emergent ink

I don’t care what the groundhog said;
There’s six more weeks of winter ahead.

Groundhogs don’t have calendars or jobs, so they don’t know that weeks have seven days or when baseball players fly south for spring training.

People have much bigger brains than groundhogs. Our brains are too big, and sometimes that gets us in trouble.

We have calendars and jobs. We split our days into weekdays and weekends. We didn’t split these as evenly as we could; we made only two weekend days and the other five belong to the week. We’re supposed to work on the weekdays. That doesn’t seem fair. To make things worse, the weekend days are weekdays too, sometimes, and become workdays. But that never works in your favor when you need a check to clear. And only one of them ends the week; the other one starts the next week.

Our big brains love to categorize and define and predict. These things are useful, but our brains have too much horsepower for us to handle, so much that they can do something called imagination.

This has mostly worked to our benefit.

But sometimes, not so much.

Memory is another thing that has its ups and downs. It helps us follow a train of thought, no matter how badly it might get derailed, like right now. It gives us traditions. But some traditions get in the way, some grudges need to be set aside. It would also be nice if there was a way to stop this song from playing inside my head. Much as I like Simon & Garfunkel, the sound of silence would be a pleasant break from The Sounds of Silence.

I had to know, so I looked it up: getting a song stuck in your head is called an earworm. The Wikipedia entry suggested calling it an aneurhythm or humbug.

That reminds me: I was talking about groundhogs. Our big brains, with their powers of imagination and tradition, gave us Groundhog Day. If the groundhog sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter. Otherwise, spring is near.

Our brains are way too big.

Their real jobs, which involve analysis and definition and prediction, bore them. So they make stuff up.

Groundhog Day is February 2. The first day of spring is March 20 or 21. There’s an extra day in February every four years (except on century years, except when those century years can be divided by 400). So there are 46-48 days between Groundhog Day and the first day of spring. Always. Every year.

Since that’s almost seven weeks, whether the groundhog says there’s six more weeks of winter or that spring is coming a little quicker this year, it’s always almost right. Or wrong. It depends on how much of a stickler you want to be.

The first day of spring is, by tradition, the vernal equinox. That’s the day when there are equal amounts of daylight and nighttime. (This is different in different parts of the world, but these rules were made in the northern hemisphere, and that too is tradition.)

The earth goes around the sun in a little less than 365.25 days; that’s why leap years are not always every four years. It’s all designed so the vernal equinox falls on March 20 or 21 every year.

(About 1000 years ago it fell on March 16, which was six weeks from Groundhog Day, but then we fixed the calendar.)

Our brains figured all this out for us. But like always, they got some things wrong. And not just the bit where groundhogs can predict weather.

Spring ends on June 20 or 21, when summer starts. That’s called the summer solstice. It’s the longest day of the year. It’s really just as long as all the rest, but it’s when the northern hemisphere gets more daylight than not. Tradition, again.

The changing lengths of days has to do with how the earth is tilted as it goes around the sun. Things would be a lot more boring if days never changed.

It doesn’t make sense that the days should get shorter starting with the first day of summer. But that’s what happens, the way our brains set things up in America and Britain. Summer starts to die on its very first day. This is less fair than weekends. Thanks a lot, big brains.

The longest day of the year should be smack in the middle of summer. Some traditions do celebrate midsummer’s day. We should immediately adopt this new calendar, if we have money in the budget.

If you look at it this way, if you let your brain repartition your calendar for you as I’m suggesting, then the first day of winter (the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year) is actually the point where you are already halfway through winter.

Days have been getting longer since December 21. Knowing this is a comfort. I’m almost out of firewood.

Go ahead and look this up for yourself. Ignore the stuff about thermal lag; it’ll just depress you. Warm yourself with this: because the earth moves at different speeds along an elliptical orbit, the seasons don’t have equal lengths.

The earth takes 88.99 days to get from the winter solstice to the spring equinox, but there are 92.75 days from there to the summer solstice. Nice, warm days.

Groundhogs don’t know all this. Or if they do, they’re not telling.

If you break the seasons up this way, and I recommend that you do, then the first day of spring is… Groundhog Day.