I am not advocating a revolution, certainly not a violent revolution. Revolutions tend to be messy and bloody and to end up as something quite different from what was originally intended. But America's election day is soon, and we remember the attempted revolution on January 6. What if Donald Trump loses a close election, and thought he should have won? Or what if he wins and decides to change the whole order of things?
A revolution is actually an opportunity to change the basic way that things are done. Remember the French Revolution and the revolutionaries' obsession with the number ten. The ten-month year, ten-day week, and ten-hour day didn't last, but the measurement system based on ten did last. It is what we call the Metric System.
Just in case there should be a revolution, why don't we make the best of it and change a few things for the better?
THE UTILITY ALPHABET
Some letters of the alphabet form useful descriptive shapes. A structure may be described as an A-frame. Some things are C-shaped or D-shaped. A structure may be arranged like an H, or may be constructed of I-beams. A curve may be described as resembling a J. An obvious way to describe a circle is like an O. There is an S-curve, a T-junction and a Y-junction. Things may be described as V-shaped or Z-shaped.
But the rest of the alphabet is of little use as descriptive shapes. With modern technology, we should be making maximum use of the alphabet for descriptive shapes. This is the alphabet that I came up with. Eleven of the letters have been replaced.
The letter M has been replaced by a similar form that will be more useful. The one replacing Q is a right triangle, but four sided because the hypotenuse is broken into an angle. The letter replacing G is two semi-circles that don't touch. The one replacing R is two semi-circles that do touch.
With the technical descriptions that are widely used today, this will be a much more useful alphabet.
THE SPACE AGE CALENDAR
Have you ever thought that we could use a new calendar? The Gregorian Calendar, named for Pope Gregory, that we now use is from a medieval time when most people worked in agriculture. The idea of calendar reform is not new. The days do not fit evenly into a year and there has been the idea of "leap weeks" instead of an extra day in a "leap year", every four years.
I have a calendar too. My calendar is called the "Space Age Calendar". As the name implies it is intended to help with space exploration. The calendar is based on the earth's distance from the sun.
The earth's orbit around the sun is elliptical, rather than circular. The point at which the earth is closest to the sun is known as perihelion, and the furthest point from the sun is aphelion.
Why on earth do we need months? Months were based on the orbit of the moon around the earth, which is 29 days and does not fit evenly into the year. This might have been useful in agriculture, to keep track of the best time to plant, but months are completely irrelevant today except as a convenient billing cycle. I have long thought that we should name the weeks, rather than the months.
In my calendar the days are simply numbered, from 1 to 365, with day 366 added every fourth year. We will still keep the weekdays. Today we live much more by the clock than by the calendar, and much more by the week than the month. Months have been mostly irrelevant since the Industrial Revolution, except for setting holidays and religious observances by the lunar cycle.
The convenient monthly billing cycle can continue on multiples of 30. Day 30, Day 60, Day 90, etc. The date will be expressed with three digits following the year. Today will be 2024298
The solstices and equinoxes, when the day or night is longest and the other shortest and when the two are equal, will still be there. But today it really matters to very few people exactly when the seasons begin. It is only temperate latitudes that really have four seasons anyway.
If the year were to begin with either perihelion or aphelion the date, the number of the day, would tell us how far the earth was from the sun. There is a difference of about 3 million miles, or 5 million kilometers, between perihelion and aphelion. This distance makes a difference. For an example spring tides, where the gravitational pull of the sun and moon is coordinated, will be stronger at perihelion but weaker at aphelion. But neap tides, when the sun and moon are at right angles to each other, will be the opposite.
One issue with space travel is that there is no ready way to tell directions in space. There is no north, south, east or, west. We might refer to the northern or southern hemisphere of the moon or sun or one of the planets. But we are only going by earth's northern or southern hemisphere. This is less-than accurate because each planet has a different axis of rotation that is not parallel to earth's.
The earth rotates eastward. The moon revolves around the earth in the same direction, as does the earth around the sun. So we might say that the earth revolves eastward around the sun. But it is only eastward relative to the earth, there is no real "eastward" in space.
But using a line between the points of aphelion and perihelion, which remain fixed, gives us a meridian or baseline from which we can establish directions in space. Two lines perpendicular to it, both intersecting the original meridian at the center of the sun, would be all that we need to establish directions in space, just like on earth. We would easily find exactly where in space we were because the date would give us both the position and the distance from the sun. We just have to factor in that the earth does not move at a constant pace in it's orbit around the sun, it moves faster when it is closer to the sun.
I was thinking of beginning the year on January 4, because that would be closer to the present New Year. But aphelion occurs, just by chance, on America's Independence Day. What would Americans think of the year beginning on what is now the Fourth of July? As far as naming the weeks, instead of the months, there are 52 weeks and we could name a week after each state, plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico.
