[html5cat]

Not all heroes wear capes. This is excellent and can't wait to get aluminium mac next to try it – don't think Space Black is a good way to go.

Author's another post on "The Seasons are Wrong" [0] is excellent too and I fully support both approaches.

[0] https://kentwalters.com/posts/seasons/

[kokanee]

The seasons idea is interesting -- to me, both proposals feel wrong. I think it's because the weather changes that I perceive seem to lag behind the changes to daylight length by a few weeks.

I would propose boundaries that align partly with how I perceive the weather, and partly with how we plan our year (by months): Summer starts June 1st, Fall starts September 1st, Winter starts December 1st, and Spring starts March 1st.

[dpc050505]

Ocean currents, elevation and distance from the equator also have a big impact on what the season is going to feel like.

There's no need to change the dates. They're already arbitrary based on the position of the sun and the earth and people have the experience to take them with the grain of salt necessary to the region they live in. People who live near the equator probably don't have much care for the notion of the winter at all. Folks who live far up north know that spring actually comes in much later than march 21st. People who climb glaciated mountains in the canadian rockies know they won't get summer conditions until late june.

[thaumasiotes]

> People who live near the equator probably don't have much care for the notion of the winter at all.

My understanding is that tropical regions tend to divide the year into "wet season" and "dry season".

[perilunar]

That's how it works in Australia, though rotated six months: Summer starts December 1, Autumn starts March 1, Winter starts June 1, and Spring starts September 1. I think it even has legal status. In the North of the country though they typically just use wet and dry season.

I've also always thought that the equinoxes and solstices should be the middle of the seasons, so using the 'cross-quarter' days as the beginning of seasons makes more sense.

[fy20]

In my country the dates you stated are what are considered the start of the seasons. This year there was a very clear change between winter and spring on March 1st. February was cloudy and minus, March was sunny and plus.

[throwaway5465]

Forcing seasons into chunks of equal duration also feels wrong, to me but also anyone I recall having a conversation with so seeing every HN comment assuming all seasons are 3 months long is somewhat perplexing.

[Tyr42]

I second this proposal. Three weeks shift can feel about right.

But we lost a lot of nice symmetries that way, which is unfortunate

[Izkata]

Sunrise and sunset don't shift at the same time, and December 1 is right about where sunset approaches it's earliest time (where I am it's 4:19, vs the earliest at 4:18 on Dec 8)

Summer doesn't work with that association though, with the latest sunset being the end of June instead of the start.

[html5cat]

funny how this is actually the default for me having grown up in Ukraine.

probably same for other post-soviet countries too?

[Fnoord]

> I would propose boundaries that align partly with how I perceive the weather, and partly with how we plan our year (by months): Summer starts June 1st, Fall starts September 1st, Winter starts December 1st, and Spring starts March 1st.

You do realize there's also a southern hemisphere on planet Earth?

[Humphrey]

Oh, I have never heard of seasons starting mid-month. My mind is blown!

In Australia it's just split up by months, with each season being 3 months long:

March 1 - Autumn starts June 1 - Winter starts Sept 1 - Spring starts Dec 1 - Summer starts

Of cause, those in far northern Australia, only really have Dry and Wet seasons. I have no idea when those are.

[nopassrecover]

We were taught the same (Australian) - though it always felt slightly off as March often has major heatwaves, and December can be quite spring-like, often cool and wet.

Adelaide’s climate anecdotally feels to be more humid in recent years (historically bone dry Mediterranean climate) and the seasons feel like they’ve shifted a few weeks forward.

The Kaurna (Australian Aboriginal people of Adelaide, pronounced Gar-nuh) apparently mapped seasons a little differently, with a longer summer that resonates with my experience:

https://www.bom.gov.au/resources/indigenous-weather-knowledg...

The Noongar people of Western Australia have a 6 season model that also maps pretty well to my experience in South Australia.

https://australiassouthwest.com/six-seasons-of-the-south-wes...

[LeoPanthera]

Part of the reason for this is that climate lags behind sunlight a bit, so the end of the authors "summer" would be warmer than the beginning.

But most countries other than the USA use meteorological definitions of the seasons starting on the 1st of December, March, June, and September.

[ryukoposting]

It's funny, because back home by the Great Lakes, the solstice system aligns better with the seasons than his system. Peak "cold" is usually in January or early February, and you'll generally get one straggler snowfall sometime in March. Peak "hot" is sometime in July or August, with June being when the temperature noticeably goes from "springy" to "summery."

[mitthrowaway2]

There's a significant lag between the longer days and the resulting higher temperatures though, which does make the seasons make more sense temperature-wise.

[Macha]

On the seasons front, traditionally in Ireland winter starts on Halloween (at sunset if you want to be really specific), and so you get winter is November till January, spring is February to April, summer is May to July and autumn is August to October.

