Area teacher proves egg-standing urban myth

[snopes]

http://www.frontiersman.com/articles...news/news4.txt

By proving an urban myth, Alaska Job Corps teacher Stan Colegrove became a shell of the man he once was.

Colegrove has off-again, on-again tried to prove a raw egg could be stood on its end on the longest day of the year - the spring equinox. Until Thursday, the 49-year Alaska resident had no success.

"Longest day of the year - the spring equinox"? Somebody needs a basic science lesson -- solstice and equinox are two completely different things.

- snopes

[ganzfeld]

Isn't the Longest Day June 6th?

[imjustasteph]

Originally Posted by ganzfeld

Isn't the Longest Day June 6th?

It's whichever day the stepkids are here and their mom is late.

[zman977]

The days are always twenty four hours. It is the amount of daylight that is longer. I love annoying family members with that information.

No where we have Daylight savings time we do have one day that is an hour longer when they switch. It used to be the last Sunday in October also making October the longest month, but as they switched the change over day to the first Sunday in September, October is back to being a normal 31 day month. let me get that

[Dropbear]

Originally Posted by zman977

The days are always twenty four hours. It is the amount of daylight that is longer. I love annoying family members with that information.

Not always - sometimes leap seconds are introduced making the day 24 hours and 1 second.

Dropbear

I have a friend who can balance raw eggs any day of the year. Took him a long time to master it, but now he does it to win bar bets (Never accept bar bets. Nobody offers them unless they can do something completely ridiculous to win). The teacher probably would have succeeded much sooner if he didn't wait for the equinox to roll around every year. Probably would have gotten a much different result, too.

[Troberg]

The days are always twenty four hours. It is the amount of daylight that is longer.

Except for one day which is 23 hours and one that's 25, due to daylight savings time.

In Swedish, we have separate words for "calendar day" (dygn) and "daylight period" (dag), although dag is often used when the extra precision is not needed.