Sure, let's shame everyone for grasping at a somewhat political neutral occasion to spark a little joy in their lives!
The point isn't arbitrary. It's the winter solstice. It just drifted a bit due to history and stuff.
It's Xmas that highjacked the winter solstice. New year used to be the start of spring (March) then the Romans decided to acknowledge the first 2 months, and then changed the start of the year to January so they could elect some officials to govern Spain instead of waiting an extra 2 months. It's about as arbitrary as it can get.
https://youtu.be/RrGHtl5qJfk About 24 minutes in to skip to ^
Is the fact that the start of spring is 2 months after the solstice arbitrary? Seems a pretty clear cause and effect.
But honestly we should make a new calendar that starts on the spring solstice, is subdivided by solstices, and doesn't have weeks (I just don't like them).
It'd still be a mess anyway. How do you subdivide your two year halves? What do your months look like? If they still exist.
Assuming you use equinoxes too, you can split your year in 4... Except since you've got 365 days to split, it will never be a perfect split.
And turns out the Earth doesn't care about synchronizing rotation and revolution and the year is actually about 365.24 days. so you still have freaking leap days every four years, except not every hundred year, except yes please every 400. Or whatever rule you make to fix the inevitable deviation.
I mean we define year as being from one spring equinox¹ to the next, no matter if it's 365 or 366 days. So if we made next year 1 it would be from 20th of March 2026 14:46 UTC to the next 20th of march 2027 20:25 UTC (The first day of the year could be day 0, the last of the old year but still also in new year, to account for the fact that it's not midnight.). The months would be replaced with quarters(seasons), ending on: June 21, September 23, December 21. Every year the dates would slightly shift because of the way orbits work, but there is no leap year math.
The first quarter, spring, has 93 days, the second, summer, 94 and so on. These will probably be subdivided a multitude of ways. Quickly sketching I found 6 * 4 * 4 - (3 or 4) which seems to work, though I'm naturally draw to base6 due to it being highly composite. This makes 24 days in a quarter-season. A nice analogue to the hours.
I think this calendar works better because it doesn't attempt to add any human control over a completely chaotic system: Earths orbit speed and rotational period. The underlying principle is chaotic and humans should build systems that are build on top of this natural disorder. By attempting to define and control disorder you must create so many convoluted rules (Like the leap day rule). Our calendar is an example of the human desire to "fix" nature to our own way of life instead of leaning to coexist with the natural disorderly processes that govern our lives. It's the same mindset that gives us the blatant disregard for the natural resources or climate.
This is a rather anarchic position but that's because I cannot help but inject anarchic rhetoric into my thought process due to so much of the way we live has been in blatantly build using archic concepts, even the calendar is dripping with it.
¹: Accidentally called it solstice sense I forgot there's a different word.
The 365.2422 days per celestial year is a math error we can fix.
We need to adjust the length of days and seconds but we can get rid of it completely if we wanted to.
It's not like noon means the maximum of the suns arc or sunset and sunrise don't already shift throughout the year.
The only thing that stops it is the momentum of a human measurement error.
If we use 366 we just get slightly shorter days by about 3 minutes. All of these time measurements are more arbitrary than feet and inches. Science back filled the bullshit with physical constants and there is no reason we cannot tie a proper system into alternative physics constants.
A year is a rotation of seasons. It has nothing to do with the day-night cycle. That should absolutely be separate.
And the 365.2422 isn't a math error. It's a mathematic ratio, rotation around the sun / rotation around itself. and it should absolutely be upheld.
The mathematical error os not basing our time counting on that ratio. The number is only 365.2422 because our second, hours, days are too long/short.
We can just decide we want one rotation to be exactly 366 units and then work backwards from there to determine new units.
A day is defined as a single rotation around earths axis. A year is a single rotation around the sun. The 356.2422 is the result of those two definitions. Earth takes 356.2422 rotations around its axis to rotate around the sun. That is a fact. You could define a unit to be 366th of a rotation around the sun, you could even call it a day, but as a result you lose the reason a day is a useful unit: It's the time it takes for earth to spin around its axis, a far more useful definition than 366th of a year.
Days are defined by a different natural cycle, that of the earth's rotation around its axis. That happens 365.2422 times every time we go around the sun. You can't just assign the length of a day to something more convenient
A year is exactly 3 days!
But it's the middle of summer!
