Month: June 2007

For a while now, I’ve thought it somewhat silly that the first day of Summer falls on the solstice. This is the day where the Earth’s north pole is pointed as close to the sun as it will get, the sun will be the highest in the sky, and the northern hemisphere will receive more solar energy than any other day in the year. By all rights, this should be midsummer’s day.

And in times past, it was! The Celtic holiday of Litha celebrates midsummer, and their are seven others (Lammas, Mabon, Samhain, Yule, Imbolc, Ostara, and Beltane) marking eight equidistant spaces around the calendar. The longest day of the year is midsummer, and the shortest is Yule, i.e. midwinter. This just makes sense to me, I don’t know about you.

Of course, I also feel (and here we’re getting into mere opinion and personal attestation) that the middle of summer weather is more deeply in July than in June. Likewise, the more wintery part of winter is about a month or so after December 22, previously noted as Yule/Midwinter (known in popular society now as the first day of winter). So, from personal experience, I’d place the mid-seasonal day about one month after the currently selected first-day-of-whatever. I’d place midsummer’s day around July 15, and mid-fall around Halloween (Samhain), midwinter near January 30, and midspring on May 1.¹

These are, of course, personal picks. For ease of use, I’d advocate going back to the Celtic calendar for seasonal variations and stop calling June 21 the first day of summer. It was bloody hot out yesterday, so why wasn’t it summer yet?

¹If it were a true weather geek, I’d graph this and pick some points using objective temperature data, but I’m not. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader

Anyone who blog posts in the fashion that I do is a plagiarist of some sort. Plagiarism in this case is defined as not citing your source information correctly. Now, keep in mind that my wife is a college professor of technical communication and has lectured me several times on the definition of plagiarism. Do not send me comments about how linking to the website is citation enough. If you paraphrase, quote, mention, or write anything that did not emerge fully formed from your own skull, you are supposed to cite your source. That is where we bloggers fail miserably, because we paraphrase all the time, with only a link-back to justify our actions.

I am not going to change, however. We’re not publishing academically or professionally, and in that case, I believe that my citations are sufficient. There is, however, that breed of site that plagiarizes directly without any attempt to inform the reader that they are doing so.

For example: My last post was about a biofuel alternative. I had two links in my feed reader to this one. I read the first one and found this entry at the bottom.

Note: This story has been adapted from a news release issued by University of Wisconsin-Madison.

So I went to the UWM site and read the substantially same information. Then I went to the second site in my feed reader, Biopact.com. I found the same information, copied directly from the UWM press release, with absolutely no attempt to alert the reader that this was not written by Biopact. There is even a blockquoted paragraph halfway down, again copied directly from the press release, which would imply to the reader that here is text taken from elsewhere, rather than copied along with the rest of the article.

This sort of activity gives everyone a bad name, and I call on Biopact to not do it. A quick blurb (see my post) followed by a link to the press release would be the acceptable format.