Days start getting longer on December 21st*. They start getting shorter on June 21st*, the first day of summer.
*Dates may vary from year to year.
The average inland farmer who’d never seen the ocean, perhaps. The average sailor or fisherman certainly knew the world wasn’t flat. They might not have thought it through enough to have realised that the world is a globe, but they could tell from simple observation that the surface of the ocean is curved. You only have to watch a ship sail over the horizon to grasp that.
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That their oh-so-politically-correct opinions are anything of value. Just having an opinion is no more serious than gas. Nobody cares What You Think, so shut up. Heh.
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That we are all the same in every way and furthermore that it is “something-ist” to ever mention any differences between any groups of people in any way. No, bozo, we’re not. See above for appropriate course of action. Heh. Heh.
I feel much better now, thanks. ;o)
No, there be dragons.:eek:
Ok, but I think that the blind assertion that the solstices are the starts of Summer and Winter is a misconception. In plain speech, when I refer to a season, I’m talking about the climate, not the position of the sun in the sky.
I was going to say this, but more strongly. The first day of summer is not the summer solstice. Hereabouts it’s mid to late May, or early June at the latest.
Officially summer starts on the solstice. But in my universe, it starts two weeks from Friday, at precisely 3pm.
Never made sense to my pagan heart, either. Midwinter (the Solstice) is the *middle *of winter. Duh. And Midsummer (again, Solstice) the middle of summer. Spring and Autumn equinoxes, coming right in the middle of them, make perfect middle of their seasons’ markers. This isn’t rocket surgery.
Luckily, there are no really **official **official dates marking the seasons in the US, so I can be right. 
“Officially” implies that there is some authority issuing the edict. Do you have such an authority in mind? If so, which one, and what gives said authority the ability to make such a ruling?
It says it on all of my calendars, so I guess in this case it’s the calendar makers.
This is incorrect. Passive investors can deduct interest from the income they receive for the property (if you get 1000 in rent and pay 300 dollars in tax, interest, and insurance, you would pay taxes on 700). What they can’t do is apply costs to other income. Also, you don’t have to be “in the business” so much as take active part in the process. Even if you have a management company, if you make decisions about rent, repairs, improvements, or tenants over the course of the year it is not passive.
Except usually that interest and tax is lower than what you would pay because he bought the property before you rented it(and as mentioned above, he gets to deduct it). This brings up a very common misconception that many people have and helped lead to the recent bubble:
Renting a home is a waste of money. In fact, renting is almost always going to be cheaper* than buying a property over the short term. Buying a house pays off if you plan to live in it long term or if you can add value to it at less cost than normal (e.g. you can improve it with your own labor).
*Where cheaper means less outlay of money. Depending on your assumptions you could say that principle repayment and down payments are not costs, but then you have to compare opportunity costs and things get complicated.
This is incorrect. Passive investors can deduct interest from the income they receive for the property (if you get 1000 in rent and pay 300 dollars in tax, interest, and insurance, you would pay taxes on 700). Otherwise you could end up in a situation where you lost money on a property but still had to pay taxes on the gross income.
What they can’t do is apply net losses to other income. Also, you don’t have to be “in the business” so much as take active part in the process. Even if you have a management company, if you make decisions about rent, repairs, improvements, or tenants over the course of the year it is not passive.
I do not believe there is a calendar-maker’s guild, or a licensing board for calendar-making, or any such thing. And WhyNot has already pointed out the problem with treating the solstices & equinoxes as the beginning of the seasons: it wars with the obvious.
The Perfect Master says:
Another common misconception: although the summer solstice is the longest day of the year (in terms of hours of daylight), it is not the day of the latest sunset; that happens later.
“The home mechanic can’t work on a modern car.”
Most of the stuff that needs doing and needs fixing are the same things as always. Sparkplugs, filters, oil changes, water pumps, U joint’s or CV joints, ball joints, Wheel bearings…none of that stuff has changed. Most of the stuff you can no longer do doesn’t need done. Fuel injection systems are probably 100 times more reliable than a carburetor, good riddance to points and rotary distributers.
AND if the computerized stuff goes wrong you can buy scan tools for $20 for a cheap one to maybe $300 for a nice one that will often tell you exactly what the trouble is.
“My time is too valuable to work on my own car”
Every time I have taken my car to a dealer has required 2-5 hours of my time by the time I picked it up and dropped it off. I can usually do the work at home in about 1-1.5X the book time, and I can’t earn a shop’s hourly rate. I am money ahead even if I take unpaid leave from work to do the job…even if I have to buy tools.
It still seems to be a pretty commonly accepted definition. But let’s do it your way. Better yet, let’s do it my way.
Summer starts on the Friday before Memorial Day, at 3pm.
Fall starts on the first cool day of October.
Winter starts on Thanksgiving Day, right around the time we have pie.
Spring never really starts.
So the greatest period of time when days get longer is during winter. (And in the mythical time called spring.)
The greatest period of time when days get shorter is summer and fall.
Perhaps you missed that my argument was with the word officially, which implied things you couldn’t prove.
As for your way, it doesn’t work well for Memphis, which has about four months of autumn.
As I posted in that thread about monkeys versus apes, I’m a primatologist and every single primatologist I know says that apes and monkeys are two separate things.
As I basically posted there: While it is true that the term ‘monkey’ might be used by those who (incorrectly) suggest a common descent, there are many similarities between monkeys that give the term meaning and cause it to be distinctly different from ape. The term ‘monkey’ is paraphyletic, and I don’t believe it is correct to argue that that we must completely ignore paraphyletic terminology. It has its uses and we in the field use it all the time.
For those of us in the field, ape refers to only to those in Hominoidea who share a set of characteristics. Humans are apes because we are in Hominoidea. Those who are arguing that apes should be including under the label monkey have probably never heard of the term ‘simian’, which is the proper term to use for the group that encompasses both monkeys and apes. A monkey is a non-ape simian.
We are mammals because, like other mammals, we have the three ear bones, hair and mammory glans.
I make sure to inform people that chimps and humans are not monkeys because I think people are woefully uneducated about our evolutionary past and our close relatives. Also, apes have some very distinct characteristics. Also, I always say we did not evolve from monkeys because the monkeys we observe now have had their own long evolutionary history and it implies the scala naturae.
It’s been over a year since I’ve played rock band and yet the words are still ringing in my head.
Winter taking days,
NIGHTS FILLED WITH LONGER HOURS!
That you need to consume eight glasses of water a day. I have seen this “fact” written on the labels of bottles of water sold by otherwise reputable companies, used in advertisements, and so on.
If you have never been to the Eiffel Tower, you probably think you have a pretty good idea of what it looks like down to the color. It is a really big tower sort of grey or blackish metal that looks out over Paris. All of that is right except for the color part. Somebody decided to paint it beige and I have no idea why. I was thoroughly confused when I first saw it up close and I know other people are too. My youngest daughter was trying to color it this weekend and she thought I was crazy when I told her to use beige or light brown.