(urth) Home Fires questions

Mon Jan 16 11:02:52 PST 2012

David Stockhoff added a few comments recently about the use of "hundred day" in Home Fires, exploring the possibility that the calendar is altered in some way that may illuminate the background of the story. Like the dialects of certain characters, the colloquial use of "hundred day" adds a distinct flavor to the story, but I haven't found any indication the calendar has been changed. Home Fires seems to have a 24 hr clock, a 7 day week, and 365+ day year. Still, I keep wondering whether we can eke out another layer of meaning.

I've been searching for some secondary association of "hundred day" that connects to mind-control or memory enhancement or some well-worn epigram of Simonides (as in the dedication to AEG) or some mnemonic device. This line of attack seemed reasonable because the first "Reflection" chapter opens with a discussion of memories, where Skip offers the idea that each morning we rebuild our identity with scraps of memories pieced together from "somewhere" upon waking. Unfortunately, the memory approach leads nowhere.

Just to see what would happen, I tried translating "hundred day" into standard metric form = "hectoDies." Maybe this refers to a person named Hector who dies or someone whose alias is Hector Diaz. If there is such a person, Hector and Achille would have it in for each other.  

Possibly interesting, but pretty flimsy unless there are other traces of the Iliad hidden away somewhere.

________________________________
 From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
To: Stephen Hoy <stephenhoy at yahoo.com>; The Urth Mailing List <urth at lists.urth.net> 
Sent: Tuesday, January 3, 2012 10:42 AM
Subject: Re: (urth) Home Fires questions

On 10/23/2011 12:38 PM, Stephen Hoy wrote: 
On Wednesday, October 19, 2011 4:16 PM, David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net> wrote in reply to me:
>>> Hoy: What if a year is actually ten hundred-days? Is there anything in Home Fires that might contradict this metrification?  Twenty-two years of hundred-time equals about sixty of ours ...
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>> Stockoff: There was some discussion of time a few months ago (see "Home Fires and calendar reform"). The year seems to be 400 days, with 100-day quarters and (I guess) 33-day months. So 500 days would be more than a year. I just returned the book to the library---how long is Chelle supposed to be on leave? Anyway, the agent's assignment to Skip could be that long.
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>> Stockoff: Now, if you allow massive rounding (odd in a metric time system, but maybe common among people who haven't adapted to it yet), "200 days, about half a year" could mean almost 250 days, so a year might be 500 days. BTW, I think you're off by a decimal: 22 x 100 = 2200; 2200/365 = 6 of our years or 5.5 400-day years. Or did I misunderstand you?
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>I was calculating that 22 "thousand-day years" is about 60 "three-hundred-sixty-five-day years."     22 * 1000 = 60 * 366.666...  But my guess is refuted by a detail I hadn't noticed & to which you refer: Ch 11 Right and Left, Rick Johnson tells Skip about a temporary job he once held for "two hundred days or so, about half a year." 
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>> Stockoff: Another approach: if tours of duty are similar to our own, i.e., 6 months to 2 to 4 years, maybe that's a place to start. Given interstellar distances, 2 years may be the minimum time Chelle was away. Would 1000 days be a typical tour, or 500 + star travel? How many years would pass on Earth?
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>Nailing down the length of a year has significance if you want to know where Chelle fought the Os.
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>In Ch 2 When Janie Comes Marching Home, Chelle asks, "How long was I gone?" "Twenty-two years, one hundred and six days," Skip replies, "I was..." then trails off into silence. "Speechless, Counselor?" Skip offers up a few words to explain how he felt, including a phrase from Edward Coke,"Veritas nihil veretur nisi abscondi." Truth is only afraid of concealment.   Curiously, we find a similar quote in An Evil Guest from Coke's legal rival Francis Bacon, the bit in the first chapter where the President scoffs,"What's truth,  said jestin' Pilate."] This particular legal phrase doesn't really fit Skip's situation. To me, it feels more like "X" marks the spot.
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>The time passed provides an estimate of the distance traveled. There are only three stars within 11 light years of Earth. Assuming near-perfect lightspeed travel, Chelle possibly traveled to Epsilon Eridani, 10.5 light years distant. 
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>Doesn't leave Chelle much duty time at her destination--about 1 year 106 days--, but this is consistent with the story. She returned early due to injury.
"Rational" calendars have been proposed that make all years
    identical except for an extra week every 5-6 years:

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/rational-calendar/#more-90639

This one uses a 364-day year. If the financial sector and
    spaceflight were to combine to change our calendar (interestingly,
    this calendar is promoted by an astronomer AND an economist), as has
    been proposed for HF, shifting emphasis from the messy but familiar
    month to a less human-centric quarter-based system may be a logical
    outcome. Under this calendar, an alternative to the above
    calculations would be a 182-day half-year colloquially rounded up to
    "200 or so" or 364 for the whole year. A quarter would be 91 days,
    again colloquially rounded to 100. Why?

The vagaries of our months force us to think in months of "about" 30
    days; these future administrative needs plus the fact that every
    year would be identical might explain the shift to rounded-up
    100-day intervals, because it might be easier to think in terms of
    quarters if all quarters are the same---every 3 months is a
    predetermined 91-day block. Each third month has 31 days vs 30,
    which makes the quarter (and half-year and year), not the month, the
    smallest consistent base unit. 

Even given this determination, people might think in terms of 100
    days. When the leap week is added, you get 98 days in that final
    quarter where the week is technically applied, which is almost 100.
    Knowing that some final quarters are longer might loom larger than
    you'd think, because this would be the ONLY anomaly in the system
    (aside from the first day of each month still shifting from month to
    month, but not from year to year, so that people quickly would learn
    the pattern) and it's a big one. Granted, rather than trade stocks
    or work or fly space missions during this week, people would
    probably just party, but still that makes a quarter = 91-98 days,
    which is not exactly brain-friendly. Knowing the spread exactly
    could, paradoxically, lead to an oddly casual routine approximation
    among non-administrators.

The argument is imperfect because we can only guess about human
    behavior in such a system. The biggest weakness is that the above
    arguments ought to work even better for a system with more regular
    months, say where 3 months = 99 days or 1 week is 10 days. But not
    only do no such systems exist, the characters' approximate language
    suggests that no such precision exists either, nor has the Earth
    year been ditched completely---they still have 12 months and 7
    weekdays, just like the proposed calendar. The Earth year is
    peculiar and even in a "rational" system humans will choose to
    ignore its inevitable anomalies and cling to their perceptions of
    time.

Anybody recall any sign of a leap week in the text? Possibly, the
    phrase "200 or so" included a leap week if it spanned a year-end,
    making that half-year = 189 days. 
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