And Slaters Go Plop

Our calendar system is based on how many times the earth rotates in the time it takes to do a full circuit of the sun. When it was first invented we didn’t know that was how we were measuring it. We used the stars and the seasons which just happen to be a result of the earth’s rotations/circuit.

The problem with this is that it doesn’t take a nice, even amount of rotations to do a full circuit of the sun. Apparently it’s 365.242199 days or so and that is why we round it off to 365 and throw in a leap year every four years.

365 is a crap number. It’s tricky to divide up evenly. In our past we convinced ourselves that there were four seasons in a year (which is like saying that a rainbow has six or seven colours) and so we tried to divide 365 by four and then into three for each month giving us a nice 12 months of 30.416666… days each month. Which means that some months have to be 31 and some 30 and then one adjustment month, February with 28 and sometimes 29 days. Add to this the fact that we’ve chosen to go with seven days in a week and you’ll see that 11 months of the year aren’t evenly divisible by weeks.

In 1849 Auguste Comte proposed the Positivist Calendar which did away with the notion of the four seasons but kept everything else and manages to do a pretty good job of it (if you trim off his peripheral ideas for the month names and for when the new calendar was to start). What he does is he divides 365 by 13 months of 28 days each which gives you every month starting on the same day with an even four weeks per month and one (two for a leap year) blank day at the end of the year. Brilliant!

I have a couple of issues with New Zealand’s current democratic system. The first is that the party that ends up in power is the one that 60% of New Zealand voted against in alliance with a party that 95% of people can’t stand and the second is that you can only vote once every three years.

Actually, make that three issues: Someone who has a criminal record has the same weight of vote as someone who has been nominated for an award for services to the community.

I believe it’s largely down to the technology we are using. In the days when all the votes had to be collected and driven by horse to the nearest centre to be counted it made sense to keep elections to a minimum just to save time and money. These days we have the technology to let everyone vote on every issue when ever they want.

How much would it cost for every house and post office to have a set-top box that provides a voting channel? Less than one election? You wouldn’t need political parties then - you’d just need a couple of good debating teams (hired and fired just like any other company) to present the issues put forward by the public.

What about some kind of voter-weighting system where everyone starts off with 100 points and you gain points, to a limit, for things that may make you a better voter (education, community awards, respect) and lose points for the opposite. The amount of points you have determine how much influence you have when voting.

Is this practicable?

Here’s a photo I took of Jupiter and three of her moons. Until yesterday night I wasn’t even aware you could see the moons of any other planet without an observatory-sized telescope.

Equipment required:

• 1 x crappy telescope
• 1 x el cheepo digital camera
• 1 x hour of fiddling with settings and a tripod

I’m reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan at the moment. I’d heard of the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud before but thought they were small clusters of rocks somewhere in between the planets.

No so.

The Kuiper Belt is a collection of big rocks ranging from a kilometer in size up to Pluto (yep, Pluto is now part of that collection) which is 2320km across and others that are even larger. It’s in a disc shape starting at Neptune and extending for about 3 billion kms (20AUs) and Neptune, which is the furthest out of our planets, every once in a while manages to pull one of these objects out of its orbit around the sun and occasionally flings it inwards causing much of the pock-marking we see on the moon and other planets. Including Earth. Neptune is throwing rocks at us.

The Oort Cloud extends beyond the Kuiper Belt, is in the shape of a sphere rather than a disc, extends a long way out (the Kuiper Belt extends to 50AUs and the Oort Cloud as far as 100,000AUs). All of these objects are held in orbit by the force of the Sun’s gravity.

To get an idea of the size of our solar system take a look at the ongoing travels of Voyager 2. It was launched in 1977, sling-shotted around Juipter in 1979, did the same to Saturn, Uranus and Neptune in 1981, 1986 and 1989 respectively and continued on outwards travelling at a speed of 3.3AUs per year (55,000km/h).

Travelling at 55,000km/h it’ll take something like 20,000 years to clear our solar system. If it were heading toward the nearest star to us it would take about 80,000 years to get there.

Let’s face it, unless we invent a snappier way to travel we’re going to have a long term plan for this planet we live on.

There is a problem with the way people connect with each other. If I move house and my phone number changes I have to try to find everyone who may have my number and address and let them know. If I’m working at a company and keep in contact with my friends using my work email or if I’m with an ISP and am using the email address they provide and want to change providers I have to go through the same hassle of contacting everyone to let them know of the change.

So, how about having it that every person in the world is assigned a unique identifier and depending on the method of communication it is routed to where ever they are. An example of an identifier could be lastname.firstname.chosenname. The chosenname could be your middle name or a nickname. That way I can be living in the UK and all someone has to do to phone me is dial (not using numbers) peterson.damian.charlie. They can use exactly the same identifier to email me or to send a letter.

When I work for a company I would use the company email which would be a role, not a person, i.e. com.nice.designer or something. When I leave the company clients can continue to send email to that role because it’ll soon be filled by another person.

Notice that I’ve gone from big.to.little in my naming because I feel it gives better perspective. I also think that our date system should be 2007.4.8 rather than trying to guess if 4/8/07 is American or British.

I’m not sure what would happen with women when they change their names in marriage. Perhaps they get two addresses once they’re married? I would think that it’ll be a thing of the past within 100 years anyway. Seems a strange tradition when you think about it.

Anyway, so one identifier and some kind of background lookup for routing. I think it’s the way to go.

Perhaps a good way to end spam is to associate a cost with emails. If each email cost 5c to send but the 5c was refunded upon acceptance from the other end it just wouldn’t be affordable to bulk-mail a million emails. You could have a number of accredited companies where you could pre-pay say $10 or so and top up from time to time. It’s good for the top-up companies because they get a bit of money to play with and it’s good for everyone on the new email system because they get less, much less, spam.

Create a website where people can post ideas and inventions with the sole purpose of putting them out in the public domain so that anyone can get on with making it happen. Apparently you can’t apply for a patent for an idea that has previously been published.

I reckon that the types of people who have ideas are not necessarily the types of people who will get off their arse to bring it to fruition.

Scenario 1. Ten people have ideas and each gets patented but only three of them manage to get their idea / product to market. Now each of them has to pay a premium for these products and seven of the products can never be used. Three people are partly winners because of the patent system but they also suffer from the same system by having to pay more for the other two’s products and by not having the other ideas / products available.

Scenario 2. Ten people have ideas but they release them all to the public domain. Six of the ideas are snaffled up by twenty different companies and competition brings the value of these ideas down to what they are really worth. The other four ideas don’t get used because they were not marketable in the first place. Now all ten people have access to the best ideas for a fair price. Everyone wins.

Patents bad. Sharing ideas good.

Over the last three months or so we’ve been aerosol-less. We’ve taken to using matches and I have to say that, in my opinion, they are more effective than the sprays we used to use which add a perfume layer to what continues to be a fairly hefty undercurrent of turdiness.

As an experiment I splashed some matches with a range of different perfumes and aftershaves and it seems to work well.

Is it more environmentally-friendly? Does burning a match put more carbon into the atmosphere than a spray from a can?