Fyi there are 365.242374 days in a year.
The only real solution is to use rockets to nudge the Earth into a slightly faster orbit so it can be an even 365.
You are wrong. It is easier to adjust earth rotation around its own axis, changing day duration, so that there are exactly 365 days in a year. Well, maybe 256 is better.
Actually, it’s cheaper to just move water around. China did it, so can the rest of the world.
Some weird grammar in that article. I thought it was AI at first.
a figure skater attempting to spin faster will draw her arms tight to her bodies, and thereby reduce her moment of inertia.
How many bodies does she have?
I’m intrigued by your comment, what are you referencing?
edit: thanks for the answers! fascinating
The Hebrew Calendar is supposedly 5784 years old (it isn’t) but it’s all sorts of fucked up.
Time is all relative anyway. Do we even know how fast the Milky Way is going and in which direction?
Do we even know how fast the Milky Way is going and in which direction?
Great question! Yes we do, for the last 40 years or so.
“astrophysicists found that the Milky Way was moving in the direction of the constellation of Centaurus at about 600 km/s”
I’m not an expert on the subject, but at least one of the calenders you’re thinking of is a Lunar calendar.
So not 365.242374 days but a variety of other synchronisation problems.
This mess pops up every time that we’re relying on multiple primary standards for the same property (in this case, time). If redoing it, it would be simply better to use the day as the “one cycle to rule them all!”, and then use exact and round-ish multiples/divisions for larger/smaller amounts of time. (e.g. “a new-second is 1/80000 of a day” [currently 86400], “a new-year is 400 days”)
…except nobody is touching some weird shit that has been ingrained in human societies for a million and half of days. Probably even before that.
Having summer and winter start around the same time every year is a pretty good thing to have.
It is. But I think that having rounder numbers is even better - it simplifies any measuring, division or multiplication. People planting crops/etc. would likely refer to the seasons instead of year (same as now), and school summer vacations would be likely set up per year (just like Easter etc.).
A somewhat middle ground approach would be if the “social year” was defined to have 360d. Seasons and years would still mismatch over time, but from one year to another they’d be rather close. (e.g. if summer started 10/Mar this year, it’ll start ~15/Mar in the next year)
A 12-month-year using this system has 354 days, which would drift significantly from the tropical year. To fix this, traditional Chinese years have a 13-month year approximately once every three years. The 13-month version has the same long and short months alternating, but adds a 30-day leap month (閏月; rùnyuè). Years with 12 months are called common years, and 13-month years are known as long years.
