Eco-Logical calendar (more artform than calendar)

[helen99]

This past year I've been looking into the ways in which the structure of timekeeping affects the way people think (chronopsychology?). This was the subject of much discussion and would have been a workshop if I'd been able to synthesize the information, but nothing gelled as of last June. Today I ran across this (bought myself a copy):



Aside from being very pretty, it may be useful for experimenting with differing methods of timekeeping. If nothing else, it's a very pretty calendar.

Comments

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Time cycles in my spherical, precessing, rotating calendar were based on the following excerpt from http://earlbakken.com/text.phtml?m=114 :

"Twice each lunar month, the sun and moon are in line — at the full and the new moon — and the sun's gravitational pull added to the moon's causes tides that are considerably bigger than average. Called spring tides, these tides take place every 15 days — year round. They result from the interaction of two environmental rhythms, the daily rotation of the earth on its axis and the 29.5-day rotation of the moon around the earth."

Decided to base it on the ebb and flow of algae (the bottom of both the food and oxygen chain), which depend on the spring tides for their existence...

This is about as far as I got though. I never actually fleshed the thing out... (I'm not sure it's possible).

[helen99.livejournal.com]

"Many organisms that live between the tides have intrinsic rhythms that correspond to the 15-day spring tide cycle. The brown alga, Dictyota dichotoma, sheds its reproductive cells into the waters of a high tide on a roughly 15-day cycle. A marine midge, Clunio marinus, emerges, mates, and lays its eggs on the red algae growing at the lowest limit of the lowest tides. Since the algae are exposed only once each 15 days, the midge has but two hours or so to complete its entire adult life- a life cycle with a roughly 15-day rhythm that persists even under constant conditions in the laboratory"

And so on. It's a natural cornerstone of sorts...

[helen99.livejournal.com]

Found the other article related to this - Chronobiology:
http://www.archaeusproject.com/chronobiology/default.shtml