to get involved in calendar reform. It's the stupidest waste of time. It's hopeless,'" Henry said.
But he put the Hanke-Henry calendar online anyway, weathered a storm of publicity, and watched nothing come of it. This time, he said, he's hoping that the influence of Hanke, the economist, will spur real interest in change.
To Hanke, the need for a new calendar goes beyond the annoyance of out-of-date syllabi. Calculations for interest payments, for example, are complicated by the irregularity of months. Different financial entities deal with these irregularities differently, meaning that the amount of interest accrued depends not just on time, but on who did the calendar-related math. The Hanke-Henry calendar would do away with these irregularities, streamlining the process, Hanke and Henry wrote in the January 2012 issue of Globe Asia magazine.
The new calendar would also be more business-friendly, the researchers wrote. Meetings and holiday time off would be easier to schedule. Other businessmen's attempts at calendar reform, including one by Eastman Kodak founder George Eastman, failed because they didn't always maintain Sundays as weekends, disrupting the Sabbath for Christians. The Hanke-Henry calendar doesn't have that problem.
"The natural date for the introduction of these changes is 1 January 2012, because it is a Sunday in both the current Pope Gregory calendar and the simple, new calendar," the researchers wrote.
While that would not be enough time to update computers to the new calendar, he said, the target for complete technical adoption could be January 1, 2017, when the Gregorian year again begins on a Sunday.
When's my birthday?
But no matter how simple Hanke and Henry's suggestion is, it faces high psychological barriers.
"My favorite reason it shouldn't be done is, 'But my birthday will always be on a Wednesday!'" Henry said. "Of course the answer to that is you can celebrate your birthday whenever you want."
Another problem: "To my extreme annoyance, my calendar contains four Friday the 13ths each year," Henry said. "Isn't that awful?"
Nonetheless, Henry has some hope for a simpler calendar. After all, he said, smoking has gone from completely acceptable to often banned in public, in just a few short decades. The federal government once managed to institute a nationwide speed limit of 55 miles per hour. And despite centuries of habit, no one says "Peking" anymore when they mean "Beijing."
"Real change is possible," Henry said.
Also:
From 2004: Pros and cons of the calendar remake
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