These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!)
When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha.
A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed my suspicion - 'Oh, so you're the new resident there, I'd planned on being in touch - that stone monument has been there for more than 2000 years, is A-listed and please, whatever you do, don't do anything with it. Seriously.'
The current state is such that we can, with great authority, give an exact measure of each "years" length, with every one bieng unique. You touch on but dont quite state that math is a usefull game, but miss that reality does not use math consistantly, and we force arbitrary units and measures onto what we are trying to understand, but are still clueless as to what the nature of reality is, and how it works. Testable…
It's the other way around. It takes my breath away how consistent the mean length of a day is and how accurately we can measure it. So accurately that if it deviates by mere tens of milliseconds, and it does, we can notice it. It boggles my mind that a hunk of rock made up of differing densities, with so much of salty water sloshing around, Moon exerting her brakes, bombardments by extraterrestrial matter, Earth stil…
ha ha ha!, we state the same thing, I think, maybe, but it's the "10's of milliseconds" of inconsistancy that I am refering to, we can measure things in as you well state, a "breathtaking" way, but are then reduced to bieng reality's mad, overworkered, note keepers, and ALL of the clocks are still ALWAYS wrong, with the very definition of time becoming something that we must descibe as "realitys ongoing mistake, that we must correct for".
I will indulge myself and go a bit farther into woooooo, teritory, in that this new ability to keep time so accuratly is something that resists entropy by creating order, where there is none.
I don’t know if it’s related to Western-centrism or not, but I recall thinking it was weird that my English-speaking colleagues do not know the formula to solve second-degree polynomials as the “Bhaskara formula”, as we call it in Brazil. By the way, Wolfram’s website has an interesting summary of the history of this formula.[0] [0]: https://mathworld.wolfram.com/QuadraticEquation.html
Interesting that it is called Bhaskara formula.
In India and also in general it's called Sridharacharya formula or method. It's named after the Indian algebraist Sridhar
It's the other way around. It takes my breath away how consistent the mean length of a day is and how accurately we can measure it. So accurately that if it deviates by mere tens of milliseconds, and it does, we can notice it. It boggles my mind that a hunk of rock made up of differing densities, with so much of salty water sloshing around, Moon exerting her brakes, bombardments by extraterrestrial matter, Earth stil…
ha ha ha!, we state the same thing, I think, maybe, but it's the "10's of milliseconds" of inconsistancy that I am refering to, we can measure things in as you well state, a "breathtaking" way, but are then reduced to bieng reality's mad, overworkered, note keepers, and ALL of the clocks are still ALWAYS wrong, with the very definition of time becoming something that we must descibe as "realitys ongoing mistake, that…
Frankly there is nothing woo about it.
Even without venturing into the realms of Quantam Mechanics or Chaotic Dynamics, all measurements are, by physical definition, upto the resolution of the measuring instrument. So it always come with inherent +/- error bars. Sometimes these error bars are made explicit, at other times they are elided, often with the assumption that it's obvious.
Models are always simplifications. That is precisely why they are useful. ( A 1:1 scale map is not very useful, especially when we already have one). Models are obtained by ignoring the effect of many known disturbances, but whose effect one deems not to exceed a tolerance bound.
These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!) When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha. A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed…
We also have these in Germany, in the region where I live it which is North Rhein Westfalis they are quite a common thing actually. Strongly recomment people check it out if they pass by here some time
These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!) When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha. A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed…
When an aperture is aligned to the winter solstice, it is also aligned to avoid light the rest of the year. An early attempt at air conditioning? Keep the heat out.
When an aperture is aligned to the winter solstice, it is also aligned to avoid light the rest of the year. An early attempt at air conditioning? Keep the heat out. We jump so quickly to religious significance.
Why not just point the door to the north if the goal was to keep the sun out?
These are all over the place in Norway (as are they everywhere else, presumably!) When we moved to the island we currently live on, our address was in a road called 'Solsteinen' (The Sun Stone), but I didn't think anything of it until I realized that the roughly hewn stone serving as the property limit marker was juuu-uuust touched by the sun on Winter Solstice. Aha. A quick call to the local archaeologist confirmed…
The local archaeologist? Incredible
Oh, he works for the county, but happened to live just up the hill from us.
There's so much old stuff around here that he is basically being called out to perform an assessment every time anyone wishes to build anything.
Where we live now, for instance, there are a handful of burial mounds from God knows when (all plundered long ago), lots of old charcoal pits, a couple of late stone age fish traps in the lake in a corner of our farm.
To exaggerate just a little - where we could build our home was basically dictated by where we could find a spot noone had claimed thousands of years ago...