”Winter was short, this year”. “Spring came early”. It does not make sense to tie these concepts to a calendar. Summer is when you dare to dip your toes in the ocean. In winter we have a meter of ice. I generally place vacation weeks in July and august, because the weather is nice and other people are on vacation as well.

The statement that the seasons are wrong, does not make sense. To tie these names to a calendar, does not make sense.

Yeah, I was expecting this to be an article about climate change which really is causing the seasons to become "wrong".

As a trivial example, a couple of weeks ago a local newspaper reprinted its usual "What's on in London in April?" article, and one of the items was "the first half of April is peak cherry blossom season".

Er, not any more it isn't! Most fruit trees were already in leaf by the time the paper went to press, with only a few prunes remaining with significant amounts of blossom. And we'll see a similar article in May talking about bluebells, despite them actually being at their peak right now. So that's a shift of 2-3 weeks over the course of the two decades that that particular publication has existed.

And it might not matter so much if the seasons were changing equally for all species - but some instead rely on day length, yet others on the amount of sunlight (which has been low so far this year). So pollinators are arriving only at the end of pollen season, predatory insects are finding their prey diminished by starvation, rodents haven't hibernated, and entire ecosystems are becoming weirdly distorted.

I'm with you.

Australia calls December "summer". If climate patterns changed and shifted our weather patterns by a month, we'd shift our season vernacular to match.

Seasons refer to the climate we experience. They're a human experience, not calendar slot.

The Noongar calendar from the south west of Western Australia is, of course, a much better fit to the local climate. We are just starting Djeran, with probably the best weather of the year, then it'll be Makuru, with by far the most rain and plenty of rainbows, and coldest temperatures. Djilba is when it just starts warming up again and at the end of Djilba is wildflower season which is probably the most beautiful time in the region. Then it's Kambarang around October November which is perfect temperature again, and then we are into Birak which is "first summer" and Bunuru "second summer". Obviously it's linked to food availability rather than the weather but it does fit far better than the British four seasons.

Haha! Me too! Based in the UK it's one the few ZIPs I know by heart . It's a great site though!

I think that rocket still stands [0] :) [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxus_(rocket) [1]: http://www.astronautix.com/m/maxus.html

There are no see cows mentioned in the Wikipedia article about Merovech [0]. I have no knowledge about this, but such a juicy databit should just jump at you, if it was true. Instead, a quite mundane etymology around ‘merovech’ is provided.

One of these articles are wrong :)

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merovech

The link you gave does not seem to work :)

In 1995, World War III almost broke out after a rocket launch from the exact same location [1]. It was only a coincidence that stopped the Russians from doing retaliatory nuclear rocket launches. So, indeed, launching to the east is not a good idea from this latitude.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_rocket_incident

Else is a common name in my part of the world and capitalizing the word makes the connection more explicit.

Bear? It is more like a stray dog that keeps shitting on your living room carpet. You don’t need to hate the dog, you just keep it on the outside where it can run around and have a great time on it’s own.

Interesting. I came in contact with dynamic programming as a means to implement the Viterbi algorithm in an equalizer. This relates to calculating “cost” of routes through a trellis, where you accumulate partial results corresponding to alternative routes.