Shadows, Sunlight, and Wikipedia
I took this picture about an hour after sunrise, with the sun throwing clear shadows into the kitchen.
I've thought about this shadow being a sort of sundial. When its right edge reaches the Shakespeare magnet, as pictured, it's 10:30! But every day as we head towards the spring equinox the sun is a little higher at 10:30, relative to the previous day, meaning the horizontal shadows will be a lower. So If I traced the lines every day on the fridge door, and marked them with the date, I'd have a solar calendar. This clock and calendar would be limited to the winter half of the year because in the summer the sun is too high and the shadow shines on the floor, rather than than the fridge.
Maybe I'll carry on using my watch for time and my computer for the date!
Once this train of thought got going I had to look up sundials on Internet and, as so often, I soon arrived at Wikipedia and saw that it is 20 years old today.
What an amazing creation Wikipedia is! Like any encyclopedia it has its strong and weak points but 50 million articles published in nearly 300 languages has to be impressive. And an improvement on the old encyclopedias is articles describing things that happened recently,
or are actually ongoing! All of it produced by a non-profit organisation funded by donations. 20 years old on the 15 January - guess what they would like for a present?
Finally, we all love a good picture so here is a link to an article about Wikimedia's latest picture of the year, and the two runners-up.
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