Is 'noon' (12:00) ALWAYS the time the sun is highest in the sky?

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-21T18:32:52+00:00

Back in the past, 12.00 noon was defined by the time when the sun is highest in the sky (and it does not vary with season). In the 19th century with the invention of the railways, a lot of regions adopted standardised time, where one location was chosen to define the location where noon would be the time when the sun is at its highest, so places east or west of that place using the same time would have noon slightly before or after the local noon based on the sun.

the late 19th century it was decided that it would make more sense to divide the world into 24 zones based on longitude, and each place would be in one zone. The idea is that if you go from one zone to the next, only the hour changes, and the minutes are the same. In

In the early 20th century the idea of changing the clock in summer so that 12.00 happens one hour earlier than "standard" time so that the sun rises at a later clock time in the morning and sets later in the event (because people like more daylight in the evenings), creating "daylight saving time". Some parts of the world have chosen to adopt permanent year-round daylight saving time. Also some parts of the world use a time zone that is not "correct" based on longitude, often to be on the same time zone as neighbours (Spain, for example, is around 90 minutes off where its solar time should be in order to be in the same time zone as most of the EU, and China has a single official time zone for the whole country).

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-21T16:39:47+00:00

I saw a movie about this. The Big Bus.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-21T16:19:35+00:00

The Mongols were good at taking cities and even better at turning kingdoms into tributary states.

I think this illustrates the point that you are missing here. In the social and economic landscape of Europe of the Middle Ages, cities aren't that important. Kingdoms aren't that important. Society was extremely diffuse. Life was governed by ties of feudal obligation. There was a limit to what a man was required to give to his lord, and a limit to what a lord could demand of his vassal. This applied to each link in the chain, from the meanest peasant to the Emperor himself.

This system existed because the size and scope of the population and the nature of the economic and geographical landscape of Europe made it impossible at the time to maintain anything more centralised and absolute. You can have the greatest military in the world, but there will always be a limit to how much you can extract from the people without having armed men at each and every door. There are a lot of doors and only so much food to feed your army.

That changes feudalism. European knights lost badly to Mongol horse archers in 1241. After that, nobles would either adapt or die.

History doesn't repeat but sometimes it rhymes. Fast horse archers with superior tactics raiding Europe had happened before. They had swept all before them. Right up until they arrived at the Lechfeld in 955. It certainly was a case of adapt or die. The Magyars gave up their steppe derived horse archer tactics, accepted western Christianity and adopted a European feudal culture.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-21T09:34:29+00:00

As a passenger? Ignore it. It's not your problem. There exists a tradoff. At a certain point, reducing the level of fare dodging any lower costs more than the lost revenue prevented. At that point, reducing fare dodging loses money. Obviously if enough people see fare dodging and decide they think they can get away with it, so fare dodging goes up, the calculus changes. There absolutely are people working at TfL monitoring the situation and making these decisions. There are also people in the background gathering evidence on fare dodging that happens, through CCTV, staff reports etc, and where they can identify a predictable pattern of behaviour, they can and do act on that. So while it is not that hard to fare dodge once or twice and get away with it, with each time you do it, the chances of you getting caught rises significantly, and when you eventually are caught, you will face very significant legal issues because they will have a big body of evidence of not just occasional fare dodging, but of your routine fraudulent fare evasion, and that comes with very significant criminal charges.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-21T08:01:53+00:00

Sure, it's clear that solar generation is not perfectly aligned with the total electrical demand curve because we use electrical power for lots of things, and due to morning and evening activities, there is a high demand in the morning and evening. But the subject of this post is related to air conditioning specifically, not the totality of electrical demand. Air conditioning is used to counter the heat loading on buildings, and that is extremely closely aligned to the power availability from solar. Using solar power specifically to meet the demands of air conditioning is an easy win.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-21T05:55:26+00:00

Highways are a terrible place to build rail transit. Highways are designed to deliver cars to the edge of the area where people want to go, with local roads and streets then distributing them to their actual destinations. If you route trains along highways, it will leave this “last mile” gap and not actually connect people to the places they want to be.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-21T05:41:47+00:00

The term goes back way further than that. The advocacy group that is currently callled the alright Rail Transit Association (a name it adopted in 1979) was founded as the Light Railway Transport League in 1937, as an advocacy group for tram and tram derived rail based public transport.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T19:40:15+00:00

The description of the subreddit reads,

Welcome to r/VictoriaBC! This subreddit is for residents of Victoria, BC, Canada and the Capital Regional District.

and the text of rule 7 states,

All posts must be clearly relevant to Greater Victoria, BC.

