"Cultural influences such as Christmas creep may have led to the winter season being perceived as beginning earlier in recent years"
I think I've always considered November to be winter, and at some point I picked up that Christmas is in the middle/even towards the end to break it up and give everyone something to look forward to, so I'm always a bit surprised seeing talk of winter in the future tense once I've put on the winter duvet/started wearing a coat all the time/turned on the central heating (not this year).
In many parts of Northern Europe, at least, February is often the absolute coldest month (most likely for snowfall in UK, for example). So for heating worries, we’re definitely not out of the woods come February.
In Alberta November is Firmly in Winter, same with February (normally the coldest month of the year). Most years October & April also fall into it. Only month I haven't seen snow is July.
I realized this is exactly what has been happening for me. Because of even how early things like Christmas shows and stores switching into Chrismas mode happens it really does make it feel like Winter is late. But really it's just that culturally Christmas has started happening earlier.
I always thought that the shortest day shouldn't be the first day of winter, but rather the middle, so then winter would begin in late October, and summer would begin in late April.
> I always thought that the shortest day shouldn't be the first day of winter, but rather the middle
That's not just you. Every traditional calendar says the same thing.
As far as I can tell, the idea that winter starts on the solstice, when it's been winter for more than a month (unless you're in the tropics), is an invention of Hallmark or some other calendar manufacturer. It is based on nothing.
I tried reading Poor Richard's Almanac[1] to see if it indicated the "beginning of [any season]", but if it does I didn't understand. (There is a column of "remarkable days", but it is often difficult to understand the entries in that column.)
Careful track is kept of the exact time of sunrise and sunset, and of what kind of weather to expect ("rain"; "snow"), but the seasons don't seem to be labeled explicitly.
Interestingly, I browsed through the Almanac of 1748 as a sanity check while writing this comment, and the sunrise and sunset times clearly identify June 14 (well, the 8-day period from June 10 to June 17) as the summer solstice (we'd expect June 20 or 21) and, much more weirdly, March 8 (exactly) as the vernal equinox, where we'd expect March 20. The autumnal equinox is September 11 and the winter solstice is sometime between December 3 and December 18.
Either Benjamin Franklin was terrible at calculating astronomical dates, or there was a calendar adjustment between then and now.
There was indeed a calendar change just 4 years after the 1748 almanac you were reading. In 1752 the American colonies switched from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. That leaped 11 days ahead.
The oceans are Earth’s heat buffers. Summers are when the ocean stores heat, winters are when it releases heat.
There is more land in the northern hemisphere, more ocean in the Southern Hemisphere. Summers get hotter in the north, winters get colder. This is because land does not store/release nearly as much heat as ocean.
It just hit me that (of course) this was coordinated. I'm against many forms of advertising, but somehow I don't mind this. They needed a name for the letter and looked around. I can't imagine the brands having paid all that much to be the name of an Android version.
Can't tell which side you're on based on this comment... is the number of potentially offended people greater and so it's a worse crime or is it more of a public event where the public should be entitled to express themselves?
While this isn't at all objective, my feelings on it all started to change when the BBC begun sneaking in pure praise for Charles/monarchy without any balance, having softened us up with the same thing but with the Queen for a few days, knowing no-one would disagree with that. It now feels political.
> Can't tell which side you're on based on this comment
I'm sorry, I didn't realize I needed to pick a side first.
I have no involvement, don't know the facts, haven't followed the discussion. From this thread, I gathered that people are being obnoxious and so they whipped out an ancient law to round them up for. Is selective enforcement good? Probably not. Is it good to stop people from being obnoxious at any funeral? Generally yes. Is the situation GP was posing comparable (random funeral vs. the queen's funeral)? No. Is royalty good? I don't know, I've heard pros (stable face of a country, for foreign relations, without the same person always being in power) and cons (costs).
I'd rather argue about merit and facts than "sides" you're on
...but probably that doesn't fit in a comment anyone is going to read and upvote, so alas.
Sometimes I toy with the idea of having difficult discussions (best example might be nuclear fission energy) in the form of a wiki, where the contents embody the current best known facts, with conclusions logically following from facts. When you change a fact, it cascades and the "thus"es are marked as needing an update. If you don't care for the whole discussion, you can just read the conclusion and find a "because" that you think is wrong somewhere and argue about that. But then, who'd find that enjoyable?
Opt-out means on by default, opt-in is off by default (sorry to state the obvious).
The users above are referring to opting in/out of the tracking rather than the blocking of the tracking - so GA on Firefox by that standard is opt-in, even though in a Firefox specific context the setting is opt-out.
Obviously the EU wouldn't be cool with "but a competing browser with a small market share blocks us by default anyway".
i.e. completely stop or just reduce? Because I was going to say it would make sense for the "threat model" to go beyond "traditional" stalking to domestic abuse etc.
I'm sure every culture, including Western ones, has some kind(s) of food everywhere along the "healthy" to "medicinal" scale.
Everyone agrees what you eat is important, nobody can agree on what that should be, hopefully this kind of research will tell us.
I get the desire for the clear binary answer from seeing lots of similar problems with COVID tests. But if I bought this test I'd feel a bit scammed, I'd expect some magical fully digital process, the borderline results still exist with this system but are hidden, it kind of ruins it if you know that.
