notes.husk.org. scribblings by Paul Mison.

Attaining Hampstead

While researching the proper way SCREEN$ load on a Spectrum, I was distracted by somehow running across an old adventure game.

Hampstead was by Melbourne House, who put out a fair few classic text adventures in the 1980s. As the instructions put it:

Hampstead is a quest, but not for gold. The aim of it is to reach the
pinnacle of social status, and acquiring wealth is only one part of
the problem. If you wish to go up in the world you also have to gain
the admiration and respect of your fellow men, and there's more to
that than a fat bank balance.

There’s been a flickr of rediscovery in the past: Aleks Krotoski wrote about it in the Guardian Gamesblog in 2007, as did Anna Black earlier this year. Personally, I find it interesting for a few reasons. For one thing, it’s one of those games during the flowering of 8-bit home computers that tried to reflect everyday life, and perhaps even comment on them (as did Manic Miner and Skooldaze/Back to Skool). For another, there’s this comment in the Crash preview of the game:

It is different to most adventures, in that its purpose is to amuse people rather than provide a hard adventure. Indeed, the adventure is extremely simple, which the authors say is so that anyone can complete it, and so reap more enjoyment from it.

That’s a sentiment that’s getting traction again these days, at least amongst certain people I know. Perhaps I’ll even download the game and give it a go. After all, who doesn’t want a bit of Hampstead once in a while?

On New Year

I’d forgotten - until yesterday - that the epic post on calendars and blue moons, on the Panic blog, had made me think about doing a post about the changes in New Years. So, before 2010 properly gets going (with most people going back to work tomorrow), I thought I’d try and get this out while it’s still topical.

You’d think the concept of a new year was straightforward. After all, it’s right there: the date is 1/1 (whether you’re European or American), and given we don’t use 0 for dates¹, that’s the first day of the year, right? Well, yes, it is now, for a good chunk of the world’s population. It wasn’t always.

Readers of Pepy’s Diary will know that; indeed, the entry for 1st January 1666/1667 bears two dates. Until the UK changed to the Julian calendar in 1752, the first day of the year was on the Feast of the Annunciation, Lady Day, marking the occasion of Mary’s meeting with the Angel Gabriel. Before then, dates for the first third of the year carry both the date of the Julian and Gregorian year. The British tax year still starts on this date, with (complicated) adjustments for the days lost when the calendar changed.

That’s not the only “new year”, though. Parliamentary years start with the State Opening, in November (or, occasionally) December; the Catholic and Anglican liturgical year also starts in December. Meanwhile the academic year starts after harvest in September. (Australia’s also starts in late summer.) Admittedly, none of those has as much legal force as the calendar or tax year, but still, I thought them worth mentioning.

That’s just in the UK, of course. There are two other obvious major world calendars, both lunar. The Chinese new year (also celebrated in Korea and Vietnam, but not Japan, which swapped to the Western calendar in 1873) is based on a lunar-solar calendar, so it moves around, but not much: it’s defined as the second new moon after the winter solstice, fixing it to a date between 21 January and 21 February (with thanks to this PDF, which did all the sums for me).

Meanwhile, the Hijri calendar, used by Muslims, is a pure lunar calendar, with nothing fixing it to the solar year. As a result, the Islamic new year shifts by either 11 or 12 days a year, moving through the Western calendar every 30 years or so. Even more alarmingly for those used to the rigid certainty of solar reckoning, the first day doesn’t happen until the new moon is officially sighted: this can shift the start of the year back a day, in theory at least. In 2009, the first day of Muharram, the first month, was on 18 December.

I’m not even going to try and explain the various Indian new year’s days, except to note that most of them seem to be around the northern hemisphere spring equinox.

So, happy new year, unless you’re Islamic, in which case, belated happy new year, or Asian, in which case, it’ll soon by new year, unless you’re Japanese, in which case: happy new year.

¹ There’s an exception: astronomers have a year 0, and their convention has been adopted by ISO 8601.

Tax

nevali:

What if we threw out of all of the existing [personal] taxes, allowances, credits, and bands, and replaced them with a aflat 35% income tax?

I’d be interested to see if anybody’s actually run the numbers and modelled this.

Flat taxes aren’t exactly a new idea, and they’ve been tried, notably in the Baltic republics (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia). They’ve been proposed for the UK, and criticised, too, for cutting the overall government budget (albeit at a 22% above £12,000 rate, not 35% (on everything, presumably, which would surely only increase the size of the poverty trap)).

In the end, though. it just seems like so much geek-friendly “wouldn’t it be great if…” reinvention, when the real world just doesn’t work like that.