Comment on Don't fix the problem just change the parameters
wischi@programming.dev 22 hours agoI hope you are not serious. If the shadow (handle) is on two, it’s two o’clock. If it’s on three, it’s three o’clock. If it’s exactly between those two ticks it’s half past two. There isn’t even anything to learn (at least when they were invented). That’s exactly how the hour handle on a clock works.
(Note: Today it would be a bit more complicated if you want wall-clock-time because the sun dial always tells local solar time and if you want the time in your time zone you would have to adjust for DST and use the equation of time for some smaller corrections)
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
So no, you don’t - you’ve forgotten to calibrate the sundial.
wischi@programming.dev 15 hours ago
What is progression towards the equinoxes? You mean progression of the equinoxes? That takes millennia and is very much negligible when reading sun dials on a day to day basis, or even year to year basis.
The orbital motions of the objects in our solar system is pretty messy and you are right that there goes more into designing accurate sun dials than just a stick in the ground, but I’d still argue that that’s not part of “reading a sun dial” - which was the question I answered.
Warl0k3@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
No, I mean the progression towards the equinoxes - historically the equinoxes were the common way to demark calendar dates, and as a result they’re a useful reference point. Not universal, of course, but still frequently used enough to be useful.
I get you’re arguing because, well, this is the internet and I contradicted you. That’s how it works, our egos are too tied up in our comments alone and it’s too easy to read any tone into a comment that we’d like. We get heated. So in that spirit, let me be explicit that I’m not trying to be rude to you when I say this: You’re oversimplifying the metaphor to make your point.
For example: I’ve been sitting around for a full day, but the damn clock says only twelve minutes have gone by.
You adjust a sundial in the morning, and then can read it from there (assuming it hasn’t been jostled) - but you still have to be aware of the rules and conventions of the system, and work within it’s boundaries. If we arbitrarily dismiss critical parts of it’s operation, there will be no meaning in anything we have to say. The territory of things like “clocks don’t measure time, they measure circles and everything we derive from them is thence wild and baseless speculation”, literally true and I can defend that position until we both die of carefully-measured old age, but so over-reduced as to be completely meaningless.
wischi@programming.dev 13 hours ago
Do you have a link or something that explains “progression towards the equinoxes”. I never heard of that and can’t find anything about it.