Starship Asterisk*

[quote="orin stepanek"]I guess I can't see the significance of dropping a ball to start a new year. It's not much different than the old clock striking 12. Seems to me it would make more sense to start the new year on the shortest of longest day of the year. That would be more like getting a new start. :lol:

Orin[/quote]
Perhaps that is why things are so messed up...Everytime the new year starts, someone "Drops the Ball" :lol:

[quote="orin stepanek"]I guess I can't see the significance of dropping a ball to start a new year. It's not much different than the old clock striking 12. Seems to me it would make more sense to start the new year on the shortest of longest day of the year. That would be more like getting a new start. :lol:
[/quote]
There are twelve days of Xmas starting near the shortest day of the longest year (366 days + 1 second); New Year's Day is in the middle.
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http://www.pncchristmaspriceindex.com/CPI/pressRelease.html

PITTSBURGH, Dec. 1, 2008 – <<The PNC Christmas Price Index increased
by a lavish 8.1 percent over last year, the second biggest leap in the
history of the whimsical economic analysis by PNC Wealth Management
based on the cost of gifts in the holiday classic, “The Twelve Days of
Christmas.” According to the 24th annual survey, the cost of the PNC
CPI is $21,080 in 2008, $1,573 more than last year. The PNC CPI
exceeds the U.S. government’s Consumer Price Index – the widely used
measure of inflation calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The
Consumer Price Index is up 3.7 percent this year. The core CPI has
increased 2.2 percent since Oct. of 2007.

The seven swans a-swimming proved to be a driver of this year’s index,
carrying the greatest weight with a whopping 33.3 percent increase due
to their scarcity. True Loves will spend $5,600 this year for Swans
compared with $4,200 in 2007, accounting for $1,400 of the $1,573
increase. The swans typically have the largest swings in price in the
PNC CPI. “Omitting the seven swans a-swimming may be a tempting way
for a True Love to hold the line on costs, but one would be advised to
proceed with caution," warned James Dunigan, managing executive of
investments for PNC Wealth Management. Large percentage increases were
also seen in turtle doves (37.5 percent, to $56 from $40); partridges
(33.3 percent, to $20.00 from $15.00) and pear trees (33.3 percent, to
$199.99 from $149.99), according to PNC.

There is good news, however.

True Loves will pay less for the five gold rings this year. Retail
prices dropped by 11.4 percent (to $349.95 from $395) as retailers are
trying to move luxury merchandise in light of concerns with the
slowing economy, PNC found. Two other costs in the CPI dropped this
year: three French hens and Six geese-a-laying. This year the hens
cost $30, a drop of 33.3 percent over last year, and the geese cost
$240, falling one-third. Four calling birds remained steady, costing
$599.96, the same as a year ago.

Another Pay Raise for the Milkmaids

As the only unskilled laborers in the Christmas Price Index, the eight
maids a-milking received a raise for the second straight year, due to
another increase in the federal minimum wage. Before 2007, they had
not received a raise since 1997. The federal minimum wage increased
this year to $6.55 per hour, following last year’s $5.85. In the last
two years, the maids a-milking have seen their wages rise by $1.40 per
hour, an increase of 27 percent. Still, the maids will cost the True
Love $52.40 this year, only $5.60 more than a year ago, a relative
bargain in the PNC CPI.

The cost of most performers in the index—the drummers drumming, pipers
piping and Llrds-a-leaping—jumped a modest 3 percent, essentially a
cost-of-living increase, reflecting the current labor market in which
the unemployment rate rose to 6.5 percent after sitting below 5
percent for much of the decade. Only the price for the Ladies Dancing
was unchanged this year.

For those True Loves who prefer the convenience of shopping online,
PNC Wealth Management calculates the cost of “The Twelve Days of
Christmas” gifts purchased on the Web. This year, the trends
identified in the traditional index are repeated in the Internet
version, with an overall price growth of 2.8 percent, significantly
less than the traditional PNC CPI increase of 8.1 percent. True Loves
will pay a grand total of $31,957 to buy the items online, almost
$11,000 more than in the traditional index.

Seven of the 12 items in the Internet index stayed even with 2007. The
Internet price of swans a-swimming was unchanged this year, but they
still cost significantly more to buy online at $7,035. In general,
Internet prices are higher than their non-Internet counterparts
because of shipping costs for birds and the convenience factor of
shopping online, Dunigan said.

