Talk:Earth Seasons

From 43FoldersWiki

There's got to be a way to calculate this. If anyone can find a way to calculate the equinoxes/solsitces, that would be great since that's the only thing preventing remind from being able to automatically track Discardia. Right now, I'm seriously considering writing a Perl script to find solstices/equinoxes and add reminders for discardia for me (triggered of course, by Remind executing the Perl script when the current Discardia starts). -ThePolack

I checked http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox but got nothing. A google seach gave me a few hits that all mention the book "Astronomical Algorithms" by Jean Meeus. Since you seem to be a Perl person, googling with something like http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&q=CPAN+equinox+%22Astronomical+Algorithms%22+%22Jean+Meeus%22&btnG=Search should give you the equinox/solstice code you want. Share and enjoy. --DavidCary 20:10, 15 July 2006 (EDT)

Yeah, I did the same search after posting my query here. It turns out that calculating the solstice/equinoxes involves some pretty hefty math, and is never 100% accurate (if you're interested in to-the-second accuracy which I'm not). I wound up looking at pages from NIST and NASA and they make it sound like they need heavy iron to get the job done. As for the CPAN libraries, already got them. I was just hoping to avoid spawning a new process (and going through the complicated process of executing one scripting language, remind, to run a script in another language, Perl, that then edits the script of the first language -- obviously less than elegant) just to insert a single line entry into my remind file. I'm also not thrilled at the prospect of doing this kind of computation whenever I run remind (frequently since I'm using geektool). I'll probably just end up making a list of Discardia-related reminders with appropriate ++[x] values on them calculated by hand. Bummer. Maybe I'll tinker with it and find something I hadn't thought of. -ThePolack