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Elaboration 68

Our systems for calendar, time-keeping, place determination on the globe and so on, are just as primitive, and just as 'only one step from random', as our arithmetics and geometrics, language and social organization that baffle our children. One step further, logical organization (instead of almost random agreement), would surprise and delight our kids. Now, they have to start early in finding the illogical, the stupid, 'normal' (!), i.e. they are being made stupid by us. What stupidity e.g. it is to have an imaginary line on the globe (maps), on one side of which it is tomorrow, on the other side it is yesterday, a date-line! Cannot we do better than that? When a man in Denmark speaks over the telephone with a man in Mexico, he perceives clearly that both places (the whole planetary sphere) have the same time. It shows by giving proper answers to questions unforeseen, without a time-lag of more than a second. A logical thinker would have a world time therefore (the G. M. T. for instance), over the whole globe, but then without a date-line, with Greenwich going East, from zero to 360, i.e. Greenwich again. Still, it all is a question of silly superstition to have each one's own time reckoning. When the sun is amply risen, we have breakfast, and are going to our work at the required time, does it matter whether this time is called 11 or half past three? The superstition is that the (named) time of day has something to do with sunrise and sunset. We can easily free ourselves (starting with the more logical thinking kids) from such irrational superstitions. Why should the zero large circle, the one of Greenwich, not be 360 degrees as well, like the 12 on the clock that is also zero? Nay, why have a sixty digit calculating system at all, when children have to learn to do arithmetic in a ten digit system? They easily are being made stupid by this.
next up previous
Next: Elaboration 69 Up: Elaborations Previous: Elaboration 67
Ven 2007-09-11