Daylight

Well, I'm not liking the sun these days.

Also the Beatles suck, but that's another blog post.

You Say Yes, I Say No

Amy and I are polar opposites when it comes to daylight.

The summer equinox, the day of the most daylight, is one of Amy's favorite days of the year. The funny thing is she's also a late sleeper, so she routinely misses a few hours of what makes the equinox so great. On the other hand, the winter equinox requires massive adjustment for her. She strings Christmas lights on the tree and throughout the yard, which counterbalances the Seasonal Affective Disorder.

I'm different. I grew up in South Dakota and Nebraska where the summer equinox was hot and humid. Hot and humid slows my brain down. Since I can't concentrate, my brain gets itchy. It craves stimulation, but can't actually get stimulated in the day time. It is very uncomfortable.

When I was 14, I had the morning paper route. I got up at 4:00 AM and delivered about 78 newspapers around the neighborhood. It was a blast. I loved the summer morning time. I could think, listen to FM Radio on my bulky 9-volt powered headphones ... and get paid for it mindlessly flipping papers into the night (hopefully onto the right porch, but whatever).

It was a revelation. In a world arranged by people who loved and craved daylight, I had found a way to at survive on my own terms.

When I hit grad school at the University of Nebraska, during summers I would switch to the graveyard shift. I would go to campus at 9:00 at night and work until noon the next day. It did get lonely - my companions were the custodian who waxed the floors. But I got a lot done.

Don't get me wrong. The summer sunshine is nice in theory. It brings color to the world. It's necessary for the explosion of vegetables and fruit of the season.

Just because it's there doesn't mean I have to like it.

These days living in New York State, I don't work the graveyard shift anymore. Most days are not hot and humid like the Midwest, and I can plod my way through them. Still, when the night finally falls at 8:30 PM, it is like an old friend has shown up my doorstep, ready for chatter and a G&T.

I'll Follow the Sun

I have made my peace with summer, only to have it upended again.

Our flat in Edinburgh is at latitude 55.953278. (I love GPS). This wouldn't be so important, but Earth is spinning and tilted at a 23.5° angle.

Spinning is a good thing. If the Earth weren't spinning, half the world would be in perpetual daylight and half would be in the perpetual night. At some point, your side of the Earth might flip from being all day to all night, but then it would last that way for 6 months. That's no way to grow crops.

Tilting ... now that's more complicated. If the world were spinning but not tilted, the amount of daylight would be exactly the same every single day. There would not be any reason to give a sunrise and sunset time, because it would never change. Of course different spots on the globe would still have different sunrise and sunset times. They would just be fixed. But that be for everyone.

Tilting varies the amount of sunlight, but not for everyone. Once, Amy and I were in a beachside bar in Belize in October. At 6:00, the sun dropped into the sea. It was weird because you expect when the air is warm, and it was always was in Belize, there would be a sun shining to back it up. On Party Beach, the party should go on for hours right?

We were the only ones in the bar. We asked the bartender, who was from Ohio, if they get more customers when there's more daylight ... like in the summer. "Oh it's the same every day," she replied.

Which goes to show you: no matter how tilted your planet is, some spots will turn out boring.

Add to that ... without tilting, there would be no seasons. Or, more precisely, there would be one season. This takes a little longer to explain.

The sun is like your oven. The heat source in your oven, whether it's electric or gas, operates at one temperature - ON. The 210°C setting (see https://auld-riecke.ghost.io/the-metric-system/) is an illusion caused by:

• Flipping the heat source on and off. The oven has a thermostat which turns the heat source on when it gets below, say, 210°C and off when it reaches 230°C.
• Varying the distance between your food and the heat source. So sticking your steak next to the broiler gives you a hotter temp than sticking it in the middle.

So the Earth is like an oven with the following replacements:

• The sun heats the ground underneath when it's visible (on) and doesn't heat it when it's not visible (off).
• The distance to your heat source varies with the time of year. So in summer, when the sun is up, it's closer to you. In winter, when the sun is up, it's further away. And if you look at the city that's mirror image of you (as far south as you are north, or vice-versa), the pattern is exactly reversed.

The combination of spinning and tilting makes the daylight patterns on Earth very complex. And worse ... the complexity is different in different locations.

