Another orbit around the sun

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They took over the celebrations during colonization. Do the natives even celebrate New Year?

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Which was before today or not?

Captain Howdy

Aren't all forms of measurement (in this case it's a measurement of time) completely arbitrary?

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Does January 1st coincide with the ending of winter anywhere?

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I shouldn't be surprised that lemmites would find a way to make hating the new year a personality trait.

Bob

Even if it were arbitrary, I think a personified celestial body would instantly recognise the humanity in celebrating something happening again and again. Like when someone keeps falling over and the people witnessing it go "wahey!" every time.

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Does January 1st coincide with the ending of winter anywhere?

Ending? Winter just started 10 days ago.

Winter solstice - Wikipedia

(en.wikipedia.org)

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Kind of my point

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New years >>>>>>Christmas

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lol... casual searches for info on this yield a lot of questionable new-agey galactic alignment stuff.

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Summer is a much better time to celebrate anyway. I don't get why Europeans decided to do it in winter.

Anyway, it doesn't stop being an important day... after an arbitrary week-and-half delay.

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The measurement of earth orbiting for one revolution around the sun (a unit of time we refer to as a year) isn't arbitrary. It's clearly defined, you've either made one complete revolution or not. It's just that the original starting point for the first measurement was arbitrary because you'd have to start somewhere.

Many forms of measurement are absolute, like temperature, measured from absolute zero, or time, measured against the cesium standard (atomic clock). You'd have to break physics in order be able to define them as arbitrary.

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But divisions of time are arbitrary, no? 60 seconds per minute, 60 minutes per hour, 24 hours per day, 30(ish) days in a month, 12 months in a year. There were other ways to divide all that up. There's reasons they were divided that way, but the fact that we have to add a day every 4 years just because it's not perfect says a lot haha

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In this case I might argue that there are more "natural" points of reference (eg. solstices/equinoxes).

We use political/religious markers instead which are completely irrelevant to the planet's orbit.

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The change of year is not aligned with the solstice. The new year has been intentionally moved to an arbitrary date to obscure the solstice behind religious holidays.

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Fuck you, let us have fun.

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If there were reasons that it was divided that way, as you said, then that would make it non-arbitrary, as it was based on a system of logic. Define arbitrary, I guess.

I guess it could appear to be arbitrary to those that aren't aware of those reasons/logic, like the astronomical objects in the cartoon

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There's still a ton of non-absolute values though. Like the difference between absolute zero and absolute zero + 1.

Choosing one second to be 9192631770 transitions of a caesium atom seems quite arbitrary.

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I mean, winter solstice is a little more than a week away, I'd say that was probably a significant influence on the designation of end of the year.

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Ah, well, they moved it ten days away, very hidden and sneaky. Those dastardly fiends.