No More Leap Year

[bobbyi]

The amount of time it takes the earth revolve around the sun ("a year") ain't divisible by the time it takes earth to rotate on its axis ("a day"). How is that our fault? Where did we mess? Leap years seem like a good solution to that problem.

[jba]

pointless piece of trivia, there will be a leap second at the end of this month

Let's all get drunk and play pingpong!!!!!!

[jason_t]

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since leap year is actually just humans way of admitting, "Hey look... we screwed up. We miscalculated how long a second should be so that 31536000 of them equal the amount of time it takes for the Earth to do a full revolution around the sun,"

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It wasn't a miscalculation. It stemmed from the belief that astronomical events are regular. Historically the second was defined as follows. One day is divided into 24 units called hours. One hour is divided into 60 units called minutes. One minute is divided into 60 units called seconds. The 24 comes from the Egyptians and the use of 60 comes from the Babylonians which used a base-60 system (technically it's mixed-radix base 6 and base 10). The problem is that the Earth's rotation around its own axis is not uniform so defining seconds in terms of said rotation is bad. That's why time is now defined using a more regular natural event (the amount of time it takes for a certain number of periods of transitions between two hyperfine energy states in a certain cesium isotope under certain conditions.)

[Blarg]

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We miscalculated how long a second should be so that 31536000 of them equal the amount of time it takes for the Earth to do a full revolution around the sun...

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No such miscalculation was made.

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Don't be a tease. Go on...

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Leap years aren't caused by any miscalculation, it's just because of the fact that the amount of time it takes the earth to orbit the sun is not an even multiple of the amount of time it takes the earth to spin on its own axis.

I'm with tony here. What a waste to take this extra day and tack it onto the end of a dinky little month during the winter and pretend like nothing happened. We should take the extra day and make it a total party day. Don't even give it a weekday name (so it would go monday, tuesday, super-special-party-day, wednesday,...), make it illegal to for any non-essential businesses to be open, and everyone would just go nuts for 24 lost hours.

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Let's make that day Work for Free for the Emperor day!

[PoBoy321]

You mean kinda like that episode of Pete and Pete where they took that extra hour during the switch to daylight savings time to redo something they regretted during the past year?

[OtisTheMarsupial]

No, I like leap year. It's funny when someone is born on leap day or when something extraordinary happens that day. It's fun.

[andyfox]

I understood that there was a proposal to redo our calendars that has the approval of quite a few countries.

Each quarter of the year would have 91 days:
January 31
February 30
March 30

April 31
May 30
June 30

July 31
August 30
September 30

October 31
November 30
December 30

Each year, after December 30, there would be an extra day, with no date and no "day" (i.e., it would not be a Monday or any other day). It would be "World Peace Day" or something like that. Every fourth year, there would be two such days.

Each quarter would have the same number of days. And since each year would have 364 dated days, every same date every year would fall on the same day of the week, since 364 is a multiple of 7. Thus, for example, if we made January 1 a Sunday, it would be a Sunday every year. And each quarter would start on a Sunday too, since 91 is also a multiple of 7.

[gmrankin]

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since leap year is actually just humans way of admitting, "Hey look... we screwed up. We miscalculated how long a second should be so that 31536000 of them equal the amount of time it takes for the Earth to do a full revolution around the sun,"

[/ QUOTE ]

It wasn't a miscalculation. It stemmed from the belief that astronomical events are regular. Historically the second was defined as follows. One day is divided into 24 units called hours. One hour is divided into 60 units called minutes. One minute is divided into 60 units called seconds. The 24 comes from the Egyptians and the use of 60 comes from the Babylonians which used a base-60 system (technically it's mixed-radix base 6 and base 10). The problem is that the Earth's rotation around its own axis is not uniform so defining seconds in terms of said rotation is bad. That's why time is now defined using a more regular natural event (the amount of time it takes for a certain number of periods of transitions between two hyperfine energy states in a certain cesium isotope under certain conditions.)

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not sure where you got your day theory...

here is why the day is 24 hours... that is the solar day. its what we set our watch to, 24 hours. but the sidearal day is more accurate. but it would f*** us all up if we used it. same concept for the year.

The length of time which passes between a given "fixed" star in the sky crossing a given projected meridian (line of longitude). The sidereal day is 23 h 56 m 4.1 s, slightly shorter than the solar day because the Earth 's orbital motion about the Sun means the Earth has to rotate slightly more than one turn with respect to the "fixed" stars in order to reach the same Earth-Sun orientation.

[Unoriginalname]

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So I was thinking... since leap year is actually just humans way of admitting, "Hey look... we screwed up. We miscalculated how long a second should be so that 31536000 of them equal the amount of time it takes for the Earth to do a full revolution around the sun," I have a proposal. Instead of adding a full 24 hours every four years, could we instead just have 6 hours of "non-existent" free time at the end of every year? Yeah, I know, it would screw up night and day, but that can easily be recalibrated at the start of the next year.

Think about it, 6 full hours of no-consequence life. Who else thinks this is a fine alternative?

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You know it's funny, I just had this great idea the other day too. You see, you have this mat, with different CONCLUSIONS written on it that you could JUMP TO.