Golden Slumbers Fill Your Eyes

Scottish daylight is screwing me up.

If you have ever watched a sunset closely, the sun seems to drop and hit the ground and flame out fairly quickly. At this point, the sun is just an optical illusion - it isn't really visible anymore, but it's refracted through the atmosphere. The sky turns some interesting color. Then it becomes deep black with stars. This whole process takes mere minutes.

Actually, the process takes mere minutes every night in North America. In Scotland, it takes hours.

It's freaky. It looks the same as dusk. There is still the same orange sun, the same colors in the sky. But it is happening in slo-mo. The sun disappears at 9:00 PM. You can walk around Edinburgh at 11:00 PM and not bump into anything.

If you are in bed, you will see light steaming in between the shutters at midnight. Not much, but enough to mess up your sleep.

When we arrived at our Edinburgh apartment back in April, there was a bag of sleep masks in the utility drawer. I wondered, "What are those for?" I know now.

Add to that, all of the windows have heavy wooden shutters to totally block out light. Curtains are virtually unknown here because they are ineffective.

Making it worse ... dawn has exactly the same problem as dusk, but backwards. It starts at around 2:00 AM. and lasts for hours. By the time the sun arrives on the horizon, it is 4:00 AM. All in all, you only get a few precious hours of total blackness.

Mind you, this is Edinburgh in June. Amy and I travelled to the very northern Highlands on the summer equinox. So whatever crap we were suffering through in Edinburgh was many many times worse up there.

I remember lying in bed in the village of John O'Groats, latitude 58.6384097 - the northernmost point in mainland Scotland. It was 11 PM. I had closed the curtains as far as I could, but a light just a little weaker than daylight streamed in through the cracks in the curtains.

That evening was a nightmare - literally. I have a recurring dream where I wake up, think it's like 2:00 in the morning, but the sky is a purplish color. I think, "Crap, someone dropped the bomb!" What can I say? I grew up in the 70's. Nuclear apocalyptic nightmares are woven into my DNA.

The sky looks that color. I wake up and going to sleep in fits and starts. I don't know where the reality ends and the nightmare begins.

But then I woke up to the reassuring pastorals "Baah" coming from the field down the road. There is a little daylight turning the curtains into their reassuring color. Ahhhhh. The world is intact.

Then I look at my watch. It's 2:00. Godammit!

Now the sheep just sound like a frat party.

And I Say, It's All Right

On the mainland isle of Orkney lives the ancient village of Skara Brae. It is thought to be 5,000 years old. Supposedly about 100 neolithic people lived there - they might be offended at being called "people", but I have no better term.

Mother Nature is definitely not on the Skara Brae inhabitants' side. There is wind. - lots of wind, coming off the Pentland Firth. There is rain. There is snow. And, to top it all off, there's the goddam daylight that lasts half the night. How is a neolithic person supposed to get some shut eye?

Go underground, young man.

I am stumbling around Skara Brae, functioning on very little sleep and unable to find a decent espresso to have with my breakfast. I look down into their ancient homes, possible because a violent storm in the 1800's ripped the turf off the top, leaving the dwellings exposed.

There are beds of stone. There are tools lying around all over the place. There is a makeshift workshop with some shelves - it is the largest dwelling in the settlement. The most important thing is to do stuff.

And there is one teeny tiny little window in the west wall of the workshop. It's bogus. The Skaills, who did a lot of early work uncovering the sitein the 1850's, thought it'd be nice to have one little window in the dwelling, so they just chopped one out. Yeah, modern archaeologists would have shit a brick on that one.

So really, this was all underground. A little daylight streaming in the doorway.

In other words, the perfect dwelling.

I grew up in South Dakota. We didn't have a lot of snow, but the little we had blew and drifted into 3 feet tall mounds, packed and dense. They must be turned into snow forts! And we did our best at excavating them. We got holes dug. We could crawl into them a little ways. But our boots would always stick out enough so Mom had something to grab onto and haul us in for dinner.

We think we're all so advanced with smart phones and AI and crap like that. But our snow forts couldn't rival the beauty and sophistication of Skara Brae. They made their peace with the weird Scottish daylight by escaping it, which seems like a healthy way of living indeed.

Just hope a sheep doesn't step through your roof.