i just clued in that the distance one lives from their timezone split can have a huge difference on the way the sun is experienced. i suppose that this is obvious, but i never realized it before.

the sun wasn't up until almost 8:00 today. sure, it's the shortest day of the year, but that's still pushing it. it wasn't up until around 8:00 before they turned the clocks back, too. in ottawa, the sun is never much later than 7:30. most confusing to me was that i'm comfortable in the knowledge that windsor is south of ottawa, meaning it's closer to the equator, meaning i would think it should be a few seconds (maybe a minute or two) *earlier*, not apparently a half hour later. it seemed late in the fall, too. i'm used to the sun being up before 7:00 most of the year, and it really wasn't. so, what, precisely, is the fuck?

well, it's pretty obvious if you look at the map. it's not that the sunrise is later here, it's that synchronizing clocks across timezones is something that sort of doesn't actually make sense. here's where it gets weird, and we're moving from east to west across the eastern time-zone here, within a relatively small latitude change:

boston - 7:11
nyc - 7:17
montreal - 7:32
ottawa - 7:40
toronto - 7:48
detroit - 7:59
indianapolis - 8:03

then...

chicago - 7:15

right. time zone shift.

as is now obvious, it's the move east-west that makes the difference. humans may possibly exist at infinitely many points within each time zone, producing a different experience of the sun in each that varies by as much as an hour on the edges. the difference between living in detroit and living in chicago could be dramatic for some people. what i've done is move a half hour within the zone, and it's produced noticeable effects.

there's a benefit, though, if you're the type that is inclined that way, especially in the summer:

sunset in ottawa today - 4:23
sunset in windsor today - 5:03

so, the thing to adjust to is the sun coming up a half hour later and setting a half hour later.

mom
i was wondering why the sun wasn't coming up when we drove in.

jessica amber murray
well, it was freaking you out. i just thought it was cloudy. it wasn't until around october that i realized something wasn't right.

mom
the summer days were always a lot longer in prince rupert, so i thought the days got longer when you moved north and shorter as you get closer to the equator. so, shouldn't the days in windsor be shorter?

jessica amber murray
that's a big latitude difference, though. almost 10 degrees. and the shift isn't linear - it changes faster as you move further north. so, you'd expect to notice a measurable change with longer days in the summer and shorter days in the winter. ottawa to windsor is only 3 degrees. i mean, i'm sure you could measure it down to a few minutes, but it couldn't really be that noticeable.

actually, sunrise in binghampton, new york was about 11 minutes earlier than sunrise in ottawa, today. so that's the straight comparison, north-south. at the solstice.

really, the longitude thing is totally obvious when you think about it. of course the sun does rise later over windsor than over ottawa if measured from outer space (my language up there was a bit weird). i'm just a half hour further away from the earth coming out of darkness. the thing is we tend to expect that time zones work that kind of shit out and don't think about the changes that exist when moving across the same time zone.

also, the fact that we were moving west overnight might have exaggerated the effect. we got to experience the earlier sunset in ottawa, then the later sunrise on the way into windsor.

something i've learned though is that if you like an early sunset (and i'm often up all night, and do like to watch the sun rise) then you want to be on the easternmost edge of your timezone. relative to your clock, the sun rises earlier in chicago than in detroit (although it of course passes over detroit first). somewhere like the gaspe peninsula would be perfect for those that like early sunrises..

"western capitalism is almost a better product than heroin." - genesis p-orridge

heavy dream...

i wish people would be a little less coercive in enforcing conformist concepts that reject being square. being square is a personality trait, but it's also often a reaction to events. the quality of being square exists at the core of a square person's individuality.

square people exist.

so, instead of enforcing norms through insults and coercion, why don't we just accept that people have different value systems?

i'm consequently reclaiming the term.

http://johnpilger.com/articles/mandela-is-gone-but-apartheid-is-alive-and-well-in-australia
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/the-sad-and-puzzling-story-of-abbas-khan-the-british-doctor-found-dead-in-syrian-jail-9010993.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/as-we-move-towards-the-great-wars-centenary-its-time-to-recognise-the-reality-of-its-horror-9006197.html

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/05/australia-apartheid-alive-aboriginal-history
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=unraveling-the-mystery-of-ssris-depression

