• UnfortunateShort@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    4 hours ago

    This is actually, factually incorrect. We used to celebrate winter solstice and this is directly caused and deterministically occuring on a certain (albeit slightly blurry) point of our orbit.

    • adminofoz@lemmy.cafeEnglish
      15·
      3 hours ago

      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.

  • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
    17·
    4 hours ago

    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

  • Jhex@lemmy.world
    4·
    3 hours ago

    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?

  • placebo@lemmy.zipEnglish
    50·
    7 hours ago

    Of all arbitrary things we celebrate, this is probably the least idiotic.

      • exasperation@lemmy.dbzer0.com
        7·
        4 hours ago

        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.

  • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
    116·
    10 hours ago

    The point isn’t arbitrary. It’s the winter solstice. It just drifted a bit due to history and stuff.

    • erusuoyera@sh.itjust.works
      81·
      10 hours ago

      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 ^

      • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        19·
        9 hours ago

        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).

        • brsrklf@jlai.lu
          18·
          8 hours ago

          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.

          • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
            12·
            7 hours ago

            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.

            A sketch of a calendar. Spring 01 is written on the top. The days are marked by white squares. The days are split into four sections. There are "S1", "S2", "S3" and "S4" written next to the sections. An arrow points to the first day with the text "This would be March 21". There is another arrow with the text "This would be June 21" pointing to the last day.

            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.

            • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
              4·
              3 hours ago

              Because I don’t really have anything better to do today I made a JS generator for this calendar: https://codeberg.org/anaVal/misc/src/branch/main/cal.

              Here is the full year 1 I generated using it: A calendar on a black background. On the top is the header Year 1. There are four columns titled "Season of Green", "Season Of Warm", "Season of Color", "Season of Light". Each column has four groups of numbers. The groups have 4 lines of 6 numbers counting up. The last group of every column is cut short. Each column has 88 to 94 numbers.

              Interestingly the 1st days of the 4th quarters are quite close to the starts of Gregorian months (June 1st, September 2nd, Dec 5th, March 4th).

            • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
              2·
              3 hours ago

              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.

              • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
                1·
                2 hours ago

                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.

                • Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
                  1·
                  2 hours ago

                  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.

            • moonshadow@slrpnk.net
              1·
              3 hours ago

              Excellent calendar idea, excellent post. What do you think about using solar noon instead of time zones?

              • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
                2·
                3 hours ago

                If you like the idea you’ll probably appreciate the comment I just left were I made a program to generate it.

                Time zones are complicated. One one side I like them because 12 is always noon which means you can get used to the sunset times. On the other hand I think the time shouldn’t be related to sunrise at all and everyone should use UTC (or equivalent). Let sunrise and sunset be their own thing. Again let’s not try and contain nature but instead define a simple method and just use that. Let the natural world tick according to it’s own clock. We have our own atomic ones.

                This also brings me to the idea that we should just use a single clock. Take an atomic clock, make it start counting and build all timekeeping around it. Basically the same thing computers are doing but for everyone. Let Sunrise, Noon, Year all be it’s own thing and have a single timestamp for most timekeeping. Due to liking base6 I’d advocate for this timestamp to be in base6 instead of base10. By using it we are going to get an intuition of how much some length of time is that is separate from days.

                • moonshadow@slrpnk.net
                  3·
                  2 hours ago

                  Thanks, I’ll check that out. A big part of what I liked about your calendar is the direct correlation to a natural cycle though, and I like the idea of solar noon for the same reasons. The idea isn’t to constrain nature but acknowledge it and adapt ourselves, centering days on the sun’s zenith at ones location just makes intuitive sense to me and lines up with my own perception of time when disconnected from infrastructure. Completely useless and impractical computationally, but very well aligned with a human sense of place in both time and space

          • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
            3·
            7 hours ago

            This was the first thing that made me realise that calendars could be changed. I myself don’t like it because it because It doesn’t use fixed points. But it is an inspiration for the calendar that I described in the other comment. It’s the “don’t do this” kind of inspiration but I think it counts.

    • illi@piefed.socialEnglish
      15·
      9 hours ago

      But it isn’t. Winter solstice already happened before Christmas. New Year, un our current culture, is 100% arbitrary.

      • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
        9·
        9 hours ago

        It’s distorted by a fuckton of history and stuff, including the invention of yearly calendars and manipulating them over millenia, plus whatever christianity added to the mix, but it’s not arbitrary.

        • illi@piefed.socialEnglish
          5·
          6 hours ago

          It is now.

          I can imagine it started the way so that January 1st falls on solstice. But it doesn’t so the date we set as New Year is pretty arbitrary.

      • deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz
        18·
        9 hours ago

        Ssh! If the northern hemisphere people figure out how awesome summer Christmas and new years is we’ll never get rid of them.

      • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        10·
        9 hours ago

        The fact that the other hemisphere exists did cross my mind, but I decided to ignore it because clarifying would have reduced the quippy nature of the comment.

        The comic is also saying that the entire world lives by the Gregorian calendar but that isn’t true as well.

        • Quokka@quokk.auEnglish
          3·
          7 hours ago

          It’s all good, you’re still technically correct. The Gregorian calendar is based off of Europeans, so it would still be originated from their winter solstice.

    • thebestaquaman@lemmy.world
      14·
      10 hours ago

      I don’t see how this is so heavily downvoted…? It makes complete sense that humans (by far most of which live in the northern hemisphere) would celebrate that the darkest days have passed and that we’re heading from a dark and harsh winter towards a promise of spring. Coming from the north, I can definitely testify to the fact that you feel in your whole body that the days start getting longer.

      The fact that the exact date is slightly off basically amounts to a rounding error, and making a point out of it is just pedantic.

    • A_norny_mousse@feddit.org
      7·
      9 hours ago

      It’s a fuckton of “history and stuff”, including the invention of yearly calendars and manipulating them over millenia, plus whatever christianity added to the mix, but yes, it’s not arbitrary.

      edit: my apologies for the Northern hemispherism.

    • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
      10·
      10 hours ago

      I was going to point out that if it isn’t, in fact, the winter solstice, then it is arbitrary.

      But I decided to start the new year without the pretentiousness and pedantic proclamations

      • null@piefed.nullspace.lolEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        if it isn’t, in fact, the winter solstice, then it is arbitrary.

        That’s not true though. The date is significant and not arbitrary, it’s just not the winter solstice (anymore).

        • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
          1·
          3 hours ago

          Actually, there is no such thing as a ‘winter solstice.’ The start of the Northern winter is the start of the Southern summer.

          • null@piefed.nullspace.lolEnglish
            1·
            2 hours ago

            Sure. But none of that makes New Years Day arbitrary by virtue of it not being, in fact, the winter solstice.

            • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
              1·
              2 hours ago

              If you use the equinoxes or the solstices you’re still being arbitrary because there are two of each.

              January 4 is the day of the year that the Earth is closest to the Sun [perihelion] That would be a good date, but there will be those who argue for stating the year when Earth is furthest away.

              • null@piefed.nullspace.lolEnglish
                1·
                2 hours ago

                Okay, but why would that mean that New Years Day not being the winter solstice makes it arbitrary to celebrate on Jan 1?

                • DagwoodIII@piefed.socialEnglish
                  2·
                  1 hour ago

                  It’s arbitrary because there’s no moment that is the obvious beginning of the cycle.

                  That’s the very definition of ‘arbitrary’

      • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
        5·
        9 hours ago

        Actually this is a fair point. What counts as arbitrary? For me the slight drift is just due to the way calendars and culture works, and while it is more arbitrary than having it on the solstice. It is less arbitrary than having it on your(anyone who happens to read this) birthday. It’s ultimately a matter of where you draw the baseline. Even if new year was on the winter solstice you could still argue that it’s arbitrary because there are four others. Arbitrarity is relative.

        • Val@anarchist.nexusEnglish
          4·
          7 hours ago

          The UTC is completely 100% arbitrary. The only reason it’s there is because an observatory happened to be on a specific hill, and then it drifted a bit (like most human things do), but the UTC/GMT has since it’s conception been completely arbitrary measurement. There isn’t a way to define a 0 latitude on a rotating sphere without making it an arbitrary point.

  • Ech@lemmy.ca
    19·
    8 hours ago

    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.

  • Sam_Bass@lemmy.world
    2·
    5 hours ago

    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

    • criticon@lemmy.ca
      3·
      5 hours ago

      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