Things I’ve sat and wondered about this week.

Winter is the coldest season in the northern hemisphere. It’s also when the earth is closest to the sun.

How many “new year days” are there in a year? If we celebrated the “new year” 23 days ago, what was the “new year” that started yesterday? There are actually 26 different days that begin a new year around the world. Some are solar, some lunar, some lunisolar, some religious, some an arbitrary date. One thing that is constant, there are all cause for celebration and they are all celebrated!

An extra tidbit about the Lunar New Year, even though it is called “lunar,” it is actually lunisolar in that both the position and movement of the sun and the moon determine the beginning of the year. Although it is generally associated with Asian cultures, not all Asian communities will celebrate it on the same day every year. Because of the great physical size of the continent, in some years there is enough distance between major Asian centers that the position of the moon will be in different phases on the same day and result in the new moon observed on different days. Thus there will be a different determination for beginning the new year. Also, not all Asian communities identify their years the same. For example, this year the Chinese are celebrating the Year of the Rabbit while in Vietnam it is recognized as the Year of the Cat.

How much does our brain do without telling us? You may know a favorite hobby of mine is painting. I add a heart into every piece I paint. It is my way of telling whoever sees it (whom ever?) (whatever!) that they are loved. Often when I finish a painting I will set it aside for a few days, then hang I up and take a good look at the finished piece. And often find several hearts throughout it that I hadn’t realized I had painted.

Can you find the heart?

While I am thinking about painting, did you know that black and white are not colors? To a pure physicist they aren’t. (And if you are a pure physicist and you say they are, just let me have this one please.) Colors are colors because of the amount of reflected light our eyes perceive. The different colors are formed by the different wavelengths light emits as a result of that reflection through whatever the light is passing. White is the presence of all of the possible reflected wavelengths the light may take on, and black is the absence of any reflected light.

Another interesting “color question” is, if there are only 3 primary colors, why are there 7 colors in a rainbow? The three primary colors can be combined to form the 3 secondary colors. In theory, these are the basic “building blocks” of all other colors. If you look at the light as it passes through a prism you can easily identify the primary colors (red, yellow, and blue) and three secondary colors (orange, green, and purple). But they are not perfect divisions of color.  Each color bleeds into its neighbor, the secondary colors between the primary colors. We see seven colors in the rainbow because between primary blue and the ultra violet wavelength where all light is absent resulting in black, blue goes through two stages or hues, cyan and indigo, before turning purple. A rainbow just as easily could be considered 6 colors but what would Roy B. Giv say about that?

A few years ago I considered changing the name of the blog. The Real Reality Show Blog was born on Nov 7, 2011 (990 posts ago) during the hay day of reality TV shows which bore no semblance to reality. I wanted a blog that was reflective of reality, at least my realty, and thus the unwieldy title was chosen. I suppose a number of times I wished I had an easier to remember, to say, or to type blog identifier that still reflected who I am. A while ago I thought I had come across the perfect description. Given that the posts are the ramblings of all that I am, I should title the blog what I am, and thus I thought, what am I? Aha. I am a single white male. And the stories are of a kind that a single white male would encounter. I thought that was a perfectly descriptive blog name. A Single White Male. And then I thought, but what would the email from WordPress to the author of a blog that I chose to follow read? Why it would read, “Dear [Blog owner], Congratulations, A Single White Male is now following you.” Umm, no.

Did you ever notice, when I do one of these brain dump type posts, the entries get longer as we get further along with it?

Have a great week! Next week I’ll try to be more thought provoking.

There are many sources of help but help gets us only so far. Don’t expect others to do for you. Ultimately, you have to do the work. We talked about this last week in Uplift! on ROAMcare.org. Read what we said about it here.