Home Fires and calendar reform SPOILERS

Jeff Wilson · 27 Jan 2011, 02:50 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2011 20:50:03 -0600
Subject: (urth) Home Fires and calendar reform **SPOILERS**
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=-eVirgC=xL5E3KCemNTTsaeLmbke-8fCh9X-v at mail.gmail.com>
References: <AANLkTi=-eVirgC=xL5E3KCemNTTsaeLmbke-8fCh9X-v at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4D40DD5B.1030304 at io.com>

On 1/26/2011 10:55 AM, Dave Tallman wrote:
> In "Home Fires" there is never a mention of months or month names. There
> are days, weeks, hundred-days, and years. What sort of calendar reform
> is this? Asimov proposed a uniform calendar abolishing the old months,
> with 91 days per period. Four of these gives 364 days, a reasonable fit
> with the solar year. But four hundred-days is 400, which seems
> unreasonable. Does this calendar just let the years fall where they may?
>   It seems impractical for things like birthdays, holidays, and
> anniversaries (none of these things are mentioned within the story).
>
> The solar year is slowly getting longer, but it takes centuries to add
> minutes. This story doesn't seem to be set that far in the future.

I haven't read it yet, but isn't it a story with lots of time spent 
isolated from earth, on top of the time dilation, similar to THE FOREVER 
WAR?  Earth's calendar would become irrelevant while away, but 
provisioning would depend on the subjective time endured; 
hundred-man-day units is good for estimation and logistical bundling, 
where a day's consumables are 1500 minutes worth of oxygen, three hot 
meals, and 5 kilos of water.



-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

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