A Matter of Degrees

[Sherwood, Harrison]

>From: 	David Casseres

>Getting on with it, Chris asks
>
>>     229.30 `incomprehensibly and perversely, in willful denial of God's
>>     Disposition of Time and Space, preferring 365 and a Quarter'  Well why
>>     not?  (AD)
>
>Because God sez (you could look it up, I'm sure) that a year is a certain 
>number of days.

But that's not really Andrew's question, which is (if I may), why _not_
use 365.25 as the number of degrees in a circle, as they do (did) in
China, instead of 360?

The ostensible answer being, as Dixon points out, that 360 is "vastly
more convenient" to figure with, being evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5,
6, 8, 9, 10--and that's as far as I feel like exercising my calculator.
(Interesting, that: 360 not evenly divisible by 7. Any Talmudic/Biblical
scholars want to take this on?)

Since the Earth takes 365.25 days to make a circle, God seems to provide
us a very compelling cosmologico-mystical reason to divide the circle
into that many numbers of degrees, as did the Chinese. But the West
didn't--for reasons of mathematical convenience. You'll notice, Dixon
digs at Fr. Maire on the next page, "...and 365 and a quarter seems the
sort of Division Jesuits might embrace,-- the discomfort of all that
extra calculation...? sort of mental Cilice [chastity belt], perhaps?"

Isn't this yet one more example of the mysticism/science,
Medieval/Enlightenment, East/West dichotomies central to M&D?

(Query, for one who left his _Historia Mathematica_ in his other suit:
Who first determined that the standard subdivision of a circle should be
360 degrees? Pythagoras? Some Arab algebra-walloper or another,
perhaps?)

An interesting side issue here is the metric system, which, although not
officially adopted by the scientific world until after the French
Revolution, would certainly have been in the Enlightenment air of the
1760s. Designed to replace hundreds of highly localized and irrational
and incompatible weights and measures, it calibrated itself on natural
phenomena such as the boiling point of water, the weight of one cubic
centimeter of water, etc. 

My memory is a little flawed on the details, and Web-searches are
shooting blanks, but wasn't the meter originally based on a certain
subdivision of the distance from the Equator to the Pole? And is this
not suggestive? Does this not bring us, as it were, full circle? Why not
a *metric* geometry? Why isn't a degree of terrestrial arc a certain
number of kilometers, perfectly divisible by 10?

For the same reason that we here in the Yoo Ess are still fighting the
metric system: the Old Way, borne out of medieval weights and measures
that evolved from the village marketplace, seemingly irrational and
atavistic, is actually a whole lot more convenient to use than the
newfangled sciento-fascist metric system: It's as simple as this: How
many whole numbers can 12 be divided by? Now how about 10? Ever tried to
buy a quarter of a Metric Dozen of dinner rolls?

Harrison

------

For serious Boffola Yocks, one can do no better than to check out the
"Metric Conversion Cartoons" at
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/cartoon.htm. And we snicker
superciliously at those poor eighteenth-century chumps who wanted their
eleven days back! And is that...Bison Kliban I see?