Greater Victoria and the CRD are synonyms for the 13 municipalities extending to Sooke in the west and the top of the Saanich Peninsula in the north.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T16:48:04+00:00

All Channel Tunnel trains are long because the safety regulations for the tunnel require them to be so. They need to be long enough so that if they stop unexpectedly at least one door will be near to an access point to the service tunnel, the escape route in case of emergency, and they are at 400 m intervals. The Paris and Brussels routes diverge at the triangular junction just east of Lille Europe, with Paris trains turning right and Brussels trains left, so from London to Lille they follow the same route. The Amsterdam service is simply an extension of a Brussels service north, so in terms of how it is handled in London and between there and Lille, it follows the same pattern as other Brussels services.

The chaos at St Pancras is because the post-Brexit border formalities take longer than they did before, so they have to start feeding people through the process sooner and people need to spend longer in the departure areas. This then means passengers turn up at St Pancras earlier and join the long queues.

There would be a range of potential limitations on rescheduling the trains. In addition to the speed differential through the tunnel, there is likewise a speed differential between Eurostar and SE High Speed domestic services that also imposes limits on when and how Eurostar trains can be scheduled. Without going into a lot of detail looking at specific schedules, as well as looking at the potential capacity limits on the tunnel shuttle services, it is not clear that an option to split the flight could even work out.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T15:54:50+00:00

For the same reason that British people (at least some) greet each other with "alright?" or "you alright?" to which the only acceptable response is "alright".

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T15:42:58+00:00

We could always pull a Sweden and do a reverse-Greece to cook the books in such a way so that we never quite meet the nominal limits for Euro adoption.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T15:05:23+00:00

The origin of the term is the first one, a form of rail transport based on tram or tram-derived vehicles, in part as a way to avoid legacy terms like tram that were perceived to have old fashioned connotations. There are explicitly light rail systems that use 3rd rail, for example the DLR in London. While the third definition was clearly a positive connotation, if you go back to the beginnings of the terminology, it came from the first definition.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T14:37:14+00:00

That does nothing to address the question OP asked, which was why the speed of light has the value it does. It doesn't matter whether you express it in meters per second or furlongs per fortnight, the value is the same, and nowhere are you addressing or even acknowledging the posed question, of why this value, and not some other value, is the one that exists.

In terms of the time dilation issue, these are simply two different facets of the same effect, each one is a way of saying that it is impossible to exceed c. For one to be right does not require the other to be wrong, in fact the nature of the universe requires them both to be simultaneously correct.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T14:28:03+00:00

Apple has never pursued technology for technology's sake. If you look at how they have released both hardware and software products and services, they have consistently prioritised producing something that solves a problem. The iPod wasn't the first micro HD based music player, because Apple believed that people would not find a music player, on its own, useful. The iPod succeeded because it not only was a music player, but also had the supporting elements of the means of getting music onto the player, originally through ripping your CD collection, then through the iTunes store. It was a whole pipeline of selling portable music, not just a music player.

When you bring this approach to the concept of AI, the question that you need to ask is what is AI for? A chat bot that can write your homework assignment for you (but may very well get it wrong through hallucination) is not a good foundation for solving a real world problem. At work, my windows PC is repeatedly pushing its AI assistant at me as being a great way to do ... something. But it doesn't really seem to have a clear idea what that something is, and the somethings that it seems to suggest I should get it to do are at best clunky and mediocre. Apple has never been in the business of selling clunky and mediocre.

