this post was submitted on 06 Jan 2024
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The best ones are thoughts that many people can relate to and they find something funny or interesting in regular stuff.
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Not in the same way, but UTC date and and time is a place and local time of day is a direction. Effectively, noon is when you face the sun as directly as you can that day, midnight is the opposite, 6am is looking straight into the future path of the Earth in orbit, 6pm is looking at the tail (tangentially since it's a curve). That's why meteor showers are best viewed around 3am: it's a balance of looking into the Earth's path but not losing visibility from sunlight. Day of the year is based on where midnight points, where the sun directly opposes (or, with a fair amount of astronomical data, what star the sun is aligned with; both are valid). What year it is can be determined by Sol's position in our galaxy's rotation. Change the scale (such as atomic clocks) and you lose that relation, but it can of course can be converted to earth time. Just a consideration if we ever actually become space-fairing. That introduces time dilation on a potentially noticeable scale though.
Time isn't really determined by position, but rather our scale of time is based on astronomical position and vector.