I need to know which way the year goes

[andrewducker]

Poll #29702

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 74

View Respondents

If I imagine the year as a circle then the months go...

View Answers

clockwise
62 (83.8%)

anticlockwise
11 (14.9%)

SEWIWEIC
1 (1.4%)

And December/January goes

View Answers

at the top
55 (75.3%)

at the bottom
11 (15.1%)

SEWIWEIC
7 (9.6%)

Inspired by this discussion on the post of Sophia's Wheel Of The Year poster.

Comments

[naath]

I'm clear but not certain, what I am certain of is that it is Thermidor now...

[fub]

January is on the bottom right, in south-east direction. I do not why this is.

[fub]

My partner reports that she has a direct link between the number on the clock and the number of the month, since both are used to measure time. So in her mental model, January is on the position of the 1, February on the position of the 2, etc. But rather than a 'month-hand' moving along the face of this 'clock', the 'month-hand' is fixed pointing upwards, and it is the face of the 'month-clock' that moves anti-clockwise such that the current month is always at the top.

It is fascinating to see how different our visualisations are in this area.

Moving Face

[f4f3]

Yes - I have the same image, of the clock face moving “backwards”.

[bens_dad]

I *think* I have seen clocks that do this.

[azurelunatic]

This is also the proper orientation of Mama's wheel of the year.

[doug]

If I don't think much about it, it's straightforwardly a clock shape with midnight between Dec 31st and Jan 1st at the top, and moves clockwise.

Except our calendar is wrong and actually the cardinal points are not 1st Jan, 1 Apr, 1 Jul and 1 Oct, it's the solstices and the equinoxes.

And when I think about that, I think about the year much more satisfyingly as a sinusoid graph of insolation with the solstices and equinoxes as the maxima and inflection points, and the circle you generate out of that sinusoid pleasingly corresponds to the Earth's actual path around the sun.

Then I realise that what I most care about seasonally is when it's warmest/coldest, not quite so much the light/dark, especially since that only changes (relatively) slowly near the solstices, so the shape of the year as I care about is offset by a bit. So I imagine two sinusoids a bit like cosine and sine - except they're closer than three months together so that doesn't work. And then the weather in any given year muddles it all up, and so do the holiday periods we mark. So I come back to thinking yeah, the civil calendar is close enough and the simple calendrical quarters match on to seasons close enough not to be worth arguing about.

Especially when I get right in to it and start worrying about the Equation of Time and the Precession of the Equinoxes and things like that. Yeah 1 January is at the top.

[doug]

Oh! I forgot one of the cool things I like when thinking about a sinusoidal path of light/dark. The Earth's atmosphere catches sunlight and re-scatters some of it on to the dark side of the planet, so we get light before sunrise and after sunset (i.e. twilight), so the whole system is biased and we get more light than dark. The light wins!

[andrewducker]

Aaah - my quarters are Nov->Feb, Mar->May, Jun->Aug, and Sep-Nov. Those are the ones that *feel* the most like their seasons to me, anyway.

[aldabra]

I've decided there are three seasons. Spring is January to April, summer is May to August, autumn is September to December. Once you surface after Christmas you can already see things beginning to grow.

[andrewducker]

Interesting. My experience is that it's not even got to the cold bit by Christmas. Snow hits in mid January, it stays intermittently freezing until early March, and then we get snowdrops and the like.

[flemmings]

In these southern Canuck lands, simply going by weather, winter is mid-December to mid-March, spring mid-March to mid-June, summer mid-June to mid-September, and so on. Which almost lines up with solstices and equinoxes.

But January is at the top of the clock.

[azurelunatic]

In my land of origin north of the 64th parallel, winter is October to mid-March, mid-March to mid-May is Breakup, mid-May to early June is spring, June to early August is summer, and the rest of August until the first hard freeze or until snow that sticks is fall.

Since my family celebrated astronomical seasons as well, I would put a Solstice at the top unless I am rotating the wheel.

