New Year's questions answered

Being well known as a self-described Mr.Knowitall means I get asked a lot of questions. The answers I give can be divided into three categories: the correct answer if I know it, an answer I make up to keep my Knowitall membership card, and the things that I can't make up a plausible answer for. So, here are some answers to my lovely girlfriends questions during a recent holiday road trip.

The start of the year on January 1st goes back to the Romans. This was carried forward in the reorganization of Roman dating which became the Julian calendar in 45 BC. Jan 1st was New Year's Day in all of the Roman empire and later all of christendom. Even though the first of January was New Year's Day, some countries continued using other dates to roll over the year. England celebrated Jan 1st, but did not change it's year number until March 25. England officially changed this in 1752, with its adoption of the Gregorian calendar.

The Chinese New Year is not a fixed date but a celebration starting on the first day of the first lunar month through the 15th (15th of the Gregorian month, usually January or February).

Metamodel

Found this site via Boing Boing. Site is in Japanese, but many of the model boxes have some English on them. This model of an injection molding machine was both contemplative and so very meta.

Back with a link

Nice collection of links to punk album downloads. Most seem to be working too.

Which Polyhedral Are You?

Take the quiz at dicepool.com

Hmmm, well that answers that question.

Dr. Who music

Dr. Who music just made available on the truly wonderful X-Y-Z-Cosmonaut's CosmoBlog.

Ubik the Screenplay has arrived, will start working on making that available soon.

Lovely libraries.

Just ordered Ubik : The Screenplay through interlibrary loan. Found out from worldcat that 15 libraries in the states had it. Yay to libraries.

Review of Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch from Analog

THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH
By Philip K. Dick - Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N.Y. - 1965 -278 pp. - $4.95
An author can't come up with a "Man In the High Castle" every time, but in this case Philip K. Dick certainly didn't try. This time he's standing in for A.E. van Vogt, or maybe for a Pohl-Van Vogt collaboration. The result is wild, zany, and lively, but not very memorable.
Today's "Barbie" dolls are obviously the inspiration for Perky Pat Layouts, around which the story wheels and whirls. With a little aid from a nicely habit-forming drug, peddled sub rosa by P.P.E. along with the minutely detailed Perky Pat layouts, the bored people of the overcrowded future live it up by imagining themselves into the surrogate worlds they have built up. As with model railroaders and their hobby, there is no limit to the detail with which the miniature sets can be constructed; a goodly chunk of the economy hangs on it, and on the planets, to which segments of the overpopulated Earth are shipped to molder after being "drafted," these installations are all the life worth living.
Then a wheeler-dealer comes back from Alpha Centauri with a more potent drug and layouts of a more perplexingly entrapping type, and the plot starts to get tangled. Is the mysterious Palmer Eldritch the villain of the piece or the hero. In fact, just what is going on from moment to moment? The only way you'll ever find out is by reading the book, and you may be confused then.

Review by Peter Schulyer Miller form the August 1965 Analog, p. 152-153.

I posted this in response to the list of citations here.