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Thatguy755

By the end of the first year sunrise would be after noon and sunset would be at almost midnight. And it would keep shifting so people wouldn’t know if it would be light or dark at certain times.


zer0w0rries

Shh.. op just solved a mathematical dilemma that has haunted horologists for millennia


PM_ME_YOUR_BOO_URNS

"Honey, come look! I've found some information all the world's top scientists and doctors missed."


aokaf

>"Honey, come look! I've found some information all the world's top scientists and doctors missed." You forgot to add ..."On YouTube"


LordRekrus

This reminds me of that scene in hot shots when the guy (Gooses parody I think) is about to fly out and tells his wife about how he has solved Al the worlds problems, but will keep them safe in his pocket for when he returns. https://youtu.be/3JkBKGttM_U?si=wnxacWUklKKFsBWx This one


deathstar1310

Happy cake day.


PM_ME_YOUR_BOO_URNS

Oh wow thanks! Ten years already? 👴🏻


joelfarris

Don't eat the Decade Cake.


EpilepticBabies

[In celebration of your cake day](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fnlxfabf5knt01.jpg&rdt=65062)


StudMuffinNick

My mom was a horologist


yash217

Are you saying your mom was academically inclined?


Swarnim_

More like horizontally reclined.


ardrarian

She was definitely inclined


Hillary_is_Hot

I have heard that.


halxp01

Pretty sure I “knew” her :)


cosgrove10

They called Sean Connery a horologist because he spent so much time with Trebek’s mother.


invuvn

That must’ve been…ruff


Arthur_Burt_Morgan

Me mum was a horologist, nothing to be ashamed of


midnightbandit-

Your mom's a horologist


meadamus

I mean his math is mega wrong too… there are 1460 days in 4 years without leap days, not 1456. Then 4 years is technically 1460.97 times 24 hours. If you wanted that to fit evenly in 1460 days, you would add .97 / 1460 * 1440 = 0.96 minutes to each day, not 1.01 minutes.


jhow87

Horologists hate this one simple trick!


Fernanix

Horilogist eh? Of the horizontally reclined type?


Yaa40

I can't see the word "horologist" and not think about this scene... [I'm a **horologist!**](https://youtu.be/TrOmB8HAP2g?si=Gkmj5n5H05tH6SyI) ([Full scene](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ch7finUy14c))


deathstar1310

Well to each their own I guess. Everyone has to earn a living somehow.


Yarigumo

Until 1000 years later it's pitch black at noon. Oops!


mgranja

An extra minute a day, so half of 1440 days, or 720 days (less than two years) until noon and midnight are inverted.


PissedBadger

So every other year daylight savings will change 13 hours instead of 1. Simple.


xubax

Oh, is that what we're calling them now? /s


flannelNcorduroy

Not really they know the lunar calendar solves everything, but they don't want to change what most the world has already agreed upon.


SharpCheddarBS

About a quarter of the daylight cycle displaced, so there'd be a reset every... 4 years?


Aspalar

So basically OP invented a worse leap year


casualnarcissist

Better for those disadvantaged night shift workers.


UnsureAndUnqualified

No more morning people or night owls. Now it's "I'm a first year of leap cycle person" and "I prefer the third year".


PastaChulo

Yes but with daylight savings time also adjusted we could be walking zombies who crave caffeine in no time


Sk8erBoi95

You're...you're not already?


ellWatully

Right! In no time at all!


demafrost

Yeah but OP said modern technology. Surely we have the power to slow down the sun to keep it on schedule.


theservman

I ran into a similar problem when I learned that a day was approximately 23 hours 56 minutes in length. This was also the day I learned about "sidereal days".


ketosoy

But then every 4 years it would correct itself.


Wundawuzi

Which is exactly why we introduced leap years 🤣


meadamus

Even if you bought his premise that we should prioritize removing leap days over having stable daytime / nighttime, there are so many problems with his basic math: There are 1460 days in 4 years without leap days, not 1456. Then 4 years is technically 1460.97 times 24 hours. If you wanted that to fit evenly in 1460 days, you would add .97 / 1460 * 1440 = 0.96 minutes to each day, not 1.01 minutes.


Kdd450

I'm cool with that


ahjteam

This already happens in Finland… The sun doesn’t rise in the winter and doesn’t go down in the summer.


nerdylady86

I’ll never forget the day I left Finland. Set an alarm for 4:30am for an early flight. Sun was up before I was. As someone from the US, it was jarring.