As part of its annual tradition, PNC Wealth Management also tabulates
the “True Cost of Christmas,” which is the total cost of items gifted
by a True Love who repeats all of the song’s verses. This holiday
season, very generous True Loves will pay more than ever before—$86,609
—for all 364 items, up from $78,100 in 2007, a staggering 10.9 percent
increase.>>
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Art (dropping the ball) Neuendorffer

I guess I can't see the significance of dropping a ball to start a new year. It's not much different than the old clock striking 12. Seems to me it would make more sense to start the new year on the shortest of longest day of the year. That would be more like getting a new start. :lol:

Orin

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap991029.html
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[quote]History of the USNO Time Ball
http://www.usno.navy.mil/millennium/tball_hist.shtml

<<The U.S. Naval Observatory, located in Washington, D.C., is the oldest scientific institution in the U. S. Navy, and one of the oldest in the country. Established in 1830 as the Depot of Charts and Instruments, its primary mission was to care for the U.S. Navy's chronometers, charts and other navigational equipment. In 1844, as its mission evolved and expanded, the Depot was reestablished as the U.S. Naval Observatory and was located on the hill north of where the Lincoln Memorial now stands, in the area known as Foggy Bottom.

As an institution that owed its founding to the necessity for accurate time in the form of the marine chronometer, time as determined by astronomical observation was at the very heart of its mission. Time was important not only for "rating" chronometers, but also for determining longitude, for measuring star positions, and, of course, for daily use by ordinary citizens. But how to disseminate time to the public? This problem was addressed only when the Naval Observatory moved to its new site in 1844. Secretary of the Navy John Y. Mason set events in motion when he wrote the Observatory's Superintendent Matthew Fontaine Maury on December 10, 1844:

"You will be pleased to devise some signal by which the mean time may be made known every day to the inhabitants of the city of Washington. When you are prepared to put your signal into operation, you will give notice of the kind you have adopted in the city newspapers, & at the same time inform the Department."

Faced with this task, Maury devised a time signal in the form of a falling ball, a method tested at Portsmouth, England as early as 1829 and in use since 1833 at the Greenwich Observatory. He may have known of this method through John Quincy Adams, who learned of the Greenwich time ball through correspondence with British Astronomer Royal George B. Airy, or by looking at the Greenwich Observation volumes for 1836 or 1840, which mention the "signal ball." The idea was simply that the ball would drop at a precisely known instant, 12 noon in Washington, from the dome of the Observatory. A number of balls and a variety of methods for dropping, including controlled lowering, dropping onto the dome, and throwing by hand were probably used in the early period, until an electromagnetic relay released the raised ball. The result was the same: anyone within visual sight of the ball could set their timepiece to 12 noon, and ships anchored on the Potomac River could calibrate their chronometers.

[img]http://www.usno.navy.mil/millennium/timeball.jpg[/img]
Although the first volume of Washington Observations (1846) made no mention of the time ball, and although later sources attribute its origin to the 1850s, the engraving (seen above) on the title page of that first volume shows one mounted on a flagstaff atop the 9.6 inch telescope dome. It is therefore probable that it was erected prior to the publication of that volume in 1846, a probability supported by the statement in Bohn's Hand-book of Washington (Washington, 1852) that

"John Quincy Adams, who was a devoted friend of the Observatory, and who used to visit it frequently in the last days of his life [died 23 February, 1848], has been known to walk all the way up to the Observatory from his lodgings, to see the ball fall."

Through early 1865, the USNO time service was limited to dropping this ball at noon from the flagstaff of the Observatory dome. During that year, however, more extensive dissemination of time became possible when the Observatory was connected by telegraph to the Washington Fire Alarm Office. The fire bells were struck daily at 7 am, noon and 6 pm by telegraphic signal from the Observatory. The Western Union Telegraph Company also tapped into this system, and once available to Western Union, time could be telegraphed to any location its lines traversed. By 1867 time was telegraphed "at noon, by the different lines of wires, to the northward, eastward, and westward, and as far southward as Texas." By 1869 Western Union distributed signals "which serve to regulate the clocks of nearly all the railroads in the southern States."

Once the time signal was disseminated to a particular city, the problem was to disseminate it within the city. In Washington, government clocks were telegraphically controlled from the Naval Observatory, beginning with the Navy Department in 1868, the Army Signal Office in 1871 and the Treasury Department in 1873. By 1884 20 public buildings, including the Executive Mansion and the Senate wing of the Capitol, had clocks controlled by the Observatory. By 1885 the number of controlled clocks in various public offices had increased to 84, by 1886 to 200 and by 1888 to 347.

