[Edu-sig] python satacad: class 6

[Arthur]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Beni Cherniavsky [mailto:cben at users.sf.net]

> Arthur wrote on 2005-02-20:


> Also, the Islamic holiday cannot always coincide with a Jewish holiday
> because the Islamic calendar constantly drifts relative to the Sun
> (having no leap monthes it misses about 11 days per year).  Some years
> from now it will occur in the summer, while Adar is always in the
> winter.  So he could only mean the coincidence to have some meaning at
> this specific year.
> [Pardon me if I'm explaining the obvisous, when I'm don't know the
> correspondent's level I tend to err on the side of too much details]

Well I am Jewish, and the explanation as to Adar is interesting, and new, to
me - so I doubt you are stating the obvious to a more general population.  

Though I did know that Purim is a holiday where the faithful are supposed to
let loose a bit and have one (or two) too many - a vestige of old school
religion - intoxication as a religious rite being core to religious
experience to, say, the American Indian but outside the experience  of the
Christian and Islamic faiths, as far as I am aware.
 
The issues of calendar (and more particularly time) synchronization happens
to be of current interest to me.

I am the kind of Jew who celebrates High Holy Days, in some manner - and not
much more.  Ekrem and I used to work at the same firm, He is more observant
in his faith than I am in mine, and therefore keeps with him a calendar
which gives the prayer times on a daily basis.  I would ask him for the time
of sundown on holidays I do observe (in my way) - knowing that probably even
on the question of the time of sundown our faiths depart, but that his time
was good enough for my purposes.

The history of science being a keen interest of mine - 

I had just picked up the book:

Einstein's Clocks and Poincare's Maps by Peter Galison 

just out in paperback. 

Have not gotten too far into it, but I think Galison is making and following
the point - as to Einstein - that it is no small matter that he was working
at a Patent Office in Switzerland when formulating his ideas - the accuracy
of clocks and the synchronization of time among clocks being a very active
concern of the applied technologists of his time, and particularly within
his jurisdiction - which Galison thinks, logically, helped provoke
Einstein's thinking.

Of course Anna will nail all this down for us with her presentation at
PyCon:
"""
The Time of Day 
"""

walking us through, I think,  the Python tools available for keeping
ourselves in sync.

Art