[doug]

I do like the idea of getting rid of winter by simply defining it out of existence. Less expensive (in cash and carbon) than getting rid of winter by changing hemispheres, but not sure it's quite as effective.

I've also realised I am inconsistent. Part of me wants to define seasons by the solstices and equinoxes, but that doesn't line up quite right, and part of me wants to go with modern pagan cross-quarter days but those don't work either. And then I think maybe the traditional meteorological seasons Dec-Feb, Mar-Apr, Jun-Aug, Sep-Oct are the thing. And then because I do a lot of quarterly data analysis for work I shift on from there to Jan-Mar, Apr-Jun, Jul-Sep, Oct-Dec. Which also isn't right.

I'll tell you what else isn't right: needing an extra duvet in early August because it's so bloody cold at night.

[andrewducker]

It seems that the main problem is that the universe is badly organised.

[doug]

Someone should have a word with whoever's responsible.

[fanf]

Orbital mechanics is entertainingly complicated. The latest sunrise, the earliest sunset, the shortest day, and the winter solstice - all different! And the points of aphelion and perihelion are unrelated to the angle of the ecliptic, tho at the moment perihelion is in early January, a couple of weeks after the solstice. So, counterintuitively for northerners, the earth as a whole receives more light from the sun when it is darkest for us.

[doug]

It is completely awesome! And also frustratingly fiddly. I got in to astronomical calculations some years ago and quickly worked out that accurate sunrise times were not a simple way of verifying my calculations against reality - even if you get the position in space correct there's atmospheric refraction that varies as a function of the amount and composition of the atmosphere between you and the sun - and that was before allowing for the fact that there's nowhere with a clean horizon near me. (Occultations are much better.)

These days I prefer to rely on the efforts of others. Just last night I was discussing the siting of a bench in the garden and when it would get sunlight, and briefly thought "oh I have some old code that does this" before realising it would be much simpler and faster to just whip out an AR astronomy app on my phone and just set the time on it and see where the sun would be in the sky from the actual place in the garden.

[haggis]

My answers were December/January at the bottom, turning anti clockwise.


December/January at the bottom because it is cold and dark.

Spring moves to the right and up as it gets warmer and brighter.
June/July at the top, with the Summer holidays as the Summerest part, even though the warmest time is actually later.
Autumn moves left and down as it gets colder and darker.

[threemeninaboat]

This is how mine looks as well.

[channelpenguin]

Hmmm. I'm for Jan at top/clockwise but I'm thinking why would others put Jan at the bottom I'm wondering about the variation of sunrise angles across the seasons - because winter solstice has the most southerly sunrise.

I also wonder about your skew from vertical in compass terms. Because magnetic north was in the UK some degrees West of true north... At least for most of our lifetime I (I'm the same age as Andy). But that's no longer true.

http://britgeopeople.blogspot.com/2014/01/somethings-happening-to-magnetic-north.html?m=1

Still, it may have been branded in our brain as an appropriate angle and then got co-opted into the sketch? Who knows.

[andrewducker]

And clockwise comes from the way the shadow moves on a sundial in the northern hemisphere.

[channelpenguin]

Yup. I forgot that bit!

[myka]

we need a cross tabulation of position vs rotation direction... but I guess DW does not have a poll that will generate a 2x2 table

[andrewducker]

If only we had a stats person to look at the results and pull it together for us!

[myka]

😛

[conuly]

Clockwise, obviously, same as the sun.

The top part is arbitrary, though. It's a wheel. It can start and stop whenever you like.

Something Else

[snippy]

A circle...you so carefully avoided saying "like a clock" so I imagined a circle filled with thin horizontal slices. And then September is the start of the year because I'm Jewish (at the bottom) and it goes from the bottom to the top.

[reverancepavane]

If I lived in the Northern hemisphere I might put Jan at the bottom (for winter), but since I am in the Southern Hemisphere I put Jan at the top. [I follow astronomical rather than meteorological seasons.] So summer solstice at the top/North, winter solstice at the bottom/South.

