My entries are from my school days. This would be quite weird for post-internet people, but there was a time when the Internet is harder to come by.
Libraries existed, but I for one always get overwhelmed by the sheer number of things on the shelves. It gave me sensory overload. But I still discount the possibility of me finding out about the following from just browsing a school library. You kinda need to already know what you’re looking for in libraries, and I’m the type to browse around. Libraries just don’t work for me.
So what I discovered below might already be in the library books, but the books and me are never destined to cross paths.
I noticed the way muslim prayer times (aka sunrise and sunset times) drifts throughout the year. It goes up in time, then down, then up, then down again. I plotted the times from the prayer timetable in calendars. It formed this kind of curve:
I thought it’s just the seasons making the days longer and shorter, but that can’t be it, all points of solar time (sunrise, noon, sunset) also shifts the same way at roughly the same amount.
Later on I learned it’s the equation of time. It correlates really well with the prayer times (sunrise and sunset times) on the calendar because we’re really close to the equator and seasonal variance plays little role, so it rules out my schoolboy self’s hypothesis from years ago.
This is not taught in neither science nor religious studies because, of course. And also because clocks ticking at a constant rate wasn’t a thing for most of history.