Last year I was planning on making six different calendars for 2009 to follow up the three calendars I made for 2008. I never ended up making any. It wasn’t that I couldn’t or wouldn’t, I just did really care at the time to make them. They didn’t end up becoming a priority, but I’m no sure why. I am still considering making one for myself, but haven’t yet.
The other week I came across this broadside on the Library of Congress’ Printed Ephemera Collection and thought it was worthy of sharing here. I’ll note that the graphic above shows only a portion of the original broadside, but for the purposed of this entry, it’s all I want to write about. This Perpetual Calendar was printed in Washington, DC in 1848 by the company Barnard & Sandy and is an interesting analogue means to find what the date is. Here is how:
The four steps it takes to find the day of the week.
1) Guide your finger to the years column on the right (or left) column
2) Guide your finger to the left (or right) to the central month column
3) Guide your finger down to the day of the week column
4) Guide your finger to the day of the month
Thursday, March 5th, 2009
It only works if you know what year it is, what month it is, and know either the day of week or the day of the month it is. For example, lets say you were unconscious for the last two weeks and don’t know what the day of the month it is (5th, 7th, 11th?) but you know that today is a Thursday, in March in the year 2009. This calendar will give you four options for the day of the month: 5, 12, 19, or 26.
Alternatively, if you knew that today was the 5th of March in 2009, but didn’t know the day of the week, you’d have to find where 5 shows up in the days of the month chart then find the point where the months of the year intersect in the day of the week box.
Once you figure out how to use this calendar its pretty easy to use. You can easily use this to plan for weekend trips for the next 16 years into the future or find out the day of the week a specific event took place in the last 234 years. I’ve come to the conclusion that while my art might be beautiful to look at for a year in the form of a calendar, I would rather construct a calendar like this one that outlives the 28 year cycle most leap year calendars follow. I think this would be an awesome project to undertake!
Related Calendar Entries:
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Flight & Expulsion – An Interactive Flash Map by Christian Behrens
|| 3/22/2008 || 7:46 pm || Comments Off on Flight & Expulsion – An Interactive Flash Map by Christian Behrens || ||
Last year Christian Behrens, a new media designer based in Berlin made this interactive Flash map. While I *really* like the map’s concept, coding, and visualization method, I have some issues with the cartographic layout. Specifically, it’s hard to accurately locate some countries with my mouse and since there is no scaling on the text or basemap, its hard to find countries that are typographically overlapping. Moreover, the country’s dot is the only hotspot that triggers the UNHCR data, so if you are hovering over the words, you are literally missing the point. For example, I wanted to find the Gaza Strip and realized the point where my mouse is located is not on Gaza. This also happened with Sri Lanka, whereas the dot is over water. Just south of Sri Lanka, not far from the Maldives. My favorite country on the map is Stateless (below). With that aside, I found this map to be very informative.
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