Havana Syndrome, it turns out, is a figment of lots of overheated imaginations. There are no death-ray microwaves aimed at American heads in the U.S. embassies in nations Washington doesn’t like. In March, the National Institutes of Health said so. NIH studies found neither vocational harm, nor brain injury, nor blood biomarkers, pace 60 Minutes. The whole thing was a massive hoax that started eight years ago, after which the ball really got rolling in 2017, as U.S. military and intelligence officers reported symptoms from India and China. According to Wikipedia: “The most recent studies of over 1000 reported cases of Havana Syndrome have ruled out foreign involvement in all but a couple dozen cases.” Now the NIH has presumably dismissed even those. The nefarious furren conspiracy to scramble American brains was just, well, a hallucination, suggesting some of those brains had already been scrambled due to prolonged exposure to the madness called U.S. foreign policy. Still, the hoopla wasn’t as loony as it could have been – no Havana Syndrome sufferers claimed twinges in their teeth due to electromagnetic messages zapping their fillings, though conceivably that could come next. In fact, the NIH study didn’t stop 60 Minutes from airing a story about Havana Syndrome being caused by the Russians. So there may well be more insanity in the pipeline.
We’ve had so many people were called crazy for illnesses that turned out to be real that I’ll hold off on disparaging them.
Had a silly idea and made a silly thing.
Possible applications:
- you share your birthday with a public holiday, or with someone else in your family, and want to celebrate it on your own terms. Or you’re just bored of celebrating it on the same day every year.
- you think the Gregorian calendar is too rigid, but don’t want to commit to any of those lunar calendars, so, as a compromise, you may celebrate New Year not on January 1 every year, but on the easterized anniversary of the epoch, January 1, 1 AD, which is the first Monday after the first Full Moon following the December solstice.
- you want to add to the spooky season by celebrating the Anti-Easter, the first Sunday after the first Full Moon following the September equinox, which usually falls sometime in October.
- ???
No, let them look at the eclipse without eye protection.
Beware the Anteaster Tortoise. Though slow, you do not want to find any of her eggs.
… how does that work exactly?
The first Friday that begins (at midnight) after the lunar last quarter, or the first Friday noontime after the lunar last quarter, or what
“After” can be ambiguous when equinoxes and moon quarters are discrete moments but a “day” lasts 24 hours, or 48 if we account for time zones
This is correct. The day of lunar phase transition is always counted as part of the outgoing phase. E.g. if a Full Moon turns into a Last-Quarter at say 04:00 on Thursday, then it will be the first (or possibly second) Thursday after the Full Moon, and the next day will be the first Friday after the Last-Quarter Moon.
A lunar phase transition and a solar event (equinox or solstice) can fall on the same day, but only if the phase transition happens earlier. (This is why the definition of Easter sometimes uses the wording “first Full Moon on or after the March equinox” - I used “following” for brevity.) When the chosen date doesn’t happen to have a lunar phase transition since the latest solar event, the previous solar event is used instead. E.g. March 25, 2024 is later than the March equinox, but it gets counted as “the second Monday after the third First-Quarter Moon following the December solstice”.
For the sake of this calculation, a day is also a moment - midnight at UTC. All the logic is formulated to be compatible with the definition of Easter, though since I’m using precise astronomical calculations, the resulting dates of Astronomical Easter don’t always align with the actual dates of Easter that are calculated with ancient approximations.
Reminds me of when I took the tour of the Boeing factory in Everett, WA. When the tour guide opened the floor to questions I asked if there was an employee discount on planes.
Sadly, he didn’t know the answer.
It’s consumer-focussed Hauntology.
Hopefully there’s not thousands of impoverished citizens in third world countries wearing “I survived the NYC Earthquake April 4, 2024” t-shirts along with “San Francisco 49ers Super Bowl LVIII Champions” t-shirts.