COUNTING BY TWELVES
Have you ever stopped to ponder just how inefficient our basic counting system is, the one that we have taken for granted since early childhood? Our present system of counting by tens is woefully inefficient and we began using this system only because we have ten fingers and people in ancient times used their fingers to count. This is surely the supreme example of how we can be technologically forward but system backward.
For ancient people, using their ten fingers to count worked just fine. But the world was to get far more complex. The four basic arithmetical operations are: addition, subtraction, multiplication and, division. Basing our counting system on any number, such as the tens that we use now, will do very well with the first three.
However the last of the four, division, is the tricky one. Division is very important in the flow of daily life, just as are the first three. The difference with division is that not all of the convenient numbers that we could possibly base our counting system on are equally divisible.
For maximum efficiency, the number on which we base our counting system should be as divisible as possible. It does not make sense to base the system on too high of a number because that would mean that more symbols (1,2,3,...) would have to be use and that would hinder communication. However, we have made a really great mistake by counting by tens simply because ten is so poorly divisible.
Consider that by far the most important and most frequent measurement that human beings take is that of time. In fact, we take measurements of time many times more often than all other entities that we measure such as distance, weight, temperature, etc. Now notice when you look at a clock or watch that we base our measurement of time not on the number ten, but on twelve and multiples of twelve. There are twelve hours in a day, sixty seconds in a minute and, sixty minutes in an hour.
You may notice that there was once ten months. The sept- of September means seven in Latin, just as oct- means eight, nov- means nine and, dec- means ten (as in "decimal", for example). But the logic of counting by twelves, rather than by tens, prevailed. Two more months were added to make twelve, July is named for Julius Caesar and August is named for Augustus Caesar.
The truth is that when measuring time, division is very important and people instinctively adapted a system based on twelve, rather than the conventional ten. This is also why eggs are sold by the dozen, rather than by tens, twelve eggs are more likely to be evenly divisible by the members of a family.
Time is not the only measurement in which twelve is very obviously a better base to use than ten because of it's easy divisibility. A complete circle, such as the circumference of the earth, is divided into 360 degrees. This is a nice, round, easily divisible multiple of twelve.
The Metric System is an absolutely brilliant idea that was conceived at the time of the French Revolution. But yet something is still missing about it. The Metric System is superior to the old English system of feet, yards and, miles.
However, here we are in the Twenty-First Century and that old system still has not gone away and the Metric System usually has to be forced on people by law. The reason is very clear, the Metric System is far better with regard to multiplication and the easy convertibility of units, but the old system still has the advantage of divisibility. Twelve inches are a foot, 36 inches are a yard and 5,280 feet are a mile. Notice that measurement of time was never successfully metricized.
The Metric System is at the mercy of the number base that we use and will never reach it's full potential as long as we count by tens, rather than twelves. Fractions are still as useful as they are because ten is such an awkward number to divide, basing our number system on twelve would change this by incorporating much of the useful divisibility of fractions.
Just think how convenient it would be if we could express time in decimal form based, of course, on twelve, rather than ten. Consider a decimal such as 1.63 hours. It is difficult for us to grasp quickly because it straddles the two number systems.
By using a grid, we can easily express any point on the grid by using cartesian coordinates. What if we could do this with the entire planet? We can, but expression in terms of latitude and longitude are based on twelve but we will have to express the coordinates in base-ten decimal form and it makes for an awkward and inefficient arrangement. Latitude and longitude are getting ever-more important in these days of GPS but we cannot effectively express the coordinates of a point in decimal for and will not be able to most-effectively do so until we count by twelves.
Our number system plainly and simply revolves around twelve but we try to make it revolve around ten because we happen to have ten fingers. This is certainly one of the greatest mistakes ever made. We do not still write in hieroglyphics yet we still count by tens.
THE EXPRESSION OF TIME IN DEGREES
While we are on the subject of counting and measurement systems, let's consider the units of hours and minutes. Hours and minutes are completely arbitrary units and were adapted due to the easy divisibility of the units which we use for time.
We cannot actually measure time but only motion, which is a function of time. Our measurement of time is based on the motions of the earth. The earth rotates 360 degrees in one day. Thus, one degree of the earth's rotation corresponds to 240 seconds or what we would now refer to as four minutes. An hour is fifteen degrees.
Since humans are now spending quite a bit of time in space, in earth orbit, why not express time in degrees? This would base the passage of time on how far the earth has rotated during that interval of time. I am certain that this would be much more convenient and efficient, hours and minutes were merely convenient everyday units in the pre-space age.
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