Google’s online and mobile calendars no longer feature Black History Month, Women’s History Month, and LGBTQ+ Holidays.
Previously, the world’s largest search engine acknowledged the beginning of Black History Month in February and Pride Month in June, but they will not be included in 2025.
The removal of these holidays was first reported by The Verge last week.
Google spokesperson Madison Cushman Veld shared a statement with The Guardian stating that the listed holidays were not “sustainable” for the model.
“A few years ago, the calendar team started manually adding broader cultural moments in many countries worldwide. It was noted that several other events and countries were missing, making it unsustainable to maintain hundreds of moments globally. So, in mid-2024, we decided to only display public holidays and national compliance from Timeanddate.com worldwide, allowing users to manually add other important moments,” the statement said.
The decision to remove black, LGBTQ+ and women’s holidays is another change by Google following Donald Trump’s second presidency.
Recently, Google announced a rollback of previous commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives in employment policy following an order by the US President to end DEI in federal agencies.
Google also revealed that US users will now be referred to as “American Gulf,” following an executive order by Trump to rename Alaska’s mountains to “Mount McKinley”. The company announced the name change for US users will take effect on Monday.
Many users on social media have expressed disappointment and frustration at Google’s latest decision. Users who wish to track events like Pride Month, Black History Month, and Indigenous Month will need to manually add them to their calendar.
Google assured The Guardian that changes to the calendars will not impact future Google Doodles, which typically celebrate these events with digital artwork on the website’s homepage. The company stated, “Google continues to actively celebrate and promote our cultural moments as a company,” and offers a Black History Month Playlist on YouTube Music.
Göbekli Tepe, an archaeological site in southern Turkey, features several Neolithic temple-like enclosures decorated with many intricately carved symbols.
Göbekli Tepe (Turkish for “Pot-bellied Hill”) is one of the oldest known examples of an artificial megalithic structure constructed by prehistoric builders specifically for ritual purposes.
Its impressive monumental architecture was built by a group of hunter-gatherers during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic period between 9600 and 8200 BC.
Göbekli Tepe was discovered towards the end of the last century in a hillside overlooking the Harran Plain.
It lies between the upper reaches of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, about 12 km northeast of the modern city of Şanlıurfa, known as Ancient Urfa and said to be the birthplace of the biblical Abraham.
Excavations at Göbekli Tepe, which began in 1994, have uncovered four large, nearly circular enclosures and a number of smaller, generally rectangular, buildings.
Each circular enclosure consists of rough stone walls with T-shaped megalithic pillars inset around two centrally located tall T-shaped pillars, which are usually fixed within stone sockets.
Archaeologists initially thought that Göbekli Tepe was merely a religious center, but recent excavations have revealed that it also contained a settlement of rectangular buildings, now thought to be homes.
The large enclosures are still considered “special” buildings, although there is debate as to whether they had a specific religious purpose or were large homes for powerful families.
In the context of this debate, it is debated whether the largest pillars represent gods or even worshipped ancestors.
In any case, it is generally believed that these large enclosures were roofed, but hard evidence is elusive.
A round-elliptical monumental structure with a distinctive T-shaped monolithic pillar at Göbekli Tepe, Turkey. Image credit: Nico Becker, Göbekli Tepe Archive, German Archaeological Institute.
“The largest complete enclosure discovered so far, Enclosure D (30 metres, 98 feet wide), has the oldest radiocarbon date yet obtained from the site, dating to 9530 BC,” said archaeologist David Schneider of the University of Edinburgh. paper Published in the journal Time and Heart.
“This date corresponds roughly to the end of the Younger Dryas period, at the boundary between the Epipaleolithic and Neolithic, when the Northern Hemisphere climate suddenly warmed after a near-glacial Younger Dryas climate that lasted for more than 1,200 years.”
“However, the date of the earliest occupation of Göbekli Tepe is unknown,” he added.
“Ground penetrating radar scans indicate that there appear to be several other large structures near the center of the main trail, waiting to be discovered.”
