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That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

FreshFish said:
It varies by latitude.



Short answer: because the earth's orbit is elliptical and because the earth is tilted on its axis. The rest is math. :eek:

At the northern hemisphere's summer solstice, the earth is actually further away from the sun than at the northern hemisphere's winter solstice, which is why summers in Australia tend to be hotter than summers in the US at comparable latitudes away from the equator.
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I do understand all that. I am asking something different: (1) is the earliest sunrise the same for all points in the hemisphere (given that the actual time of the sunrise is different, pulling in as you approach the equator), and (2) why do the precession of sunrise and sunset not vary symmetrically -- i.e., why is the date of the earliest sunrise not also the date of the latest sunset?

The answer to the former is, I'm pretty sure, yes.

The latter is a real head-scratcher. It may have to do with axial tilt, but I'm having a hard time creating a mental model that behaves according to actuals.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Kepler said:
The latter is a real head-scratcher. It may have to do with axial tilt, but I'm having a hard time creating a mental model that behaves according to actuals.
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oh, well. I don't recall where I copied this information from. The mirror image happens at the winter solstice; earliest sunset happens before and latest sunrise happens after, so you need to make the appropriate adjustments in the text that follows for the summer solstice, with earliest sunrise and latest sunset....

Why doesn’t the earliest sunset come on the shortest day?
The December solstice marks the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere and longest day in the Southern Hemisphere. But the earliest sunset – or earliest sunrise if you’re south of the equator – happens before the December solstice. Many people notice this, and ask about it.

The key to understanding the earliest sunset is not to focus on the time of sunset or sunrise. The key is to focus on what is called true solar noon – the time of day that the sun reaches its highest point, in its journey across your sky.

In early December, true solar noon comes nearly 10 minutes earlier by the clock than it does at the solstice around December 22. With true noon coming later on the solstice, so will the sunrise and sunset times.

It’s this discrepancy between clock time and sun time that causes the Northern Hemisphere’s earliest sunset and the Southern Hemisphere’s earliest sunrise to precede the December solstice.

The discrepancy occurs primarily because of the tilt of the Earth’s axis. A secondary but another contributing factor to this discrepancy between clock noon and sun noon comes from the Earth’s elliptical – oblong – orbit around the sun. The Earth’s orbit is not a perfect circle, and when we’re closest to the sun, our world moves fastest in orbit. Our closest point to the sun – or perihelion – comes in early January. So we are moving fastest in orbit around now, slightly faster than our average speed of about 30 kilometers (18.5 miles) per second. The discrepancy between sun time and clock time is greater around the December solstice than the June solstice because we’re nearer the sun at this time of year.

The precise date of the earliest sunset depends on your latitude. At mid-northern latitudes, it comes in early December each year. [underline was italics in original quote; bolding was added by me in response to the questions]
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Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Another thing that I think is really "neat."

Metro-North Railroad uses the terms "catenary" and "pantograph" routinely in its communications with riders and actually expects them to know what they mean. And most of us actually do....at least in summer, when heat causes the catenary to sag even more, increasing the risk that the pantograph will create a bulge in one of them and then get snagged and cause a breakdown.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

FreshFish said:
Another thing that I think is really "neat."

Metro-North Railroad uses the terms "catenary" and "pantograph" routinely in its communications with riders and actually expects them to know what they mean. And most of us actually do....at least in summer, when heat causes the catenary to sag even more, increasing the risk that the pantograph will create a bulge in one of them and then get snagged and cause a breakdown.
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That is neat.

y = cosh(x), baby.

which leads to something else that is so neat it blows the top of your head off:

"The area under the curve of cosh(x) over a finite interval is always equal to the arc length corresponding to that interval."

There is absolutely no reason why that should be true -- the measures aren't even in the same units! It's just a sort of freaking miracle, like Euler's Formula.
 
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Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

A survey that purports to show the best cities for women's sexual satisfaction can be found here.

Auckland, NZ at # 3?

Otherwise, every city in the top 50 is either in Europe or North America.
 
FreshFish said:
Another thing that I think is really "neat."

Metro-North Railroad uses the terms "catenary" and "pantograph" routinely in its communications with riders and actually expects them to know what they mean. And most of us actually do....at least in summer, when heat causes the catenary to sag even more, increasing the risk that the pantograph will create a bulge in one of them and then get snagged and cause a breakdown.
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Metro North is the old New Haven RR that runs on Amtrak lines?

Last time I rode that route up to Providence, I swear the rusted over towers were old when my father was a lad in the 1930s.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

FreshFish said:
A survey that purports to show the best cities for women's sexual satisfaction can be found here.

Auckland, NZ at # 3?

Otherwise, every city in the top 50 is either in Europe or North America.
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Their definition is:

having or promoting an open, tolerant, or progressive attitude towards sex and sexuality
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And here is the write-up, which is very sparse on methodology and metrics:

At Lazeeva, we acknowledge the importance of intercourse, and are always exploring new ways to encourage openness towards healthy, safe and consensual sex. We wanted to look into how sex is viewed differently around the world, which cities have made progress towards sexual openness, and which would benefit from further liberation in future.

