Today is Tuesday, the 31st of December of 2024,
December 31 is the 366th day of the year
It is the last day of the year;
The following day is January 1, the first day of the following year.
78 days until spring begins
The sun will rise in San Francisco at 7:25:13 am
and sunset will be at 5:02:02 pm.
We will have 9 hours and 36 minutes of daylight
(3 minutes more since Winter Solstice last week)
The solar transit will be at 12:13:37 pm.
Water temperature in Aquatic Park today is 54°F.
The first low tide will be at 4:16 am at 3.4 feet
and the next high tide at 10:04 am at 6.52
The next low tide at 5:20 pm at -1.15 feet
And the first high tide of the new year will be early tomorrow morning at 12:32 am at 4.88 feet
The moon is currently 0.6% visible
It’s still considered a New Moon
Today is ….
or Old Year's Day/Night
The first day of Hogmanay or "Auld Year's Night" (Scotland)
It’s the 6th day of Kwanzaa. Today’s principle is Kuumba (Creativity): To do always as much as we can, in the way we can, in order to leave our community more beautiful and beneficial than we inherited it.
Today is also the 7th night of Hannukah
Plus it’s day 7 of the 12 days of Christmas in which you are supposed to be gifted by your true love seven swans a-swimming, six geese a-laying, and so on and so forth….
Today is also….
LEAP SECOND TIME ADJUSTMENT DAY
…as well as….
International Solidarity Day of Azerbaijanis (Azerbaijan)
Last Day of the Year or Bisperás ng Bagong Taón, special holiday between Rizal Day and New Year's Day (Philippines)
If today is your birthday, Happy Birthday to You! You share this special day with….
1491 – Jacques Cartier, French navigator and explorer (d. 1557)
1869 – Henri Matisse, French painter and sculptor (d. 1954)
1880 – George Marshall, American general and politician, 50th United States Secretary of State, Nobel Prize laureate (d. 1959)
1899 – Silvestre Revueltas, Mexican violinist, composer, and conductor (d. 1940)
1930 – Jaime Escalante, Bolivian-American educator (d. 2010)
1930 – Odetta, American singer-songwriter, guitarist, and actress (d. 2008)
1968 – Junot Diaz, Dominican-born American novelist, short story writer, and essayist
…and on this day in history….
1857 – Queen Victoria chooses Ottawa, then a small logging town, as the capital of the Province of Canada.
1862 – American Civil War: Abraham Lincoln signs an enabling act that would admit West Virginia to the Union, thus dividing Virginia in two.
1878 – Karl Benz, working in Mannheim, Germany, files for a patent on his first reliable two-stroke gas engine. He was granted the patent in 1879.
1879 – Thomas Edison demonstrates incandescent lighting to the public for the first time, in Menlo Park, New Jersey.
1907 – The first ever ball drop in Times Square.
1946 – President Harry S. Truman officially proclaims the end of hostilities in World War II.
1951 – Cold War: The Marshall Plan expires after distributing more than US$13.3 billion in foreign aid to rebuild Western Europe.
1955 – General Motors becomes the first U.S. corporation to make over US$1 billion in a year.
1961 – RTÉ, Ireland's state broadcaster, launches its first national television service.
1983 – The AT&T Bell System is broken up by the United States Government.
1983 – Benjamin Ward is appointed New York City Police Department's first ever African American police commissioner.
1991 – All official Soviet Union institutions have ceased operations by this date, five days after the Soviet Union is officially dissolved.
1992 – Czechoslovakia is peacefully dissolved in what is dubbed by media as the Velvet Divorce, resulting in the creation of the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic.
1995 – The final comic of Calvin and Hobbes is published.
1999 – The first President of Russia, Boris Yeltsin, resigns from office, leaving Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as the acting President and successor.
1999 – The U.S. government hands control of the Panama Canal (as well all the adjacent land to the canal known as the Panama Canal Zone) to Panama. This act complied with the signing of the 1977 Torrijos–Carter Treaties.
2019 – The World Health Organization is informed of cases of pneumonia with an unknown cause, detected in Wuhan. This later turned out to be COVID-19, the cause of the COVID-19 pandemic.
