this post was submitted on 01 May 2025
134 points (98.6% liked)
Asklemmy
47853 readers
1391 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 6 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
That only gives you 364 daya per year and we need just fractionally less than 365.25. You end up needing an extra day every year, and if we want to keep midnight in the middle of the night, and extra full day every four years (except when we don't). Adding those sorts of bodges onto an otherwise elegant system would be awful to work with.
Instead, I propose we build giant rocket engines pointing straight up on the equator, and adjust the Earth's orbit until one orbit around the sun takes exactly 364 days.
There's an easier solution. Just make New Year's Day it's own thing, not attached to any month. Then every 4 years, you'd have 2 New Year's Days. Or something.
Downside with this system is if your birthday was o. a tuesday, it'll always be a Tuesday. Having the occasional Saturday birthday is a good thing imo
I have been extolling the virtues of this for years.
A global day off on NYD and every four years two days off. Really nice!
23:59 28/13/xxxx -> 00:00 NYD -> 23:59 NYD -> 00:00 01/01/xxx(x+1)
or 23:59 28/13/xxxx -> 00:00 NYD -> 23:59 NYD -> 00:00 ENYD -> 23:59 ENYD -> 00:00 01/01/xxx(x+1)
I approve of this system. It should make calendars nice and simple for the most part. For example, salaries would be pretty simple since the period wouldn’t fluctuate wildly.
It’s just that not all things respect global holidays, so calculating energy production, water consumption and other things like that would still have to deal with weird inconsistencies. Regardless, this would still be far superior to our current train wreck of a calendar.
There is a solution
Best of all, that funny fraction isn’t even constant. The earth is a bit wonky.
We fix it with rockets. Circularize the orbit and set it to an integer number of days that's divisible by 28.
Now that’s the kind of thinking we need more of! Mathematical precision is the way we run things around here. Screw whatever nature had intended for orbits and such. It’s our planet.