RIP Google Earth

If I have to explain it then it's not as funny as I thought.But the point is that what is describe in the Josh story would have left physical evidence regardless of any calendar and that evidence is simply missing.But here is an example of not one day but rather 11 days disappearing and for a very valid reason. And we did it without all the destruction and loss of life that would have been the result of Where's Joshua.

In a skeptics breakfast discussion that had turned to elements of story-telling, a cartoon artist pointed out that the challenge for a cartoonist is to be able to compose that single frame in such a way that you provide all the context needed to tell the story.My reply was saying that the context was not clear and here are some ways that can be interpreted. 
Of course, calendars are necessarily arbitrary, so there's a difference between changes in time keep methods (eg, switching from Julian to Gregorian) and actual loss of time (eg, the halting and subsequent resumption of the earth's rotation).I'm reminded of Juvenissun a couple years ago who was arguing for all kinds of physical effects including massive asteroid bombardments that radically changed the earth's orbit, et al., all in historic times -- jump into the Did the Flood really happen? topic around Message 2346 and then follow the reply threads. He was all over the place with "scientific" claims that were unable to stand up to doing the math (something which Kent Hovind forbids his followers to ever do, nor to listen to anyone who has done the math). I just tracked down that he had registered on 25 Ju1 2022 and last posted on 27 Aug 2022, so he only lasted one month.In that message link, I referred to an early creationist, creation I think, who had tried to argue that the year used to be 360 days long and then something (eg, the earth getting hit by asteroids, planets, and moons) changed our orbit radically and the length of the year with it.The basis for his claim (and I seem to recall that Juvenissun also bought into it) was that most ancient calendars were 360 days long, but he kept ignoring the simple fact that those calendars ended with a slightly-less-than-one-week-long festival which made up the difference and brought the calendar back into sync with the seasons. In that Message 2346 I explained (yet again):   A quick "back of the realtor's complimentary note pad" calculation has a point on the earth in Israel travelling at 850 mph at that latitude due to the earth's rotation (circumference at that latitude divided by 24 hours).I could be wrong in my calculations, but stopping the earth's rotation in one second's time would have exerted g-forces on everything on the earth's surface of 39 g's. If it happened in 10 seconds, then it would still be 4 g's. Then of course you'd have the same g-forces when the earth's rotation started up again.That would have had to have left a mark!Edited by dwise1, : added first part of reply

Another piece of evidence is that the degree of devastation would have decreased with increasing latitude, until at the poles there would be no damage at all.I got 47 g's at the equator.--Percy

Effects of latitude accounted for (I used a latitude of 35°), though I was too lazy to model the earth's cross section as being like an ellipse instead of a circle (the polar radius is less than the equatorial radius).Another factor in calculating the g's of deceleration would be how long it would take to go from normal velocity to zero -- let's call that "braking time". According to my rough calculations, if "braking time" took a minute instead of a second, then the g-forces would have been 0.65, and if it took an hour, then it would have been 0.0108.Those don't sound as significant, so I looked up peak ground acceleration (PGA) that is experienced during earthquakes -- that link is to the section, Comparison of instrumental and felt intensity which notes:

quote:

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Generally speaking,

• 0.001 g (0.01 m/s2) – perceptible by people
• 0.02 g (0.2 m/s2) – people lose their balance
• 0.50 g (5 m/s2) – very high; well-designed buildings can survive if the duration is short.

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A bit further down the page is a table, Notable earthquakes, whose preceding section states: "In India, areas with expected PGA values higher than 0.36 g are classed as "Zone 5", or "Very High Damage Risk Zone"."A few PGA from notable earthquakes:

• 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami -- 2.7 g
• 1994 Northridge earthquake -- 1.82 g
• December 2011 Christchurch earthquake -- 1.0 g
• June 2011 Christchurch earthquake -- 0.78 g
• 2010 Haiti earthquake -- 0.5 g
• 2016 Christchurch earthquake -- 0.4 g
• 1964 Alaska earthquake -- 0.18 g

So "low g-forces" can still pack a helluva wallop. And even if God "went easy on the brakes", the effects would have still been devastating. 
In a similar vein, it's common to have discussions of Star Trek technology and how they just came up with some tech in an ad hoc manner in order to get around problems (eg, the transporter to avoid the massive special effects costs of having that huge ship land on a planet every single episode) -- OK, it depends on the crowd you hang out with.One incredible technology that hardly anybody notices, little more than a throw-away term in TOS, was inertial dampeners (though their lack was very definitely noticed by LaForge when they failed in his turbo-lift). Without inertial dampener tech, those ships wouldn't dare move at such speeds without killing the crew ("Without inertial dampeners, the crew would end up being chunky salsa."). The recent show, The Expanse, dealt with the problem more directly without having to resort to exotic tech.From a Stargate: SG-1 episode when O'Neill and Carter are going through the pre-flight checklist in a new fighter based on Goa'uld tech: