360 degrees versus 365 days

My brother recently brought up the idea that there are 360 degrees in a circle and 365 days in a year. This is an interesting concept, and I wondered again whether this has anything to do with the size of a degree.

Degrees in a circle are, I think, just another way to measure something. Inches and meters measure length, liters and cups measure capacity, seconds, minutes, hours measure time.

None of these measurements are divinely given. They are totally arbitrary names given for convenient, but also arbitrary to a degree, measures. For example, if I decided it was easier to measure things that were the length of my hand, I would call my hand one .... something, I could have called it an inch or a meter, but those are taken. I think I heard that some king in the past was standardizing measures and he decided that the amount of water that he could fit in his (divinely holy) mouth would be called a cup... or whatever, don't quote me. So then if his mouth had been a bit bigger, then recipes calling for a cup of something would have to change to 3/4 of a cup or something like that. I don't know what this king measured that was an inch...

Anyway, it happens that the earth, in it's imperfectly circular revolution around the sun, rotates one time for each "degree" it travels around the circle. Did the people who measured and named degrees use the earth's path around the sun as the measurement? I don't know. See what you think about the aztec calendar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_calendar. They had 360 days broken into 18 months of 20 days each (360 days), and then they had 5 days every year that didn't belong to any month. What would you do if you once found yourself not in any month? How did they survive in those days? What did they write on their checks? Did they just float around sucking their thumbs and crying, not knowing what to do? Maybe they didn't even cry, maybe they just didn't do anything.

Ummmmm... so I know that geometry was enhanced because people were using it to determine the distance of planets and stars or something.

Degree really sorta means extent or severity. To what degree were you burned? At what degree is the slope? How many degrees of the pie did you eat? How many degrees hot is it (to what degree did the mercury rise?)... It's not so arbitrary a name for measurements.

By the way, if my writing seems imperfect or unclear or unfinished, to a degree, I read in a book that all your writing doesn't hafta be perfect, you should have lotsa crappy writing and it should (now I am adding my own thoughts to a degree) be an emptying of your mind onto paper. Good thoughts are like pearls, or a diamond in the rough. You will never find them if you don't search the rough.
That's what I say about people who love to read quote books, they are reading all the pearls, and they never search the rough. When you find a pearl in a book, you find it in it's context. You know exactly the thoughts surrounding that quote. There is a quote in the fellowship of the ring, early on, where the hobbits tell frodo that they will never leave him and they will be loyal blah blah blah... The quote without the context of what is going on, and all of frodo's emotions and reservations about putting his friends in danger but also not wanting to go into danger alone, means less. Within the context, it means a lot more.

I em sircheeng phoawr the teyemund in the ruff.

Overall, I think that you may study a concept; you may name things anyway you want to. In the end, it's all perception. We could so easily have never made it out of medieval times. Would we be better off or not? old questions, I've heard them before... but sometimes you wonder. there's no harm in asking old questions that haven't been answered yet, is there?

i'm getting back to that wrinkle on the brain thing... I think each person has a wrinkle in their brain that gives infinite answers to impossible questions. you probably pass over that wrinkle a million times a day when using your brain. you probably have a 1 in a million chance of accessing that wrinkle and even less of a chance of understanding what it tells you.

look for it - maybe when you find it that's when you go crazy.