Instead of using a standard measurement, they used something they knew. bridge across the Charles River when he was a student at MIT. One of the people Blaise quotes in the first chapter is George Smoot, whose cousin, Oliver, was used by his fraternity brothers to measure the length of the Mass. He’s the one who decided the day should begin at midnight because sunrise wasn’t quantifiable. In Time Lord: Sir Sanford Fleming and the Creation of Standard Time, Clark Blaise tells the story of how Fleming came up with and implemented the idea of standardizing time after he missed his train because the time at the departure point and the time at the arrival point were not synchronized.
For them, we are in the year 163 BE (Baha’i Era). The Baha’I calendar uses the same date for New Years and marks nineteen months of nineteen days. Best I can tell, this is the year 1376 on the Zoroastrian calendar and the year begins in March. The Coptic calendar sees the year 1724 beginning on January 1. The Hindu calendar, which is quite complicated, marks the new year in May and sees this year as 5108. The Islamic calendar marks the year as 1427. This coming year, 4705 (The Year of the Boar) begins on February 18. Because their years are of different lengths, the Chinese New Year is in either January or February. The Hebrew calendar marks the beginning of the year usually in what we call September and says we are in the year 5767. Yet, when it comes to our calendar, our choice to begin our year on January 1 marks nothing more than our arbitrary decision to say our year begins on January 1. I stack up my years from the day I was born. I missed being born on the eleventh by a little less than two hours. A little over two weeks ago, I marked the day I came into the world: my Day One. Watching the odometer flip made me think about the waning days of this year and what awaits us in the next.įor my car, on a day long before it became mine, there was Mile One when all but the last numbers on the odometer were zeroes. My beautiful lapis blue 1997 Jeep Cherokee Sport turned 166,000 miles today and it’s still going strong.
advent journal: I sang for my president.