I put the months in clock-wise order because people who can read clocks are used to this progression, although there are a couple of equally valid arguments that it should really be portrayed widdershins, mainly due to that then placing the vernal equinox to the right/East and the autumnal equinox to the left/West.

Widdershins, btw

[agoodwinsmith]

After thinking about all this, I realized that I do not see the wheel as vertical, but rather as flat, like a map or a vinyl record. At first I thought I was seeing the wheel move clockwise, but I realized that what I really see is that whatever is "now" is at the "top" of the map with the "pointer" moving into the future in a clockwise fashion, accomplished actually by the disc moving widdershins with the past falling to the left.

I guess the disc could be fixed and the pointer would then move clockwise, but truly I see the pointer as fixed and the disc moving counterclockwise.

[magedragonfire]

The seasons go clockwise for me, but spring's at the top. Which, I guess, is either March or April, depending on area. Dec/Jan get to be off on the left somewhere.

[simont]

I think it's impossible for me to give an unbiased answer to the actual question, because I never particularly visualised the year as a circle before seeing Sophia's poster, and now that's skewed my thinking.

But in general, I often adopt the mathematician's convention of having circular motion go anticlockwise starting from the rightmost point of the circle, instead of clockwise starting from the top. (Because that's what you get if you plot (x = r cos θ, y = r sin θ) on a graph using the usual conventions, or z = re^iθ on the Argand diagram.)

So if I were designing a wheel of the year for myself for some reason, I might well go with that convention, not because it's how I already visualise the year in particular, but just because it fits my normal policy of stubbornly doing the opposite thing from all those normal non-mathmo clockwise people. :-)

What I'd put at the zero position, though, I have no idea. Probably the Dec/Jan calendar boundary, though I can see the arguments for other things being more significant.

[andrewducker]

I have been quite boggled by the number of people who don't think of the year as a circle, considering it's a bunch of different stages that end up with you back at the beginning again.

[simont]

Oh, it's certainly cyclic. I just don't have a picture of a circle in my head for it. It's purely abstract.

[channelpenguin]

Exactly.

I'm also a 99% abstract thinker (and until recently, didn't even SEE in 3D) and am boggled at the visual detail that is being casually bantered around here. The assumption is very definitely that you HAVE a visualisation (or that a detailed one will appear when you think about it). I didn't have one and I still don't have a picture, I just logiced up a description.

Hehe. How about a Möbeus(sp) band?

[channelpenguin]

do
for (month=1; month<=12; month++;){
monthify(month);
}
loop

Is probably closest to how I think, with "monthify" being injectable for your own location and executing the appropriate seasonal stuff.

[simont]

I like it! Both solstices appearing at the same point on the strip, separated only by the thickness of the paper; both equinoxes likewise, at the opposite point of the loop. :-)

[andrewducker]

That makes sense to me.

[purplerabbits]

I just realised that when I think in months it's January at the top and clockwise, but when I think in SEASONS it's Summer at the top, Winter at the bottom, Spring on the right and autumn on the left. Aren't brains weird?

[andrewducker]

It's what makes people fascinating!

[qilora]

do you want to hear funny? we Hasidim think (because we are taught? or told this by the rabbis?) that time is circular and not linear... so when we hear the 10 commandments given to us on Shavuot, we have the belief that even though we are all standing there in -- let's say -- 2023, and we are hearing the modern-speaker reading Moshe's words, we suddenly realize that we are the same time with our ancestors (and our former selves) standing there at the first reading, and hearing Moshe read these words for himself...

our Rebbe (OBM) of Lubavitch took the circular-time concept one step further, and he believed that since we do not come to the exact same place in the space-time whenever we pass thru another year (we come just a smidge more "spiritually evolved") it was his opinion that time is an upward-spiral and not merely circular...

and btw, before you go to a Hasidic shul, to observe another holiday, it is always best to drop acid... ;D
bs"d