“Since only a small portion of the site's surface has been excavated, and even less has been excavated down to bedrock, the origins of Göbekli Tepe may ultimately be dated back to a time closer to the beginning of the Younger Dryas period, around 10,800 BC.”
“In fact, scientists have suggested it may have originated in the Paleolithic period.”
In a new analysis of the V-shaped symbols carved into the pillars at Göbekli Tepe, Dr Sweatman found that each V likely represents a day.
This interpretation allowed researchers to count a 365-day solar calendar consisting of 12 lunar months and 11 extra days on one of the pillars.
The summer solstice was considered a special day, and a V was drawn around the neck of a bird-like beast, which was thought to represent the summer solstice constellation at the time.
Other statues believed to represent gods were found nearby, all with similar V-shaped markings around their necks.
As both lunar and solar cycles are depicted, the carving may represent the world's oldest known lunisolar calendar, based on the phases of the moon and the position of the sun, predating any other known calendar of this type by thousands of years.
Detail of the center section of Pillar 43 at Göbekli Tepe. Image courtesy of Martin B. Sweatman, doi: 10.1080/1751696X.2024.2373876.
“Ancient people may have created these carvings at Göbekli Tepe to record the date when a swarm of cometary fragments hit Earth about 13,000 years ago, i.e. in 10,850 BC,” the scientists said.
“The cometary impact is thought to have caused a mini-glacial period lasting more than 1,200 years and led to the extinction of many large animal species.”
“It may also have triggered changes in lifestyle and agriculture that are associated with the emergence of civilisations in the Fertile Crescent of Western Asia shortly thereafter.”
Another pillar at the site appears to depict the Taurid meteor shower, which emanated over a 27-day period from the direction of Aquarius and Pisces, and is thought to be the source of cometary debris.
The discovery also appears to confirm that ancient peoples were able to use precession — the wobble of the Earth's axis that affects the movement of the constellations in the sky — to record dates at least 10,000 years before it was recorded by the ancient Greek Hipparchus in 150 BC.
The carvings appear to have been important to the people of Göbekli Tepe for thousands of years, suggesting that the impact event may have sparked new cults and religions that influenced the development of the civilization.
The discovery also supports the theory that Earth's orbit crosses the path of orbiting cometary debris that we normally experience as meteor showers, increasing the chances that Earth will face cometary impacts.
“The inhabitants of Göbekli Tepe are likely to have been avid skywatchers, which is not surprising given that their world was devastated by a cometary impact,” Dr Sweatman said.
“This event may have marked the beginning of a new religion and may have sparked civilization by encouraging the development of agriculture to cope with the cold climate.”
“Perhaps their attempt to record what they saw was the first step towards the development of writing thousands of years later.”
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Martin B. Sweatman. The representations of calendar and time at Göbekli Tepe and Karahan Tepe support an astronomical interpretation of their symbols. Time and HeartPublished online July 24, 2024, doi: 10.1080/1751696X.2024.2373876
The Antikythera Mechanism is a multi-part device recovered from a shipwreck near the Greek island of Antikythera in 1901. It is believed to be the remains of a complex mechanical calculator from ancient times and has undergone considerable scrutiny and analysis to determine its true form and function. In a new study, astronomers from the University of Glasgow have used statistical modelling techniques developed to analyse gravitational waves to identify the location of a hole under the Antikythera Mechanism's calendar ring. Their results provide new evidence that the component was likely used to track the Greek lunar calendar.
Fragment of the Antikythera Mechanism. Image credit: National Archaeological Museum of Athens / CC BY-SA 3.0.
The Antikythera shipwreck is a Roman shipwreck dating back to the 1st century BC (85-50 BC).
It is located at the junction of the Aegean and Mediterranean Seas, east of the Greek island of Antikythera, near Crete.
The Antikythera ships are thought to have been carrying looted treasure from the coast of Asia Minor to Rome in support of a planned triumphal parade for Julius Caesar.
The wreck was discovered in 1900 by a group of Greek sponge diggers on their way to Tunisia, who had taken refuge from a storm near the island and decided to look for sponges while waiting for calmer weather.
