Blog 93 Lake Ketchum Art Galleri

I'll tell you what is great about the year almost past, 2005. I--and probably a great many others--discovered that you can buy in the supermart pasteurized orange juice in a carton that passes very nicely for freshly squoze, complete with bits of pulp left in. Simply and greatly delicious.

Norma tells me that it has been available for some time, but I think the price was high and she never bought any home, she not being crazy for the stuff as am I. So it came as Satori, revelation, epiphany, or some such key event to me. And my first taste was a petite madeleine.

I remember when frozen orange juice came on the market, fifty years ago, and we all began drinking screwdrivers instead of beer, and told ourselves as we got drunk that we were getting healthy because of all the vitamin C we were ingesting. I remember my first taste in a outdoor parking lot in Palo Alto. Yeah!

My heavy drinking days are all behind me. A beer or two in the evening is all I imbibe now. But my morning ritual of orange juice and vitamin capsules makes me think sometimes of buying a bottle of vodka, just for the sake of the good old days, that really weren't all that great.

In the Classroom of Life, Kiddies, there are no foolish questions, and the Ultimate Democracy prevails in the usual Socratic manner. Likewise, there are no wrong answers. And one is required to answer himself the question that he asked. Thus, Rory responds to what he himself asked only a couple of days ago:

The answer is Earth's orbit around the sun is not a circle. it is an ellipse, and Earth is at perihelion -- closet to the sun -- about New Year's Day so then (a date determined by the its path around the sun) the Earth is traveling quickest in its orbit (c.f. Kepler's Laws) which happens to be close to December 21 (a date determined by the direction of the tilted axis -- ignoring precession.)

OK, now the good people who give us "the time" have to decide when Midnight is. And it has to be the "same" time every night, with the length of the day exactly the same every day (unless there's a leap-second) even though the traveling earth speeds up and slows down.

(There's something else too -- which, while it doesn't really change things, does make it even more interesting for the official timekeepers. Even if the Earth did NOT rotate on its axis, just going around the sun once a year would still give you a day that accumulates in one year. Now put the rotation back in. Like before, the 24 hour day has to be the same EVERY day, no matter how fast or slow Earth is revolving around the sun that day, and now there is that EXTRA day, that has to be factored in as well.)

Anyway, it is THIS "equation of time" effect that means that while the AMOUNT OF DAYLIGHT STEADILY DECREASES at the end of Fall until the first day of Winter, the timing for sunrise and sunset kind of jumps around. (And locally, don't forget, winter and summer day-lengths are accentuated at higher latitudes.)

The difference between the natural time, when daylight would lengthen or shorten in a day symmetrically from both morning and evening, and the "time" that the government doles out changes fastest as Earth swings fastest around the sun.

(Note: a graph that shows this so-called Equation of Time is the analemma.

For myself, it's how much daylight there is after work that's the sign of the seasons. I prefer this second measure, because it gives the illusion that the worst of winter has just passed.

Yet another dumb sunrise shot, but somehow appropriate
to the matter at hand--see below

I saw your note in a 2-year-old blog about the late December phenomenon of later rising sun, but diminishing daylight. Did anybody every respond and/or explain what is really going on? This is a little-remarked-on phenomenon that my uncle puzzled over for years until we finally got the explanation from some obscure astronomy books for him (before the days of the Web.)

I love sharing the logic of the peculiar time-geometry of this week (the precise phenomenon actually only happens for an 8-day period, and we are 2 days into it right now), but it bores most folks to hear the somewhat arcane explanation of WHY only during this period the days are getting shorter, but the sun is setting later, and thus rising later at an even faster rate. Are you still interested, or did you finally find the answer yourself?

Portland, ME

Well, Rory, we thank you for writing. It is nice to know that somebody reads us, even entries that are two years old. Frankly, we don't remember this one, but it certainly is appropriate for this time of the year. I guess I noticed this in the morning paper and thought it worth quoting from. And the reason why this happens continues to escape us. If your uncle is alive, you might ask him and report what you learned to us at Life at the Lake. We'll pass it on.