20.3.07

Equinox

You may or may not be able to balance an egg today, but you can observe the near equal amounts of night and day. It is symbolically important to the Neutral party, which emphasizes balance. A reminder that though the amount of daylight may rise or fall, it will always peak and return back to the median.

As the Neutral party is a strong proponent of the sciences, it is only fitting that the equinox would be the day before the first day of the new decimal calendar. The metric calendar has 360 official days (with 5 intercalary days), the same number of degrees in a circle. Of course, this is no surprise since the adoption of 360 degrees in a circle was based on the approximation of 360 days in the year. A graph of daylight hours over the year gives an interesting result: a median at 0, the spring equinox, a maximum at 90 days, the summer solstice, a median at 180 days, the autumnal equinox, a minimum at 270 days, the winter solstice, and back to a median at 360 days. You may recognize this as a sine curve. This would allow us to convert time from days to radians, with a year being 2 pi long.

I realize that I am probably the only person in the world that is fascinated by the idea of measuring time in radians.

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