March 9, 2004
Ding Ding Ding Ding
You've been a tease, NASDAQ, but not today. This afternoon's close of 1995.16 translates to February 28, 1995. I don't know how long we'll stay in the past, but let's make the most of it. Not much happened that day. The Washington Post had this on the front page, though: "Balanced Budget Bill Heads for Showdown; Senate Vote Is Today; GOP Leaders Court Nunn ... Senate leaders of the balanced budget amendment drive, still one or two votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed for passage, spent the final day of debate yesterday vigorously courting Sen. Sam Nunn (Ga.) and four other Democrats who will decide the fate of the measure."
Checking the Constitution, it appears they didn't close the deal. Sir John Maynard Keynes would be happy.
Posted by cradle at March 9, 2004 4:34 PMI could not find your email address on this site so I posted this on your most recent post. Can you email me with Al Franken's email address. I loved his book, but I was wanting to know his sources on some of his information in some chapters (namely so that I can cite them as well). If you still had this email address, I was not able to find it anywhere else, and I wuld appreciate it if you would get back to me with it.
Thanks for your help,
-Adam Beaudoin
Daaaaavid and NPR sittin' in a tree... K.I.S.S.I.N.G!
Posted by: Brooke at March 10, 2004 7:50 PMCouldn't 1995.16 also translate to january 6th, 16th or 21st?
Posted by: cliff at March 12, 2004 5:30 PMHere is how the magic works:
0.16 * 365.25 - 31 = 27.4400, which
is 10:33:36 AM on Feb. 28th, I think.
I know, but this makes a relatively low amount of sense out of any formal reason you could cook up to mke an analogy between a NASDAQ index and s particular date.
Why should .16 = sixteen hundredths of a year, when a year is not base-10? If you are going to make the dot a formal convention, make it something that is a little bit saner, like a delimiter between the year and one of the next lower measurements in the same system.
So either 1995.16 should be the month of April, 1996, or it is January 16th, 1995.
Posted by: cliff at March 15, 2004 1:06 AMI chose it because it makes a relatively high amount of sense, at least in my way of thinking. Rather than invent a new notation, I adopted the common one when encountering two strings of decimal digits separated by a period. So "1995.16" becomes "1995.16 years" ==
"1x10^3 + 9x10^2 + 9x10^1 + 5x10^0 + 1x10^-1 + 6x10-2" years, that is, 1995 years + 16 one-hundredths of a year.
Posted by: David at March 15, 2004 10:09 AM
So you are saying that it makes sense to you to divide years into hundredths. That's very interesting for you, David, but you know, a good number of people divide a year up into 12 months, 365 days, 8760 hours, 525600 minutes, or 31536000 seconds. These just aren't base-10 numbers.
Since measurements of time are largely a consensual apparatus anyways it is pretty important to make sure you are in step with the other kids on this. tsk. Here I thought you were one of the smart people, and you can't even grasp something that any stoner figures out as soon as they are two hours late for their first job interview.
Just as a side note: 365, 8760, 525600, and 31536000 are all base-10 numbers. For example: 365 == 3*100 + 6*10 + 5*1.
But I understand where your misunderstanding is coming from.
Fortunately, I have an analogy.
Consider a yard. A yard is not 100 feet, each of which have 100 inches. Rather, a yard is divided into 3 feet, each of which are divided into 12 inches. Now, a meter is 1.0936133 yards. How do you interpret the ".0936133" ?
Posted by: David at March 15, 2004 11:33 PMI propose we move to a new chronographical system using yarins and centons.
Posted by: cliff at March 16, 2004 4:57 PM