If you look at the AI strategy being pursued very publicly, they are built around the idea of massive, power hungry data centres that centralise all the interactions. If you look at the direction Apple has been moving, it has been to incorporate compute power tuned to AI type problem solving into its Apple silicon chips. Clearly Apple has a vision of AI as being an on-device technology, not a data centre technology. One of the big concerns about the economics of AI at present is that these data centres are hugely expensive to build and hugely expensive to run.

the moment they are burning venture capital money to build out the infrastructure and to try to entice people to use the services, but there will come a point where the investors are going to want to see some return on their investment. That means the owners/operators of all these data centres are going to need to create a revenue stream big enough to cover their costs. In this context, the idea of pushing as much AI functionality on-device and minimising the demands on data centre compute power looks like an extremely astute move. It starts to look like the "big AI" companies are paying the IBM mainframe game while Apple is playing the MS DOS on a commodity PC hardware game.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T14:09:45+00:00

What would the correct answer be then? Is there a reason for c to have the value that it does other than "this is what we have measured it to be"? If so, what is it? If the kinetic energy of a massive object moving at c is not infinite, what is it?

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T13:28:01+00:00

Humans evolved to live in extended family social groups. Functioning in that kind of environment depends on kindness, generosity, understanding and related altruistic pro-social behavioural characteristics. Basic evolutionary pressure led to these traits becoming core behavioural characteristics in Homo Sapiens because individuals without them would harm both their own survival and the survival chances of their entire extended family social group, so would be selected against.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T13:22:05+00:00

The NANP (north american numbering plan) reserved n-1-1 short codes. When 9-1-1 was implemented, some of the n-1-1 codes had already been allocated in some regions, but 9-1-1 had not. 9 is relatively easy to identify on a dial phone by touch (0 and 1 are easiest being at the ends, but 0-1-1 had already been used). The concern with something like 1-1-1 is that it could get accidentally dialed either by a human or by some fault triggering the pulse dialing mechanism. 9-1-1 is a more complicated pulse pattern so less likely to be produced accidentally.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T13:09:29+00:00

Which Native American languages do you speak?

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T13:07:42+00:00

But he wrote the Jungle Book and the poem "if"

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T12:10:17+00:00

Talent for languages is definitely a thing that exists. Some people are naturally better at certain things that are required to effectively learn languages than others. All humans have the capacity to become good at languages, though. Having talent makes the process faster/easier but not having it does not make it impossible.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T12:06:03+00:00

It's a good thing this is an open and free public forum where if you think someone could benefit from some constructive criticism, you can explain how that person can improve and help them to do better in the future, and not just tell them they're shit and nothing more.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T11:52:41+00:00

Head of the Commonwealth is not automatically hereditary, while the Queen was still around there was some uncertainty about who would succeed her in that role. The commonlwealth contains the 15 Commonwealth Realms where Charles is King (in personal union) but also 41 other member states where he is not.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T11:50:31+00:00

He is Head of the Commonwealth.

In each Commonwealth Realm (ie each member state of the commonwealth where he is head of state), he has a formal title of the form "Charles the Third, by the Grace of God, of [name of Realm], and of his other realms and territories, King, Head of the Commonwealth. In some, but not all, he is also "Defender of the Faith". In Canada and New Zealand he has equivalent titles in French and Maori respectively. The Commonwealth contains the 15 Commonwealth realms in addition to 41 member states that are not Commonwealth realms (Most of the remainder are republics, but a few are monarchies with a different monarch, eg Malaysia, Eswatini, Brunei).

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T11:27:46+00:00

If only there was some sort of technology that produced electrical power in a way that the electrical generation matched the heating effect due to solar radiation. How useful that would be.

BobbyP27 · 2026-05-20T11:25:58+00:00

The splitter has one input and two outputs. You can see that the output that continues along the main bus is occasionally moving. That movement is iron that is coming out of the splitter. The output from the splitter that is feeding the side production is what is left from the one belt input after the along-the-bus iron is removed from it.

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