As an unwitting Northern Hemisphere chauvinist, I forgot that although yesterday was the first day of spring up here, it was the first day of fall below the Equator. So let me make amends by presenting the Google Doodle showing this year’s advent of fall, whose first day, by my calculation, ends in roughly 45 minutes.
The Doodle, designed and animated by Kirsten Lepore, features not only autumn squash but a lovely animated squirrel. Click on the screenshot below to go to the animation.
BTW, how do you keep from falling off down there? 🙂
h/t: Dennis
It’s 9:42 PM, March the 21st. as I start writing this. A few hours left yet. But we don’t have fall in Australia, we have autumn instead. And we’ve broken free of the celestial tyranny of equinoxes. We celebrate the start of autumn on the 1st. of March. But this also means we miss out on the Google Doodle.
As to how we don’t fall off: we used to rely on our naturally sticky fingers and sticky toes, but now we use Velcro.
I thought the bee was pretty cute for our Northern Hemisphere Spring but this squirrel is way cuter!!
Why do you interpret it as one squirrel? Doesn’t it makes more sense to assume two squirrels taking turns popping up, rather than one magical teleporting squirrel?
as ratbago said, we evolved to have sticky pads on feet and fingers (misintepreted as callous) but these days, we rely on the sophisticationof global gravity (it has gone global, hasn’t it?)
We steal the gravitons from tourists at knifepoint. Now guess where I’m from. =)
“As an unwitting Northern Hemisphere chauvinist . . . .”
Some years ago I read an article how students (and how many adults for that matter) believe that winter is caused by the Earth being farther away from the sun during winter (as opposed to the 23 1/2 degree tilt of the Earth). The article said that the Earth is approx. 10% closer to the sun during the winter. (Or perhaps it said 10% farther from the sun during summer.)
Of course this article was apparently written by an unwitting U.S. NORTHERN Hemisphere chauvinist to other such chauvinists like me, eh?
So it follows that the Earth is 10% closer to the sun in the S. Hemisphere summer, presumably making the sun exposure/burn there at least a little more problematic. If so, then it seems winters will be a bit colder. (Seems I read as a youth that it is colder in the Antarctic than the Arctic.)
Growing up in the U.S. hinterland, the Southern Hemisphere and the night-time Southern Cross sounded so exotic. I finally fortunately got to see the latter in the clear night sky on a glassy sea when in the U.S. navy some years ago. (Enya’s “Paint the Sky with Stars” comes to mind.) Certainly would like to do some more stargazing there.
I’m sure that 10% is wrong. If the inverse-square law applies, that would mean we got 21% more of the sun’s heat in (northern hemisphere) winter. That’s a huge difference, it should mean that we in the southern hemisphere fry, but I also think it would mean that the northern hemisphere would get no winter at all.
Wikipedia: Earth’s orbit has an eccentricity of .0167. Not sure how that translates to percentages.
From the same source:
Aphelion: 151,930,000 km
Perihelion: 147,095,000 km
Divide it out to get ~3.3% farther away at aphelion, which would translate to about 6.3% less illumination.
Like Australia, we (NZ) don’t have Fall, we have Autumn, and it officially started on 1 March.
Like the northern hemisphere, the southern one goes all the way around the planet, and a day lasts for 24 hours. 🙂 At the time of writing, it is just after 8am Sunday 22nd in NZ, and two hours earlier on the east coast of Australia.
Chicago is currently 18 hours behind NZ. Before you started daylight saving, it was 19 hours behind. When we stop daylight saving in a few weeks, Chicago will be 17 hours behind us.
I never can remember who says “Fall” & who says “Autumn” since I use them interchangeably but probably say “Fall” most because it’s only one syllable and life is short. 🙂
I think fall might be a bit more common in the US, but we use both, too. Funny that NZ & AUS don’t.
Helps with the end of daylight saving as in ‘fall back’ even if I still go with Autumn
Yes, spring forward, fall back! I was glad to see the autumn doodle, having just harveste a 4’kg pumpkin (a Queensland Blue) from the garden. I’ m not a good gardener, so am quite amazed. There is a lot of roast pumpkin soup and roast pumpkin coming up!
I like ‘autumn’ as it has the lovely adjective ‘autumnal’.
Much better than ‘fallish’, or ‘fall like’, or ‘fallen’? Heh:)
The doodle seems wrong, at least for my part of the southern hemisphere. Squashes and squirrels are very far from being indigenous in Oz.
Same goes for NZ.
Yeah but South America has both.
So many ways to be chauvinist here! 😀
🙂
Fine if Google in South America showed it. If Google Oz or Google NZ showed it (and I have no idea if they did or not) I imagine the response would be ‘Huh?’ Or possibly ‘wtf?’
My new iPad was set to ‘Bing’ when I bought it and I must say that I am enjoying the beautiful homepage and unobtrusive news feed.