New Year
Happy new year.
There are a whole lot of concepts in that first sentence that could do with being explained, but let's stick with the idea of years for the moment.
A year is a period of time. People out here have argued a lot about years, as they have about most things, but most of us now agree that a year is how long it takes for Earth, the planet we live on, to orbit (go around) the Sun, which is a star.
There are a lot of terms in there that I'm not going to bother to try to explain, for three main reasons:
1. I probably wouldn't explain them correctly.
2. I'm trying to stick to one concept per post (more for my benefit than yours; even now, your brain is probably in better condition than mine).
3. This whole Rough Guide to Earth schtick is a great theme for a blog, but it does require some suspension of disbelief (another term I'm not going to gloss just for the moment). It requires, for instance, that we temporarily disbelieve (a) that you are a foetus who cannot read English in any form, least of all in a blog on the Internet and (b) that I am abundantly unqualified to teach you about most of the things on Earth (and in its environs).
All that being said, years are important.
Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473 - 1543.
The Earth goes around the Sun (this was established by a fellow called Copernicus, pictured above) in what's called an ellipse, which is like a circle that's been stretched out a little bit. While it's going around the Sun, the Earth is itself spinning around, but the axis (again, lots of terms we'll just have to come back to) it's spinning around isn't exactly upright, so the top and the bottom of the Earth (the proper names are the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) get more sunlight at different times of the year. Because sunlight is responsible for pretty much everything that goes on on the surface of the Earth, which is the part we live on, a lot of what goes on out here depends on these changes.
We call these changes seasons, and still tend to plan quite a lot around them. Back before we had things like genetic engineering and Tesco (we'll come back to those too), we used to plan stuff like sowing and harvests, because if we didn't, we'd starve.
Nowadays, we generally just use the seasons, and the bits we've arbitrarily divided them into, to remind us when to buy various kinds of things. For example, in the summer, when it's warm, we buy holidays, which are trips to places where it's even warmer. In winter, at a time called Christmas, we all spend money (don't ask) we don't have buying things to give to the people we know even though they don't need them.
When you get older, you'll hear a lot about 'responsibility'. Responsibility is mainly just doing stuff like this and not asking too many questions. However, it does also involve not letting smaller members of the species like yourself perish in the snow, so it's not all bad.
As I was saying, we now use years just to remind us to do things we don't need to do, or to remember things that happened, like births (or wars, or hit singles, or vaccines), a certain number of years ago, as if that told us anything useful about the things, or about years, or about us.
Having said all that, tonight we marked the passing of the last year in which you won't have been on Earth.
That's pointless and arbitrary too. But not to me.
There are a whole lot of concepts in that first sentence that could do with being explained, but let's stick with the idea of years for the moment.
A year is a period of time. People out here have argued a lot about years, as they have about most things, but most of us now agree that a year is how long it takes for Earth, the planet we live on, to orbit (go around) the Sun, which is a star.
There are a lot of terms in there that I'm not going to bother to try to explain, for three main reasons:
1. I probably wouldn't explain them correctly.
2. I'm trying to stick to one concept per post (more for my benefit than yours; even now, your brain is probably in better condition than mine).
3. This whole Rough Guide to Earth schtick is a great theme for a blog, but it does require some suspension of disbelief (another term I'm not going to gloss just for the moment). It requires, for instance, that we temporarily disbelieve (a) that you are a foetus who cannot read English in any form, least of all in a blog on the Internet and (b) that I am abundantly unqualified to teach you about most of the things on Earth (and in its environs).
All that being said, years are important.
Nicolaus Copernicus, 1473 - 1543.
The Earth goes around the Sun (this was established by a fellow called Copernicus, pictured above) in what's called an ellipse, which is like a circle that's been stretched out a little bit. While it's going around the Sun, the Earth is itself spinning around, but the axis (again, lots of terms we'll just have to come back to) it's spinning around isn't exactly upright, so the top and the bottom of the Earth (the proper names are the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) get more sunlight at different times of the year. Because sunlight is responsible for pretty much everything that goes on on the surface of the Earth, which is the part we live on, a lot of what goes on out here depends on these changes.
We call these changes seasons, and still tend to plan quite a lot around them. Back before we had things like genetic engineering and Tesco (we'll come back to those too), we used to plan stuff like sowing and harvests, because if we didn't, we'd starve.
Nowadays, we generally just use the seasons, and the bits we've arbitrarily divided them into, to remind us when to buy various kinds of things. For example, in the summer, when it's warm, we buy holidays, which are trips to places where it's even warmer. In winter, at a time called Christmas, we all spend money (don't ask) we don't have buying things to give to the people we know even though they don't need them.
When you get older, you'll hear a lot about 'responsibility'. Responsibility is mainly just doing stuff like this and not asking too many questions. However, it does also involve not letting smaller members of the species like yourself perish in the snow, so it's not all bad.
As I was saying, we now use years just to remind us to do things we don't need to do, or to remember things that happened, like births (or wars, or hit singles, or vaccines), a certain number of years ago, as if that told us anything useful about the things, or about years, or about us.
Having said all that, tonight we marked the passing of the last year in which you won't have been on Earth.
That's pointless and arbitrary too. But not to me.
posted by Paraic O'Donnell at 2:53 AM
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