Time

[poorprincess]

Time and Distance
Distance is length it can be measured with a ruler.
Time can be measured with a clock.
We made the rulers and the clocks.
But the rulers are always right.
The clocks are not.

Heres a quote from a book called "The Calender:History, Lore and Legend"

"The calender is subject to two contradictory forces. On the one hand, the measurement of time tends toward ever greater uniformity. Thus the Gregorian calendar has gradually been adopted as a world wide system, crossing among cultures. On the other hand, various political, social and religious communities manipulate time to serve their needs and match their preferred rhythms. We live with many calendars, each a repository of collective memory."

One that might be more relevent from the same book is:

"why have calendars at all? in order to predict the regular patterns of nature. In an agricultural society you need a solar calendar to know when best to sow your crops. In a society that lives by fishing you need a lunar calendar to know the tides. Yet it's impossible to establish a simple arithmetical relationship between the two that would bring them into harmony."

Calendars are based on observation of "heavenly bodies" Three cycles in specific:earths rotation on it's axis which defines the length of a day, the passage of the moon around the earth which defines the lunar month, and the earths orbit around the sun which defines the year.

There is no mathematical relation between them and more importantly their durations VARY.

The stellar year: 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes, and 9.54 seconds
The tropical year: 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45.96 seconds
the tropical year loses five seconds every thousand years and that is a fact that it impossible to establish the perfect calendar.

The duration of the DAY:

Not regular either.
it varies between

23hrs 59min 39sec and
24 hrs, 0 minutes, 30 seconds

the 24 hour day is just an AVERAGE. 24 hour days do not exist. Every society that has tried to make a calendar has come against this problem.

"calendars are always homemade improvisations, compromises with complex astronomical cycles."

I'm not even gunna talk about the leap year unless someone makes me.

So, if calendars are units of measurement for time, and we base them on the movement of the sun, moon, and earth, which move irregularly and are not calculable to perfection, then our measurements are generalizations. Fiction based on fact.

Clocks and calendars are the tools of humanity but they are not TIME.

Thaughts?

ps the ruler which measures distance is always correct because it was made by man. Why then are clocks not always correct? Were they not made by man aswell? Because they were made by man and based on something man cannnot correctly measure. We didn't make up the rotation of the sun, moon, earth. We did make up the inch.

poorprincess Reviewed by poorprincess on 04-21-2006. Time Time and Distance Distance is length it can be measured with a ruler. Time can be measured with a clock. We made the rulers and the clocks. But the rulers are always right. The clocks are not. Heres a quote from a book called "The Calender:History, Lore and Legend" "The calender is subject to two contradictory forces. On the one hand, the measurement of time tends toward ever greater uniformity. Thus the Gregorian calendar has gradually been adopted as a world wide system, Rating: 5

[poorprincess]

Jaques Le Goff on the Century;
"the first century in which the word and the term were truly applied was the 18th. From then on this convenient, abstract notion imposed it's tyranny on history. Everything thenceforth had to be couched in this artificial mold, as if the century were imbued with life, as if it had a unity, as if things changed from one century to the next."

[Highness]

from what you have stated it appears that there are many levels of time and not one all powerful force of time. This is plausible and makes good since I mean everything else grows and adapts and changes as it needs to better fit its purpose...why not time?