Solar Orbit Events and Lunar New Year

My birthday weekend was a very pleasant one, and I deeply appreciate the messages, phone calls, etc from the c250 people who contacted me (as is my want, I responded individually). The day itself started with cat rescue; Erica H has been visiting for a few days and her cat Eadrick decided to leap from the balcony to the apartment patio directly below - which is very rarely occupied. I managed to work around the fence from a kind neighbour and rescue the wayward feline. Later in the day we went to the Monet and Impressionists Lume exhibition and spent quite some time there. It was, of course, very beautiful as the style of the Impressionists. It is especially notable how dependent even art is on technology; the Impressionists simply wouldn't have existed without the invention of the paint tube; it was this that allowed them to directly engage in nature and pain "en plein air". Much of Saturday was in the company of Brendan E., where we watched the Chinese action film, Operation Red Sea, loosely based on the evacuation of foreign nationals from the Yemeni civil war. There wasn't much in terms of character development, and there was some light propaganda, but mainly it was action and technology, both of which it did very well at. Yesterday I further engaged in similar activities with a visit to the NGV with Dr Bec, whom I had hitherto not spent much time with in the past and really enjoyed our conversation on data science, among other matters.

It is now, of course, the LNY which is either a rabbit or a cat, with the latter for the Vietnamese communities. It does make me wonder about calendaring systems in general. It would delightful if our planet had a neat 360 day year, with four seasons and the solstice and equinoxes fitting into a nice 90 quadrant, and the moon going through a neat 30-day cycle twelve times a year. As an young adolescent I even played around with the notion of 12 30-day months and a five day festive holiday (equivalent of Glorantha's "Sacred Time") as an alternative calendar (and, of course, with the additional leap-day as appropriate). Earth and the moon are not, of course, so exacting. The orbital period of the Earth is 365.25636 solar days, and the synodic lunar month is 29 days 12 hours 44 minutes and 2.9 seconds. It's all a bit of a delicious mess with many attempts over the course of human history. Even with our advanced technologies, there is still variation between Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) and International Atomic Time (TAI). What is the time? Imperfectly defined, but "vivre sans temps mort" should be an aspirational motto.