The same system could be used in any city once it had the "correct" time, which was defined as local time until 1883. Such local time might be obtained from a local observatory, which in fact made money from selling time. It might also be telegraphed from Washington, appropriately corrected by the differences in longitude, which were accurately known for a number of large cities. In New York City, for example, a time ball was dropped by telegraphic signal from the Naval Observatory beginning Sept. 17, 1877.

Telegraphic time was eventually replaced by radio time signals, pioneered by the Navy beginning in 1904. But time balls remained in use well into the twentieth century. The U. S. Naval Observatory time ball was removed from the dome at its Foggy Bottom site shortly before 11 July 1885. Then it, or a new model, was installed on the central pavilion (on the side facing the White House) of the building now known as the Old Executive Office Building. The Washington time ball remained in service until December 16, 1936.

Today, the Naval Observatory still maintains the Master Clock for the United States, and disseminates time via telephone, computer, two-way time transfer, and the Global Positioning System of satellites.>>[/quote]
Our earth based time system is quite well defined and it makes perfect sense to say that SN1054 took place at a point in space time D light years away and D+954 years in the past. The real problem lies in the fact that D [~ 6300] is a little hard to define precisely with current technology.

Likewise, the boundaries of many western U.S. states were defined according to the American Meridian [through the U.S. Naval Observatory] NOT the Greenwich Meridian primarily because land surveying was the only accurate technology at the time:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_meridian
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[quote="interstellaryeller"]Right now Polaris is our north polar star. In 12,000 years Alpha lyrae will be, correct? How will this effect the summer in the northern hemisphere.[/quote]
In about 10,000 years the boreal summer solstice sun will be near perihelion [and the North Polar star will be Delta Cygni (Ruc)]. This will indeed make summers in the northern hemisphere hotter but not nearly so hot as they were just 10,000 years ago when the boreal summer solstice sun was also at perihelion [and the North Polar star was Delta Cygni (Ruc) Tau Herculis]. This is because both the obliquity and the eccentricity of the earth's orbit have been on the decline for the last 10,000 years and they should continue to decline over the next 10,000 years.
[b][url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precession_(astronomy)[/url]
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[url=http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0443649/quotes]Memorable quotes for 10,000 BC (2008):[/url][/b]
D'Leh: [to Tic'Tic] We need you.[quote]
Tick tock ... tick: Extra second added to 2008
By Jim Wolf Reuters
Monday, December 29, 2008; 10:00 AM

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Those eager to put 2008 behind them will have to hold their good-byes for just a moment this New Year's Eve.

The world's official timekeepers have added a "leap second" to the last day of the year on Wednesday, to help match clocks to the Earth's slowing spin on its axis, which takes place at ever-changing rates affected by tides and other factors.

The U.S. Naval Observatory, keeper of the Pentagon's master clock, said it would add the extra second on Wednesday in coordination with the world's atomic clocks at 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds Coordinated Universal Time, or UTC. That corresponds to 6:59:59 p.m. EST (23:59:59 GMT), when an extra second will tick by -- the 24th to be added to UTC since 1972, when the practice began.

UTC is the time scale kept by highly precise atomic clocks around the world, accurate to about a billionth of a second per day, the Naval Observatory says. For those with a need for precision timing, it has replaced Greenwich Mean Time, or GMT.

The decision to add or remove a second is the responsibility of the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, based on its monitoring of the Earth's rotation. The goal is to make sure clocks vary from the Earth's rotational time by no more than 0.9 seconds before an adjustment. That keeps UTC in sync with the position of the sun above the Earth. Mechanisms such as the Internet-based Network Time Protocol and the satellite-based Global Positioning System depend on precision timing.

The first leap second was introduced into UTC on June 30, 1972. The last was added on December 31, 2005. They have been added at intervals ranging from six months to seven years, Daniel Gambis, head of the IERS Earth Orientation Center at the Observatoire de Paris, wrote in an explanatory piece this month (http://hpiers.obspm.fr/eop-pc/).

Among the reasons for Earth's slowing whirl on its axis are the braking action of tides, snow or the lack of it at the polar ice caps, solar wind, space dust and magnetic storms, according to the U.S. Commerce Department's National Institute of Standards and Technology, another timekeeper.

By contrast, a leap day, February 29, occurs once every four years because a complete turn around the sun -- our year with all its seasons -- takes about 365 days and six hours.

In 1970, an international agreement established two time scales: one based on the Earth's rotation and another on highly accurate atomic clocks.

The U.S. Naval Observatory's master clock is based on a system that now includes 50 atomic clocks, 36 based on the element cesium and 14 known as hydrogen masers.

With the Earth's rotation gradually slowing, the periodic insertion of a leap second into the atomic time scale is needed to keep the two systems within a second of each other.[/quote]