New Year's is literally the only holiday I have never disliked
Round numbers and fireworks? Countdown me in!
C'mon man. Thanksgiving has pie! And Turkey! And a celebration of a meal between two warring peoples.......who we eventually genocided.........hey look! Cranberry Sauce!
Explain what you mean by “round numbers”…
Well, it has an actual meaning. The date is arbitrary but the event isn't.
The same way that our life's depend on the cycle of day and night, they also revolve around the stations. Cycles of abundance and scarcity, of heat and cold.
Years are points of reference for historical reasons.
To be clear, we are mostly idiots but some non-idiots calculated the days in a cycle.
The date is arbitrary but the event isn’t.
It's a bit off the mark of the Winter Solstice, which is the shortest day of the year in the northern hemisphere.
So I wouldn't even call it arbitrary. It's highly relevant to a person on Earth, waiting for the day when nights start growing shorter and we can look forward to a spring harvest season.
I might argue that the problem with the New Year is that we don't also celebrate the Summer Solstice (longest day of the year) and the two Equinoxes.
If it was the winter solstice it wouldn't be arbitrary.
I celebrate all the solar holidays. What's stopping you?
Woosh.
Then why don't we light a sparkler everyday at midnight?
Of all arbitrary things we celebrate, this is probably the least idiotic.
This is actually, factually incorrect. We used to celebrate winter solstice and this is directly caused by and deterministically occuring on a certain (albeit slightly blurry) point of our orbit.
This should be higher. The days have become longer which means the humans will not die in a dark cold forever winter. The warmth will return, the crops will have another season and the lengthening of daylight hours is the harbinger of future good tidings.
The creator of the meme is in fact the idiot who doesn't realize his entire physical sustenance is dependent on this cycle.
Edit: I'm an idiot who didn't realize I'm using some weird sorting algo and apparently winter solstice was already highly upvoted.
Did you read the Helliconia series?
Quite. "... completely arbitrary" is wrong.
X days after winter solstice where X is completely arbitrary.
Humans just need a reason to party now and then. And that's completely fine.
Yeah, all this unnecessary pessimism gets really tiring...
I'm slowly coming around to the theory that people on Lemmy are less happy than much of the rest of the internet because a disproportionate number have been aggrieved by mod actions on reddit subreddits. Many of them probably have a point, but I wonder how many of them were actually banned for being wet blankets nobody wanted around anymore.
do we really need a justification to get together and have fun?; or to have a day off and do fuck all? for those that rather do that instead?; or anything in between?
Hey that guy is having fun! Get him!
Anyone who celebrates anything that isn't relevant to me personally is an idiot.
Ngl, it might be fun to watch all time zones' fireworks. Not cool enough to develop a new kind of space telescope though.
Thanks, Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Thanks, Neil Degrasse Tyson.
Why did he capitalize "astronomical"?
Subscribe me to Neil Degrasse Tyson facts.
Here’s like 20% of them
He gets a lot of shit for this and I do think he's a pretty annoying guy, but I just now developed a head canon for this where he does it on purpose whenever someone he personally knows is being a narcissist. And so it's like a super petty passive aggressive way to piss them off. I could get behind that tbh. Can you imagine? Every time your annoying brother calls and asks to borrow more money, you post some quote about greed to your huge social media following. Lol.
Problem with inviting Mercury is they don't create any atmosphere
Uranus always steals the show, anyways.
I watch videos about the planets with my kids and they say it YOUR-uh-nus, which to me goes against the conventions of the English (Americanized) language, although it's chaos to begin with. But why now are we walking back the name of this planet? It's been your anus for ages.
Total gasbag if you ask me
Funny… but Seasons… so… kind dumb.
100% arbitrary
Sure, if you ignore the expansive history of humans' measurement of time and the cultural impacts on it. That's just looking for reasons to be a dismissive ass, though.
We are the part of the universe with consciousness so if we decide it isn't arbitrary then it isn't.
Besides I like new years eve, it's a good time for reflection, resetting my motivation and optimism and an excuse to party all night
Consider for a moment that at any point in that "circuit" this ball of dirt has a 'non-zero' chance to be vaporized into dust, making it all the way around actually is a momentous ocassion
But that non zero is extremely close to zero. But it's making more fun about the fact that January 1st is very arbitrary cosmically. Even the solstice would make more sense
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