Sans Fig Leaf
w
"Demarcation"
30 August, 2007
For many years now I've
observed a personal tradition of wearing an Aloha shirt to the office
on Fridays in the summer. Except I have a somewhat generous definition
of "summer." I usually start wearing them the first Friday after
Memorial Day, and keep wearing them until the Autumnal Equinox (the
first day of Autumn), in late September.
Once when I mentioned this
quirk to someone, their comments indicated that they misunderstood
where the "generous" part of the definition came in. They thought the
part that wasn't summer was the three Fridays in September. They didn't
really understand what the Autumnal Equinox was, and seemed to think
that the whole "first day of summer" and "first day of autumn" was some
weird politcal thing, because obviously, summer begins with Memorial
Day and ends with Labor Day.
Of course, the decision to
name the seasons is arbitrary. There is no place on Earth where the
weather neatly falls into four distinctly different categories. Tying
the official beginning days of each season to a particular event
involving the orbit of the earth around the sun and the tilt of the
earth's axis was also a choice someone made at one point. It's true
that the change in the seasons is created by the axial tilt of the
planet as we spin around the sun, but someone had to come up with the
idea, and enough other people had to agree to accept it. If we tried,
I'm sure we could come with some other event to signal the change from
one season to the next.
Holidays are even more
arbitrary. Some people deride certain holidays as "fake" or
"manufactured" which always makes me laugh, since every holiday was
made up by a person at some point. But because some of them were made
up so long ago that we no longer have any idea who it was that first
proposed that this particular day was special, it's easier to think of
them has having some sort of inherent reality. As if they are real,
concrete things, rather than just an idea we've all agreed to.
The very idea of a
calendar is just as fake and manufactured as "Talk Like a Pirate Day."
However, calendars have been around so long (and are so useful) that we
don't question them.
Which is half the reason
that the person I was talking to thought of Memorial Day and Labor Day
as something akin to natural phenomenon, whereas the Summer Solstice
and Autumnal Equinox were manufactured.
The other half is a
sometimes frightening lack of knowledge of basic natural sciences. I
can't count how many college-educated people I've met who are convinced
that the seasons change because during the summer the Earth is closer
to the sun. Which makes them very confused once they learn that when
it's summer in the northern hemisphere, it's winter in the southern.
Even people who know it
has something to do with the tilt of the Earth on its axis, still think
it is only about which end of the planet is closer to the sun. They
don't understand that when the northern half is tilted toward the sun,
then the sunlight goes through the atmosphere to the northern parts of
the planet at a direct angle, whereas the light striking the southern
half, coming in obliquely, goes through a much thicker slice of that
same atmosphere.
Think of crossing a road.
If you go straight across, it takes less time and the path is shorter
than if you go at an angle, starting at one end of the block, and not
reaching the opposite side of the road until the other end of the
block. You’ve gone a much greater distance, and it's taken longer. In
the case of the sunlight, it's not the distance, but the distance
through a medium (the air) which scatters and absorbs a fraction of the
light's energy along the way. So that distance plays a role, but it's
the distance through the atmosphere that the light travels, not the
absolute distance from one portion of the Earth to the Sun. It's also
about how many hours out of each day the sunlight is coming down.
Even though I know all of
that, I have to admit that there is a part of me that thinks of the
change from August to September as an ending of one thing and a
beginning of something else. When I was a kid the end of August meant
the beginning of a new school year, and thus the end of summer vacation.
The decades since I've
been a student have failed to erase that expectation of a new
beginning. Maybe it's because I've always had some friends and
colleagues who either were still students or had children who were in
school. Maybe it's because such ideas imprinted on one's brain at an
early age can never be erased. Maybe it's because I'm more compulsive
that I like to admit. Maybe it's because the idea is so ingrained in
parts of our society that many other activities are tied to the
traditional beginning of the new school year.
What I like to think it
means is that my inner child is still alive and well. That the attitude
of a student has never been extinguished in my soul. The world is full
of so much I still don't know. Every time I learn something, new
questions that I'd never even imagined begin to bubble up inside me. I
love thinking about those questions and looking for possible answers.
As August draws to a
close, I find my mind filling up with ideas for new projects and
strategies to tackle and finish old ones. I feel an urge to poke into
dark corners, look under rocks, and open up new books.
I wonder what I'll find?
--Doctor Who
.