[LEAPSECS] Calendars count days - clocks divide them up

[Kevin.Birth at qc.cuny.edu]

The day is panculturally recognized as a time reference, but many cultures 
are not concerned with the day as a uniform unit of duration.  Instead, 
days can vary in length (like months and years), and it is not a problem.

Very few cultures have defined the concept of day both in relationship to 
a time reference and a uniform duration. 

The definition of a day in terms of multiples of smaller units of time, 
e.g., 86400 seconds, is culturally unique and extremely recent.  In terms 
of human history, the definition of small units of time in relationship to 
solar cycles is also relatively recent.  Previous to the pendulum, minutes 
and seconds were conceived as measures of angle in sidereal time.  We are 
still in the process of working out the consequences of relating the 
precise measure of small durations to the cultural emphasis on the solar 
day. 

And it seems there is impatience about working through these consequences. 
 Even within Europe, some communities rejected mean time in favor of 
canonical hours until the early 20th century.  The Gregorian calendar 
reforms are still not globally accepted after over 400 years. 

Kevin


Kevin K. Birth, Professor
Department of Anthropology
Queens College, City University of New York
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing, NY 11367
telephone: 718/997-5518

"We may live longer but we may be subject to peculiar contagion and 
spiritual torpor or illiteracies of the imagination"  --Wilson Harris

"Tempus est mundi instabilis motus, rerumque labentium cursus." --Hrabanus 
Maurus




Rob Seaman <seaman at noao.edu> 
Sent by: <leapsecs-bounces at leapsecond.com>
07/02/13 10:38 AM
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Subject
[LEAPSECS] Calendars count days - clocks divide them up






Warner Losh wrote:

>> It is gratifying to see how flawlessly this standard is implemented,

>> despite over 40 years of it being the standard. I guess the far older

>> expectation that every minute has 60 seconds is kinda deeply 

engrained...

> 

> Wikipedia drily notes that "Between 1000 (when al-Biruni used seconds) 

and

> 1960 the second was defined as 1/86,400 of a mean solar day".  That 1960

> endpoint to which it refers is the transition to the ephemeris second.

> Rubber-seconds UTC, which has occasional minutes with !=60 seconds,

> comes along in 1961.  So we've got around 960 years of the second only

> being a subdivision of the minute, versus 53 years or so of seconds

> being more complicated than that.

> 

> -zefram


Standards aren't just randomly chosen, they express an underlying model of 
how the universe works.  Implicit in the standards expressing, say, units 
of electric current and resistance are observations and inferences with 
names like "Ohm's Law".  The proposed new formalism for the SI (metric) 
system relies on this explicitly:

                 
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Relations_between_new_SI_units_definitions.png

                 
http://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/jres/116/6/V116.N06.A01.pdf

The conceptual model underlying the SI-second is frequency.  Civil 
timekeeping simply represents another standard.  Conceptual models fail if 
an attempt is made to force fit them together.

Speaking of frequency, consider the words that people use:

                 http://www.wordfrequency.info/free.asp?s=y

(This is American English - statistics for other languages would be 
welcome.)  The ranks and frequencies of usage of words related to 
timekeeping:

                  54                             year            (n)   
769254
                  90                             day             (n)   
432773
                 188                             week            (n)   
199268
                 237                             month           (n)   
162685
                 273                             hour            (n)   
138955
                 309                             minute          (n)   
126660
                 683                             second          (n)   
56022

The word "day" is used more than seven times as frequently as the word 
"second" (as a noun).  The three calendar words (year/month/day) are more 
prevalent than the three clock words (hour/minute/second) by greater than 
four to one.  Even "century" is used more frequently than "second", and 
"decade" is used almost as frequently: 

                 606                             century (n)       65667
                 731                             decade          (n)   
53727

Whatever underlying model of human cognition, these data cannot be used to 
argue that our parsing of time into units of days is irrelevant to 
society.  "Day" is more frequently used than key nouns like man, woman and 
child.  The noun "second" is less frequently used than other words 
descriptive of days like morning and night - and the combined usage of the 
terms AM and PM is 50% more frequent than "second".

In fact while all the words above are nouns the rankings are listed for 
all parts of speech.  If you scroll down the very long list you will find 
that the top five most frequently used nouns themselves are:

                 time
                 year
                 people
                 way
                 day

People perceive time
in a way that descends from
a year and a day

Rob

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