the Life of the Sun

A condensed Decade of Solar Activity

Comparing theAbysmal Year

a Gallery of Calendar images from 4-day weeks up to 91-day quarters.

the Shadows of Time

Looking at our Year in terms of light and darkness has revealed a lot of the symmetry that underlies our days, and how we imagine them.

With a recent burst in creative energy, I started making this visual wheels of the year, where each day is shaded from 100% black (the Winter Solstice) through greyscale to 100% white (the Summer Solstice). Because the Winter Solstice takes place at opposite times of year depending on whether you’re in the Northern or Southern Hemisphere, I’ve taken to making 2 of each image.

for more detail see: theAbysmal Calendar

Day = Night

The Equinox is a total misnomer

Contrary to popular opinion (including my own for much longer than I care to admit), the Equinox is not the day when the day and night are equal. It’s the day when the Sun’s zenith occurs over the Equator.

When you experience day and night as equal depends on where in the world you live. Here’s a convenient table:

the Story of Time

Myths for our Global Era (2012 – 2272)

We’ve inherited myths of Creation, the separation of the Sky from the Earth setting the Sun, Moon, and Planets into motion, from any number of oral and literate traditions, syncretic combinations of ancient and proximate stories, however, when we (i.e. the ‘West’) turned away from Christianity to embrace the sciences and reason, we failed to emphasize the need for a new mythology by which to organize and better access new discoveries and knowledge.

We have the tale of the Big Bang and the evolution of the Universe, its structure and our Galaxy’s place in it (as far as we can observe), our Sun’s place in the Galaxy, Earth’s place in the Solar System, and our place on Earth. As well, we have accumulated huge amounts of information regarding metabolism, DNA, and other molecular and subatomic processes. What myth could possibly incorporate all that?

The thing about myths is, they don’t have to incorporate everything, they simply have to have an underlying structure that can accommodate our particular way of developing knowledge.

Chinese Elementary Time

Days unConfused

Scaling the Atomic Year

Ldecola tries it with the Gregorian year. How does it hold up against theAbysmal?

Defining Time

Our common experience, across the globe, over time.

Time is such a nebulous concept, in no small part because so many of us have so much stake in all of the ways it takes form in our lives: schedules, anniversaries, history, evolution, prediction, etc. It is embedded in our languages, and is inseparable from our thoughts of space.

Examples of Time Synaesthesia