To try and quantify exactly how sexual a city is, a multitude of factors and a huge amount of data is needed from millions of people. Because of the resistance to the topic, this process was especially difficult in certain locations. We began by researching ten factors over 200 cities from around the world, before creating a final list of 100 where the full data was available. These factors included the libido of citizens in a city and their porn consumption, but also the adult entertainment and swingers culture on offer in the location itself.

We also believe that to be truly sexually liberated, a city needs to have good access to modern contraception, a positive attitude to the LGBT community and equal rights for everyone. To recognise this, cities were also given a score for these factors. Once we’d researched the ten factors and calculated the ranking, we added on something fun to end with: what term was most searched for on porn sites in each city.

Paris came first (excuse the pun) in ranking of the most sexual cities, followed by Rio de Janeiro and London. Paris scored exceptionally well for its swinger culture and adult entertainment, whereas Rio de Janeiro outperformed all the other cities in the sexually experimental and sexually active categories. London ranked as the best city for LGBT friendliness worldwide.

Five of the top ten cities for porn consumption were from North America, with the porn production capital Los Angeles unsurprisingly taking first place. Berlin topped the swingers category and also came second for adult entertainment, narrowly beaten by Las Vegas. Antwerp and Brussels scored first and third respectively for sexual satisfaction, followed by three Dutch cities. Clearly they’re doing something right in the Benelux region.
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It's basically a list of cities with a high quality of life and liberal social policies, which one would expect.
 
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Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

FreshFish said:
A survey that purports to show the best cities for women's sexual satisfaction can be found here.

Auckland, NZ at # 3?

Otherwise, every city in the top 50 is either in Europe or North America.
Click to expand...

Is #50 not in the top 50? It's Sydney, Australia.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

When the legal concept of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" was first introduced, it actually was a vast improvement in the criminal justice system.

It firmly established the concept that the reprisal should not be more severe than the original offense.

Before then, it was more like, "you put out my eye, I kill you and all your male heirs, rape your wife, enslave your daughters, and take ownership of all your livestock."
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

FreshFish said:
When the legal concept of "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth" was first introduced, it actually was a vast improvement in the criminal justice system.

It firmly established the concept that the reprisal should not be more severe than the original offense.

Before then, it was more like, "you put out my eye, I kill you and all your male heirs, rape your wife, enslave your daughters, and take ownership of all your livestock."
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Well... we assume that. There isn't much documentation of legal codes prior to the Hammurabi Code.

To be fair to you, there is an extant code that precedes the HC by centuries and it basically amounts to, "the penalty for x is death, that way we really cut down on the complexity of sentencing."

But we really don't know a lot about the intervening 300 years. From what I have read historians think that the legal codes were expressly tiered by wealth. So, if a rich man killed a poor man he had to pay for the upkeep of the surviving family (so, uh... kill them all on the first go, I guess?) whereas if a poor man killed a rich man then the poor man got death and his family became slaves of the rich household.

We can probably infer a fair amount about the legal codes from references in Bible, and the short version is: it aint pretty. In particular, try not to be a woman because it won't end well. In the HC OTOH women are treated remarkably fairly given the period. The old saw is women had more rights in 19th century BC Babylon than 19th century AD England.
 
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Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Kepler said:
Two spaces is better practice for readability. Grammar Girl is wrong on this. In many applications a two-space string is rendered as one space anyway, so she hardly need worry.

Also, if Grammar Girl knows any actual typesetters she needs to spend less time at the assisted living community.
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Two of my brothers worked with typesetters, but I'd imagine they still exist only that now their jobs have moved to a digital layout tool. Pamphlets and small booklets are still found in this world.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

St. Clown said:
Pamphlets and small booklets are still found in this world.
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They can be produced digitally too. My company produces pamphlets you would swear were 1950s typset, right down to reproducing the distinctive "fuzziness" and low fi feel. They are all digital sources.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

Kepler said:
They can be produced digitally too. My company produces pamphlets you would swear were 1950s typset, right down to reproducing the distinctive "fuzziness" and low fi feel. They are all digital sources.
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Yeah, I meant that the pamphlets and such were all designed using a graphics program these days. Any typesetter worth his/her weight, would've taken the time to learn the new digital tools.
 
Re: That's Neat! 1: That's neat

St. Clown said:
Yeah, I meant that the pamphlets and such were all designed using a graphics program these days. Any typesetter worth his/her weight, would've taken the time to learn the new digital tools.
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25 years ago or so, when I used to work directly with small business owners, I met a person who bought a printing company merely to own the copyright on their patented font. He sold off all the machinery (keeping the slugs that contained this unique font) and moved all the fonts to digital publishing.
 
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