That said being an English speaking country and absorbing a lot of media from other English speaking countries, there’s been a slow drift towards the American system making its way in, so younger generations are more likely to use American seasons and older people more likely to use traditional seasons, though you’ll find people of all age groups using either. Certainly they taught the traditional seasons in school when I was a kid, I wonder which they teach now.

(Of course, you could make yet another system based on the weather where summer is approximately two weeks in July, winter is a thing that happens every few years and the rest is a sequence of mild weather with occasional wind and scattered showers)

[Sharlin]

I find the "solstices/equinoxes mark starts of seasons" a bit foreign too, but… weather-wise, annual top and bottom temperatures are of course offset from the solstices due to thermal inertia.

In Finland the traditional division is that winter is Dec-Feb, spring is Mar-May, summer is Jun-Aug, and autumn is Sep-Nov. Historically it has made perfect sense, weather and climate wise – particularly from the point of view of agriculture, which is of course the reason people used to think about seasons in the first place!

February in particular is 100% winter in Finland with no signs of spring besides the days starting to get very noticeably longer by then. It's often the coldest month of the year and when schools usually have a week-long winter break. Similarly, August is very definitely a summer month except in the far north where spring comes late and autumn early. The academic year in schools and universities typically starts at the end of August, so that's a clear and important dividing line in many people's lifes. In Southern Finland, December is these days rather autumny more often than not, and there's often no lasting snow until January (if even then). June is a crapshoot, it can be nice and warm or surprisingly cold.

I guess Jan-Feb are definitely winter, Apr-May definitely spring, Jul-Aug definitely summer, and Oct-Nov definitely autumn. The rest are kind of transitional and their weather unpredictable. Of course, the climate change isn't helping things, either.

[rsaarelm]

It's also funny how Finland has a concept of "thermic spring", which is defined by the temperature no longer dipping below 0° C, and the term doesn't exist in English because the definition wouldn't work in the climate of most of the English-speaking world.

[amszmidt]

This a common thing shared with the Nordics. The English term would be “meteorological spring”.

https://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A5r_i_Sverige

The definition would certainly work in English countries, seeing it is just 0 to 10 degrees Celsius average over the course of a week (and after 15th of February).

[Izkata]

On holidays, in the US, Thanksgiving is Fall-themed so we wouldn't want to start winter until after the 4th Thursday of November (which because of how it shifts around, pretty much means December).

[tecoholic]

Does Europe and America really call the summer solstice the “start” of summer. Wow.

In India our summer holidays start at the end of March and finish in the start of June. That’s usually our hottest months too. And a lot of our regional “New Year” calendar’s and related festivals are on April 14th and can probably be considered the start of summer.

[hadlock]

Hottest day of the year in the US varies by 3 months from California to Texas, which is only about half the width of the country. I would imagine the region you're in has a different hottest day of the year from say Kashmir or your neighbor Sri Lanka.

[dfc]

The three months difference must be based on a wild corner case. What cities are you basing that statement on?

I played around with weatherspark and all the places I tried looked like this :

https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/1705~8813/Comparison-of-t...

[dmitrig01]

I don't know whether to call it a corner case or not, but I was pretty easily able to find this one (based on my own experience – the peak temperature in the East Bay has always felt very late in the year): https://weatherspark.com/compare/y/541~3268/Comparison-of-th...

[tecoholic]

3 months? Wow. It should be impossible to put seasons on a shared calendar for the whole country.

[seb1204]

Europe does not. Summer is June, July and August with a bit of give here and there.

[jan_g]

Probably depends on where you are, etc., but as an European, I was taught in school two ways of splitting the year up into seasons: calendar/astrological and meteorological. Calendar split is based on solstices and equinoxes (21st March, 21st June, ...), whereas meteorological is based on month start (1st March, 1st June, ...). They use this also in weather reports, for example, where on 1st March they would add "Today starts meteorological spring" and on 21st March "Today starts calendar spring".

[hadlock]

You can get some black "machinist's layout bluing" which will stain it better than a sharpie would. It's not going to be a perfect color match but better than 50%

[dexterdog]

Yes, the black will wind up 2-tone when you get through the top layer. Mine get silvery to the sides of my trackpad from hand friction over time. I like the laptop in black, but silver ages far better.

[jojobas]

You can anodize aluminium black relatively easily, similar to this

https://youtu.be/y8HEZ-x4-_w?t=402

Getting the shade right could be tricky though.

[toxik]

Great post. Also, we celebrate "midsummer" on the summer solstice in Sweden and other countries. I see the author noted that.

[eightysixfour]

The author seems to not realize the season are about temperature not about sunlight. If you align the season to northern hemisphere temperatures, where the first week of August is usually the hottest, they make sense.

[LtWorf]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Season

[eightysixfour]

> A season is a division of the year[1] based on changes in weather…

[Art9681]

I have no dog in this fight but a friendly reminder that temperature and weather are not synonymous.