Sunday, February 22, 2004
About time [360]
• The Ancient Babylonians were big fans of the number 360. It has tons of factors, and it's very nearly the number of days in a year. Nearly. Those Babylonians also loved nothing more than to divide up their 360s into bits. They divided their 360-day year into 12 months each of 30 days. They divided their 360-degree sky into the 12 signs of the zodiac. And they divided each of those 360 degrees into 60 minutes, each subdivided into 60 seconds - units still used today to describe latitude and longitude and to map the sky.
• There's now a modern proposal that the daily rotation of the Earth through 360 degrees could be the basis to construct a new global time standard. The system's called New Earth Time, and it runs daily from 0º to 360º, from GMT midnight to GMT midnight. I rather like it, take a look. (Oh, and if there are any techie bloggers out there, could someone tell me if it's possible to add Javascript to a Blogger page, or am I wasting my time trying to display a Java New Earth Time clock on here?)
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