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Friday, December 16, 2016

Lunar Solation Time

Since ancient times, peoples have used the winter solstice to begin each new year but really both the sun and the moon tell time, just very differently. While Sol tells the very precise time of the atomic clock, Luna tells a much fuzzier time with her full moons due to the entanglement of moon and sun orbital motions.  The precise time of Sol is contrasts with the fuzzy Luna time and we must somehow integrate both ways of telling time.

The solstice of 2018dec21 at 2:23 pm pst happens to be within a day of the full moon of 2018dec22 9:49 am pst. Such an alignment of the winter solstice and full moon only happens once every nine years and reflects the nine year lunar solation Sar cycle. Correspondingly, the Easter moon 2019mar 21 also coincides with the vernal equinox 2019mar20. The nine-year Sar cycle is the period that relates alternating lunar and 18-year Saros solar eclipses. The Chaldeans discovered the Sar cycle 2600 years ago by careful observation and recording in the ancient city of Babylon in Iraq.

Science declares that there are exactly 86,400 seconds in each day and science declares the length of the second is exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles of the Cs-133 atomic clock hyperfine resonance at 9.2 Ghz. But the number of days in each lunar cycle varies and the length of a lunar month varies by half a day from 29.3 to 29.8 days. Over an eight solar year cycle of 99 moons, there are 7 lunar years of 14 moons each plus one leap moon to make 99 moons. There are 14 full moons for each lunar year but the lunar and solar years only approximately rephase about once every 8 solar years of 365.25 days each and 7 lunar years of 14 full moons each as the figure shows.


Okay...so this is not the most important issue facing civilization right now...that I give you. It just seems such a crying shame that the simple relationship of 99 moons to 8 solar years does not get much press.

The decay of the Kronos atomic time of the solar day is well known and seems to contrast with the equally well known chaos of the Kairos time of the lunar month. But really, these two time dimensions simply reflect the confusion that comes from the duality of matter and action and the duality of discrete quantum versus continuous classical action.

The 2019 solstice is within one day of a full moon at the minimum of lunation period starts the 99 moon period of 2019-26. The Easter moon on 31mar2018 is moon#91 of the previous 99 moon cycle and celebrates the birth of Spring as the first full moon following the 2018mar20 vernal equinox. The Easter moon 2019mar21 coincides with 2019mar20 vernal equinox just like the solstice aligned with a full moon. The lunations around the moon#99 start always involve more solar and lunar eclipses since the sun and moon spend more time at near angles.

The Pleasure of Discovery Means Living Better and Not Just Living Longer

Living longer is not always the same as living better and there is a 2016dec report that shows life expectancy in the U. S. has decreased for the first time since the aids epidemic of 1991...at mere 0.1 year. According to an NPR report, 28,000 more people died in 2015 as compared to 2014 and a CNS report suggests that the introduction of the U.S. affordable health care act may be at least partly responsible for killing these people.

However, living longer is not necessarily desirable if living longer means living in some chronic misery like the fog of dementia and so living longer is just one aspect of a desirable future. Feeling better as psychological well being, for example, increases 5 year survival rates from 65% to 78% for a sample of 6,030 older adults, for example.

<Maintaining Healthy Behavior: a Prospective Study of Psychological Well-Being and Physical Activity, Kim, E.S., Kubzansky, L.D., Soo, J. et al. ann. behav. med. (2016). doi:10.1007/s12160-016-9856-y>

A desirable future should include at least two other measures besides just living longer. Another important measure is, for example, the pleasure of discovery and compassion for others and yet another measure is earning the means and the resources for that discovery and compassion as well as to pay for sufficient health care when needed.  Both discovery and means are just as important for a desirable future as simply living longer. The human development index, HDI, includes the trimal of living longer, discovery, and per capita GDP among a number of other factors. In fact, any measure of a desirable future in a civilization should include at least these three metrics since living well is much more than just living longer.

So before going off on some singular tangent and putting more money into a healthcare system that is already very expensive, the U.S. should also consider how to increase the overall desirability of life and not just its length. People begin more rounding up along with the inexorable demographic percentages and so olders are especially sensitive to the message of not just living longer, but living better as well.

Without the selfish pleasure of discovery, a compassion for others, and some minimum skills and means, simply living longer is less desirable The friends and family that we have and the pleasure of further discovery and the ability to afford all of that is what determines purpose, not just living longer.