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/chinese-collider-expands-particle-zoo
http://www.nature.com/news/cosmologists-at-odds-over-mysterious-anomalies-in-data-from-early-universe-1.14368
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/december-2013/mu2e-attracts-magnet-experts
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/12012013/article/discovery-pushes-back-the-clock-on-human-hand-evolution

we're slowly proving that there is no ether, i mean dark matter.
http://physics.aps.org/articles/v6/136

http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/direct-measurements-of-the-wave-nature-of-matter/

this is awesome.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=inhaled-stem-cells-might-replace-lost-neurons

http://phys.org/news/2013-12-nsa-unconstitutional.html

i'm happy that the linnaean teleology is continuing to be dismantled.
http://phys.org/news/2013-12-ancestor-snakes-lizards-gave-birth.html

http://mitne.ws/1cwDL7P

their effect on bees is probably not as strong as claimed (it's not helping, but the truth is bees were already dying and the source isn't fully clear) but there's plenty of other reasons to reduce dangerous pesticide use.
http://blogs.nature.com/news/2013/12/controversial-pesticides-linked-to-human-neurotoxicity.html

http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/december-2013/four-things-you-might-not-know-about-dark-matter

kind of like blacks, whites, asians and native americans. these weren't different species. it's just variation.
http://popular-archaeology.com/issue/12012013/article/neanderthal-genome-sequence-reveals-interbreeding-in-four-early-human-species

http://news.sciencemag.org/archaeology/2013/12/genome-neandertals-reveals-inbreeding
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=human-exposure-to-possibly-neurotoxic-pesticides-should-be-reduced-eu-safety-agency-recommends
https://phys.org/news/2013-12-trio-rsa-encryption-keys-noise.html

indeed. there's nothing spectacular about a base 2 system, except how inconvenient it would be. the babylonians were using base 60 systems thousands of years ago. take that for obtuse.

the question as to "why?" is interesting, because it's sort of like asking why people would uninvent the wheel. base 10 took a long time to come up (it's not as simple as how many fingers we have, that doesn't add up to historical evidence, it was more about religion and mysticism in the early days) with and is really quite ingenious when you break it all apart. why bother?

http://phys.org/news/2013-12-polynesian-islanders-combined-binary-decimal.html

great. just what we needed.

http://phys.org/news/2013-12-algae-crude-oil-million-year-natural.html

ok. so, the process is in theory cyclical if you expect oil companies to build giant carbon catching windmills rather than recycling the captured carbon they've put aside from burning coal.

if it completely replaces burning geological carbon, it's an idea that could help. in reality, it sounds like a way to make a profit off of stored carbon created by burning coal.

regardless, i haven't interpreted biofuels quite like this before. it's sort of understood that the carbon can't be recycled like this because oil can't be created on demand. once that's presented as possible, the whole argument shifts.

i'm not sure it's feasible to shift entirely, and i don't think it's a "get out of alternative energy" card. but it seems like it's an idea to add to the options.

i'm usually critical of ethanol because the energy in exceeds the energy out. that's another question to explore and that i don't feel the article answered.

probabilistic teleology. misses the point, every time. drives me up the wall. it's a neat article, though.
 http://phys.org/news306660276.html

obviously. no royal road to geometry, either.
http://feeds.sciencedaily.com/~r/sciencedaily/computers_math/mathematics/~3/8zwV6rRbJWA/131216102844.htm

how to completely eliminate sweatshop labour!

i'm not even thinking about people having these in their homes. robots are even cheaper than slaves. gap and the like are going to set these things up in abandoned factories in the rust belt.

that's an immediate decrease in carbon from shipping, to begin with. asians can then decide what they want to do with their means of production..

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/fashion/3D-Printing-Clothing-fashion.html

"This is not about waiting for a better life in the hereafter!"

this is what pissed marx off about christianity. he wasn't nietzsche or anything close to it. he wasn't even bakunin. the truth is he actually liked christianity, he spoke positively of "utopian socialism", but he was just really adamant that it was never going to be possible to build meaningful institutions that cater to real, existing human beings if they're ideologically driven entirely by fantasies of the afterlife. he thought it was an impossible strategy that had no outcome but co-option.

i think it's important to be cautious about taking strategic insight from the guy that thought the way to build communism was to start off with a state where one class dominates all the others. the cited engels text actually seems to want to present marxism as a tool that elites can use to replace christianity with. yes, engels actually explicitly makes the argument that marxism is a system that could be used to control the proletariat for the aims of the ruling elite by comparing it to christianity, which was previously successfully used for that purpose. marxists are generally kind of mum on that whole thing. and i realize this is where a lot of people put marx down and go their own way. but, personally, i think his deconstruction of christianity (less so than his ideas about how to replace christianity with marxism) is just about the only thing that's really worth taking from him intact without incredible modification, "de-hegelianizing", "sciencification", etc. specifically, it is the insight that workers are more likely to be revolutionary when they discard a belief in the afterlife (and that that belief in an afterlife is an impossible wall for revolutionaries to break through) that is a deep insight.

the soviets had people worshipping icons of stalin. no, for real. stalin was worshipped as a demigod. when this is spoken of at all, it's written off as a sort of megalomania. a cult of leadership. but it does come out of a certain reading of marx that implies that the proletariat needs to be controlled with a "secular religion" that denies an afterlife.

also, merry christmas.

http://redflag.org.au/article/contradictions-christianity#sthash.Qjw2Gup1.dpuf