Geometry @ MindSay

Happy New Year -- commemorating a historical blunder

We have just started a New Year according to our common Gregorian calendar. The earth just completed going around the sun once. We have just seen 366 sunrises, since the last new Year's Day. There goes a story many of us have not heard of, or have forgotten. Early mathematicians who invented the science of "geometry" decided to divide a circle into 360 degrees. The word geometry itself is inspired from geo -- earth, metry-- measurements. They saw the earth going around the sun in some 360 days (according to their crude and primitive measurements).

Although, later this was proved wrong, we continue to stick to the 360 degrees rule of circles (each degree reminds us of one day in earth's annual excursion), a big blunder which the world has accepted since ages. So, every time we celebrate New Year, we must think of this historic blunder which we made several centuries ago.

Subsequent generations of mathematicians, corrected all this, giving rise to a bewildering variety of calendars. A good collection of calendar related information can be found at ::: http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud.htm

The science of geometry grew into the science of astronomy (now we start looking at the stars). We have now come to the stage when we can actually hope to visit these celestial bodies. All this started with a faulty premise of 360 degrees to a circle.

 partha

eddie drew me a picture today in geometry class:

detention is...just that. detention.

it sucks. i'm never being late for geometry ever again.

lyremennarekab is in china. whoa.



Beijing: 39° 55' N, 116° 25' E
Boston: 42° 20' N, 71° W

she tells me that every minute you go to bed before midnight counts double. so let's suppose for a minute that she decides to go to bed early. or late. well, whichever. it works out the same way. but anyway, if she goes to bed with her head facing north, she is in a very similar orientation to if she were here in the states and standing up. see visual aid. so she clearly can't be sleeping if she's standing up. and this is just fine because it's about 11:15 pm now, and i say "go to bed, meryl." but as she likely woke up a few hours ago and is standing up and milling about in china having a fantastic time, she is in the proper orientation for sleeping were she here. sleeping while facing north, that is. so everything works out just fine, and hours she is awake before noon count double because they would be hours spent lying in bed before midnight were she in the same absolute orientation and here.

spherical geometry is weird.

a

Stake Conferance today. It was long, but I liked it. The particular highlight was the new stake presidency. President Watson, President Alread, and President McGinn are the only dudes I had ever known. Now they've got President McGinn serving as the president, President Adamson, and President Some other guy. I don't know why I'm puting all that down. Those are probably just names to anybody who will ever read this. Come to think of it, I know Michael Adamson. I can only asume that it's the same Adamson. After all, he lives down the street two houses from Lexie and two from where Riley used to live. That's pretty darn close.

So I did the wrong homework. I started working on Math, but it's a B-Day tomorrow. So I did the big physics thing. I only did eleven problems of math though, so I don't really care. Mind you, those problems took me almost an hour and a half, but that was because I took and hour and twenty-five minutes to program some more equations into my Homework Helper XL file. I did all the circumferance perimeter area volume crap. I love that spread sheet! Every time I learn a new geometric, algebraic, or trig function, I program it into the spreadsheet, and so every time I have a problem like that from now on, the calc does it for me. It's like making somebody else do my homework, except for I have to teach them how to do it and they have a photographic memory. Cheating? Not if I know how to do it initially in order to teach the computer how.

Church and Homework. Why does this day feel so accomplished. Maybe it's because (I WIN!) for now.