It's easy to figure out the rough length of the year. You can count, and you know roughly when it gets cold, and roughly when it gets hot. You notice that the Moon goes through phases, about once every 30 days. And hey, after about 12 cycles of the Moon, it goes from hot to cold and then back to hot. So how did they figure out exactly 365 days?

Let's say you build a house. You can walk outside and look at your cool house, and you notice that the sun casts a shadow on the ground. The top of your roof makes a shadow that goes right there. You're an inquisitive kind of guy. So let's say that you kind of keep an eye on how far out that shadow goes into your yard. Some days when it's too hot to do anything, you can just watch the shadow move across the grass.

So then, being the inquisitive kind of guy that you are, you notice that depending on the time of year, the shadow reaches a different part of your yard. It doesn't always go out as far. So one day you go out when the shadow is at its maximum distance, and you go poke a stick in the ground. You mark the farthest point that the shadow reached that day. The next day, the shadow doesn't reach quite as far. Almost, but not exactly.

Keep in mind that if you're lucky, you might not even have to poke a stick in the ground. Maybe on the day of the year when the shadow is at its very longest, it just happens to touch the base of a tree, or your fence line, or your barn.

So anyway, you just start counting the days until it touches that stick again. On the longest shadow day of the year, you find that it's 365 days from when it touches that stick, to the next day the shadow touches the stick. And that repeats, basically every single year.

Why is it so dark if the lights are on?

You're welcome. That's also going to be the case with basically any kind of crime. I see questions here about "what is 2nd degree manslaughter?" or some other thing. The answer is that it varies state by state.

I am a criminal defense attorney. I specialize in DUI law.

In my state, a DUI (stands for "driving under the influence") means that you were driving a vehicle while your breath alcohol content was 0.08 or above.

In my state, a DWI (stands for "driving while impaired") means that you were driving a vehicle while your breath alcohol content was between 0.06 and 0.07. It's a less serious charge with a lower punishment range.

However, other states have different laws, and they call them different things. In Texas, DWI stands for "driving while intoxicated", and it's the equivalent of our DUI.

Yes. But everything is also moving fast perpendicular to the falling direction. Like it’s falling down, but it’s also going thataway so fast that it always misses the Earth. And there’s no air in space to slow you down, so you just keep going thataway and keep missing the Earth.

You can’t eat 1000 heads of cabbage in one sitting. Your stomach would rupture and you would die. You have to poop it out first.

Cabbage is mostly water and fiber. Your body can’t digest fiber, so you don’t get anything out of it (other than it giving your intestines a good cleaning scrape on its way out). You don’t get fat from cabbage, because virtually 100% of it just goes right into the toilet.

A Snickers bar has lots of delicious fats and sugars in it. Your body can use that. If you eat more calories than you use with exercise, then you gain fat. Since your body thinks you are a caveman who needs to store fat to survive times of drought and famine, instead of a lazy fatass with a thousand Snickers bars, it stores as much of that energy as possible. It converts it into fat. A lot of it will still come out as poop, but your body can retain much more of the Snickers bar than it can the cabbage.

The Moon has no air. So that means if an asteroid hits it, it leaves a crater. Then there's nothing to get rid of that crater. It just stays and stays forever.

The Earth has air. And volcanoes. And plants. And water. So if an asteroid landed in the middle of Ohio ten thousand years ago, that's ten thousand years of rain and wind and stuff to get rid of the crater. It might still be there, but it'll look a lot more like a natural valley now. Floods and rivers and tornadoes will knock down some of the hard ridges, and trees and plants and things will gradually soften the landscape as well.

Plus the atmosphere acts like a shield, burning up most asteroids before they cause big impacts. So something that causes a big crater on the Moon will cause a really small crater on Earth, and something that causes a small crater on the Moon will never even hit ground on Earth.