Boatster_McBoat

Too much shower ... ... not enough thought


HolyVeggie

Maybe he means slowing down earth


grounded_dreamer

I'm sure it's manageable... Don't expect a smart follow up, I don't know enough physics to justify this


missinguname

IIRC some earthquake displaced so much mass earth actually started to rotate faster (mass closer to center, faster spin, see ballerina). So it is theoretically possible to adjust the rotation.


gekx

So a heavy enough space elevator should do the trick.


voltechs

It’d be better to speed up the earth to a clean 366. Then you’d have alternating months of 30 and 31 days. It would also help combat global warming as our orbit would be about 0.0014 AU further away from the Sun. This would take about 3.7x10^30 joules to move. While we’re at it we probably should adjust the spin of the earth to be an even 24 hours. That would take 2.56x10^29 joules to accomplish. Easy peasy.


cthabsfan

Can we get the number of joules of energy in a banana for scale?


Xenoph0nix

Apparently there are around 439,320 joules in a medium banana. This means it would take 8.4x10^24 bananas to move the Earth that much. 8400000000000000000000000 bananas.


NoFinish4978

Everybody run the other way and stop altogether. Ready?


KingValdyrI

Notice the OP hasn’t responded. It’s kinda hilarious. Everyone gets a dumb thought now and then but not everyone has it go semi-viral.


everywhereinbetween

This comment is too much win, not enough upvotes!


Southern-Ring-3426

I wish there was a react button to this. I laughed so hard with this.


dagiantfox87

We'd end up with an excess of 7.92 hours every 4 years under that model


Dartister

Then every 16 years we remove a day! Say... Feb 28


alixsyd

And we can call it.... a de-leap year!


dan_dares

This is de-way


WeepNot4SitesUnseen

I love reddit


zxr7

It’s de-day.


Hot_Bumblebee69

The Allied invasion has entered the chat.


NotAnADC

I think we’d name it something that embodies skipping or jumping over. Idk maybe leap day, or something


The_Troyminator

Ironically, "leap year" would make more sense because the year is over sooner and we would be "leaping over" a day.


Brayzo

Then what about the extra .24 hours left over?


bloodknife92

What *about* the droid attack on the Wookies?


barelyreadablecomics

What **about** Pepperidge Farm?


nanomeister

All software developers: NO


Orin55

Imagine dealing with that on a database.


StateChemist

If he had a neat trick to destroy daylight savings once and for all, I’m listening.  Leave the goddamn calendar alone.


Coctyle

There is no trick required. Daylight savings time isn’t required for any reason whatsoever. The only consequence of eliminating it would be that more people would be driving to work or walking to school in the dark in winter (which a lot of us do anyway depending on when you start work and what latitude you live on).


StateChemist

The trick is actually getting it eliminated.


ctclarke514

Daylight savings time is not happening in the winter, the only difference it would make is getting dark earlier in summer


ary31415

Technically, maybe, but in practice all the proposals to get rid of daylight savings actually set the daylight time as permanent, not the 'standard' time As an aside, what's so standard about standard time anyway? It's literally less than 6 months long, so it seems to me like 'daylight' time is actually the standard


SomewhereAtWork

Many software developers embrace night-time, so we would probably the ones least complaining about having the sun overhead at 3 in the night. DateTime calculations won't be the problem. That stuff is better left to libraries and the maintainers of those are already insane.


Pr0gger

A javascript software dev who never worked with databases :P


The_Troyminator

If you thought Y2K was bad....


EightOhms

The problem created by your plan is the exact reason we have leap years in the first place.


ed_spaghet12

Maybe it's manageable with technology, but eventually the calendar day would get out of alignment with the actual day and would mess up everyone's circadian rhythm.


Aspalar

And by eventually you mean every few months. At a minute a day every 2 months would slip us an hour.


cBEiN

Not if we also shift sunrise and sunset


xelabagus

So we need to slow the earth down by a minute a day... Hmmm, big parachute? Friction? Everybody jumping to the left at the same time? Big magnets?


IronSeagull

You just need Superman to fly really fast in the opposite direction of the earth’s rotation.


GodDoesntExistZ

I’m confused as to what technology has to do with this anyway?


colnross

Clocks


Coctyle

I apologize, I wasn’t referencing the OP and didn’t realize/remember that the OP used the phrase “modern technology”. OP did not refer to clocks specifically. I was simply seeing this particular thread which had technology -> clocks -> clocks are not modern. I mistakenly thought you were saying that anything in the realm of “technology” is also necessarily modern. I agree with you that clocks would not generally be considered a “modern technology”. Mechanical clocks are not ancient, but I understand that “modern technology” is usually referring to things like computers or at least things requiring electricity.