Early excavations at the site produced a wealth of finds that are today housed in the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, Greece, including three life-size marble horses, jewels, coins, glassware, and hundreds of works of art, including a statue of Hercules.
The most surprising find was the corroded remains of a complex device known as the Antikythera Mechanism, which is thought to have been an early analog computer used to plan important events such as religious ceremonies, the early Olympic Games and agricultural activities.
Also known as the first mechanical computer, this bronze device was created between 150 and 100 B.C.
It was originally housed in a wooden case with overall dimensions of 31.5 x 19 x 10 cm, with doors at the front and back and much of the exterior covered with astronomical inscriptions.
The surviving fragments contain 30 gears in an incredibly complex arrangement – technological artifacts of similar complexity would not appear until 1,000 years later.
In 2020, new X-ray images of one of the rings in the mechanism, known as the calendar ring, revealed new details about the regular rows of holes underneath the ring.
However, because the ring was broken and incomplete, it was unclear how many holes it originally had.
Initial analysis by Antikythera researcher Chris Budicelic and his colleagues suggests it probably dates to between 347 and 367 B.C.
Above: The 82 surviving fragments of the Antikythera Mechanism. Image courtesy of T. Freeth others2006. Below: Reconstruction of the Antikythera Mechanism by Alan Bromley and Frank Percival. Image courtesy of Alan Bromley.
In the new study, University of Glasgow researchers Graham Warne and Joseph Bayley used two statistical analysis methods to uncover new details about the calendar wheel.
The study found that it was far more likely that the ring had 354 holes corresponding to the lunar calendar, rather than 365 holes according to the Egyptian calendar.
The analysis also shows that the presence of 354 holes is hundreds of times more likely than a ring with 360 holes, which previous studies have suggested as a possible number.
“Late last year a colleague pointed me to some data available from YouTuber Chris Budiselic, who was trying to make a replica calendar ring and was researching ways to work out how many holes there are in the ring,” Prof Warne said.
“I thought this was an interesting problem and thought there might be a different way to solve it over the Christmas holidays, so I set out to answer the question using statistical methods.”
Using a technique called Bayesian analysis, which uses probability to quantify uncertainty based on incomplete data, Professor Warne used the positions of the remaining holes and the arrangement of the ring's six remaining fragments to calculate an estimated number of holes in the mechanism.
His findings provided strong evidence that the mechanism's calendar ring contained either 354 or 355 holes.
At the same time, Dr Bailey had also heard about the problem, and he was applying techniques used by his group to probe the calendar ring by analysing signals picked up by the LIGO gravitational wave detectors, which measure tiny ripples in space-time caused by massive astronomical events such as colliding black holes passing through Earth.
The Markov Chain Monte Carlo and nested sampling methods used by Professor Warne and Dr Bailey provided a comprehensive set of probabilistic results, again suggesting that the ring most likely contained 354 or 355 holes within a circle of radius 77.1mm, with an uncertainty of approximately 1/3mm.
They also found that the holes were precisely positioned with exceptional precision, with the average radius variation between each hole being just 0.028mm.
“Previous studies had suggested that the calendar ring was likely lunar based, but the dual techniques we applied in this study make it much more likely that this was the case,” Dr Bailey said.
“It gave me a new appreciation for the Antikythera Mechanism and the effort and care that Greek artisans put into creating it. Getting the holes exactly where they were would have required extremely precise measuring techniques and an incredibly steady hand to drill them.”
“This is a fascinating symmetry that allows us to apply techniques used to study the universe today to better understand the mechanisms that helped people around 2,000 years ago to understand the movements of celestial bodies,” Prof Warne said.
“While our discoveries about the Antikythera Mechanism are not as supernaturally spectacular as the Indiana Jones mechanism, we hope they will help us better understand how this incredible device was built and used by the Greeks.”
a paper A paper on the findings was published in the July 2024 issue. Watch Journal.
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Graham Warne & Joseph Baillie. 2024. The number of holes in the Antikythera Mechanism’s improved calendar ring: a new analysis. Watch Journal
This article has been adapted from an original release from the University of Glasgow.
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