• rah@feddit.uk
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    23 days ago

    This is a bit disingenuous; what’s considered the “new year” is usually aligned with the seasons and the passing of winter, which is very much not arbitrary and completely dependent on the tilt of Earth’s axis.

  • palordrolap@fedia.io
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    23 days ago

    From the Sun’s perspective, perihelion or aphelion would make more sense, I guess.

    By sheer coincidence, perihelion is a few days away at the time of writing, so we could lie to the Sun that this is an early celebration of that.

    Of course, this comes with two problems: 1) The common era new year is actually a belated marking of the solstice (much like Christmas a week before). Perihelion will be later and later on average with respect to it due to the procession of the poles, so the lie is going to become more and more apparent over the coming centuries. 2) The Sun might think we’re celebrating being far away because we hate it.

  • Karyoplasma@discuss.tchncs.de
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    23 days ago

    New Year’s is my favorite holiday. Just gonna chill with a friend with beer, crackers and some chess/video games. My Christmas present from my dad was to go buy some fireworks with him, so I got a bunch of stuff to do at midnight.

    Way better than Christmas or Easter or other baloney festivities. New Year’s is at least somewhat tangible even tho I do concede, it makes no difference.

  • clucose@lemmy.ml
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    23 days ago

    It‘s not completely arbitrary. New year is after the shortest day for daylight of the year.

  • xia@lemmy.sdf.org
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    23 days ago

    In theory, couldn’t we use the exact point the Earth is precisely between the sun and galactic center?

  • Captain Howdy@lemm.ee
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    23 days ago

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

    • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      23 days ago

      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.

      • Zorque@lemmy.world
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        23 days ago

        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.

        • Liz@midwest.social
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          23 days ago

          The Julian calendar, the predecessor to the modern Gregorian calendar, didn’t quite fully account for leap year shenanigans, and so drifted be about 1 day every century. The Gregorian calendar changed the way leap year works, but didn’t reset the beginning of the year. It just froze the drift where it was at the time.

          https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

  • NullPointer
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    22 days ago

    technically, everyone’s new year is on their birthday.