only because it's a lovely place to work (and free internet!) but because so many different kinds of people are here - university students, history buffs, amateur genealogists, journalists, writers, high school students, lovers of literature, people just stopping in to look at magazines. It's a vision of books and learning as rightfully integrated into the heart of life, not sequestered (or shunted) off into some quasi-monastic periphery. (Picture source.)Of course, some of the people waiting this morning might not have intended to arrive for the library's opening. We turned our clocks back last night, so some might have been aiming for 11. Others might - who knows - have been standing there for an hour!
Daylight savings is one of those times when you realize that the two hemispheres of this planet have a more twisted relationship to each other than you might think. As we fall back much of the northern hemisphere leaps forward, and so California, which was 5 hours ahead (minus a day) is now 7; New York, which was 8 hours ahead (minus a day) is now 10. (I suppose I could have said - should have said? - that California is now 17 hours behind us and New York 14.) In half a year we'll snap back again: into and out of synch, or, perhaps, ever overshooting.
That the relationship is literally a twisted one is something I learned the other day from one of my fellow honorary fellows at Uni, a historian of science. One consequence of there being far more land mass in the northern hemisphere than in the largely oceanic southern hemisphere is that the northern hemisphere is bigger. This means that it rotates ever so slightly more slowly than the southern hemisphere - the way, my fellow fellow explained, a ballet dancer spins more slowly with arms extended. In consequence the two hemispheres are torquing. Hooda thunkit!
