this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2025
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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 most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
Rules
- All posts must be showerthoughts
- The entire showerthought must be in the title
- No politics
- If your topic is in a grey area, please phrase it to emphasize the fascinating aspects, not the dramatic aspects. You can do this by avoiding overly politicized terms such as "capitalism" and "communism". If you must make comparisons, you can say something is different without saying something is better/worse.
- A good place for politics is c/politicaldiscussion
- Posts must be original/unique
- Adhere to Lemmy's Code of Conduct and the TOS
If you made it this far, showerthoughts is accepting new mods. This community is generally tame so its not a lot of work, but having a few more mods would help reports get addressed a little sooner.
Whats it like to be a mod? Reports just show up as messages in your Lemmy inbox, and if a different mod has already addressed the report, the message goes away and you never worry about it.
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Naw, the start of the day should be at the start of the day. within a margin of error.
When you say "I don't think it happens at the same time" that's only because you're counting arbitrarily from midnight. If you counted from dawn, then midnight wouldn't happen at the same time every day.
There are reasons why actually using dawn is bad.
But the thrust I'm making is that it's unsatisfying because we intuit that a "day" is a contiguous day followed by a contiguous night, but that's not what it really is.
Then we have to have a system for days that are no longer a perfect 24 hours, but rather a few seconds off every day. That means you can no longer accurately plan much of anything that runs for longer than a day without doing a bunch of offset math, it would be a disaster for anything that required accurate measurement of time.
I'm aware, but that is a modern problem only. And for that, we could have modern solutions that approximate dawn.
The goal isn't for it to be perfect day start at sunrise, it's for it to be conceptually satisfying and more closely match how we talk and intuit about days.
I think it would be even less satifying as for most people who don't live on the equator it would be off by hours anyway.
Not sure how this is any more or less arbitrary, or more helpful.
And at least you can plan "I need to be up in 6 hours" when you lay down instead of "I might have 6 and a half or 7 hours, but better plan on 6 just in case.
It's just as arbitrary, just based on a different, variable, irregular, and unpredictable (unless everyone gets degrees in astronomy). It may be predictable by the math, but no one wants to do any of that math every day.
It's nice because people intuit and talk about days as a contiguous daylight period followed by a contiguous nighttime period, when they aren't having discussions about timekeeping. It'd be nice if we picked an arbitrary delineation that aligned to that.
Wrt doing math, realistically you could just pick an arbitrary day of the year as your reference and every day begins at a multiple of 24 hours from that. No math is needed.
I'm not looking for perfect alignment with local dawn in every location on the planet, I'm aiming for a calendar day that aligns with our intuition of the day/night cycle.
But more than that, I'm having a silly discussion about timekeeping.
Exactly.