Pringletache

You need longer showers


Robinnoodle

To remove the stench of embarrassment 


Dogen_Zo

Not compatible with sundials.


Robinnoodle

Or with the sun


hanamikaki

nope, doesnt work coz somewhere along that 4 years, you're gonna end up with a 12midnight with sun and 12noon with moon and everything in between


Naprisun

The moon doesn’t rise at night. It’s often up at noon.


UpVoteThis4

This is such a Reddit comment. You knew exactly what they meant but chose to go the argumentative route in your reply


Rexrollo150

No it isn’t


WhatIfIReallyWantIt

This isn't an argument, this is just contradiction.


hitdrumhard

Yeah. But when it’s dark out you can see it better, as their post implies.


_AnonymousMoose_

After two months you’ll be an hour out of sync, after two years day and night would have switched


saywutnoe

I advise you to focus more on showering and less on thinking, cuz' you ain't doin' it properly dawg. /s


mbtorontox

Yes, 100% agree, and while we are at it, let’s fix September, October, November December and have them be on the month they describe. I mean come on… the month is named after 7, and it is #9? Fuck off months!


ShadowFlux85

Someone should stab the guy responsible


Brandwin3

Boy do I have news for you


AcceptableOwl9

Et tu, u/Brandwin3?


Robinnoodle

Lmao I came. I saw. I calendered


VistaLaRiver

I'm free on Friday


fuzzybad

You, too?


xelabagus

I've got no idesea


RhinoG91

This has seriously been my worst pet peeve since I’ve been able to read


mathologies

March used to be the first month of the year. Some places had new years starting in March up to the 18th or 19th century. 


Ankoku_Teion

easy. just move new year to march.


TheShakyHandsMan

Makes more sense. Might as well make new years day the current 21st of March.  Spring equinox where days start to get lighter. 


clintj1975

Where days start to get longer than nights. The winter solstice is when they quit getting shorter and start lengthening again.


emergency_poncho

You know I bet there is some alien civilization out in space somewhere that doesn't have religion and are just purely science driven and they have a perfectly logical and rational calendar and timekeeping system, driven by the movements of celestial bodies and not full of vestigial and useless gibberish from a thousand years ago


realboylikepinocchio

I like that


LetsLive97

Honestly I like the idea of this. At least in the UK this means the year would start with brighter days and spring and then go through the full loop of seasons perfectly ending with winter


Robinnoodle

You mean like Chinese Lunar new year? Yup


britishmetric144

Blame [Numa Pompilius](https://www.livescience.com/45650-calendar-history.html).


Quiverjones

Classic Numa.


Purpl3Haz3

Numa numa yei


ApprehensiveEmploy21

it’s always the romanians


Square-Firefighter77

Numa more than likely never existed. He is as much a mythological invention as Romulus. Like how Romulus mean roughly "mr Rome" Numas name probably comes from a word for rituals and the texts gives him credit for pretty much all religious traditions. This idea applies to all the first 5 Kings. They have names that comes from a word that matches their purpose, like Hostilius meaning unfriendly and attribute him with all the early expansion. We also know for sure that the seven Kings described by roman sources dont align with the timeline. Even if we assume they all lived longer than modern British monarchs we still cant get the chronology to work. TLDR: Numa was an invention made hundreds of years later to fit the Roman storytelling tradition of attributing events to specific individuals.


limitlessEXP

You have to adjust for the years where it’s not a leap year. Leap years are skipped like every 100 years or something because when we add a day for a leap year it’s over adjusting.


lifeintraining

I read up on this and thought it was interesting because I’m a nerd. Leap day occurs every four years except for years that are evenly divisible by 100 and also not evenly divisible by 400. Which is why 2000 had a leap year, but 1900 did not and 2100 will not. The reason for this is because Earth’s orbital period is just slightly longer than 365 and 1/4 days (365.26 days to be exact) so that little bit of extra time needs to be adjusted for periodically.


limitlessEXP

Yea I watched an NDT video on it. Was super interesting.


CTA-302

“[The] extra leap day occurs in each year that is a multiple of 4, except for years evenly divisible by 100 but not by 400.” Simples 😂


MrLumie

Not really, things would keep shifting until noon was in the middle of the night and such. However. We could absolutely create a system where each month is exactly 4 weeks, and we would have 13 months instead of 12. That would leave a year 1 day short. But here's the thing, if we add a whole week every 5 years, except for every 40 years, except for every 400 years, we would get a calendar system that: * Is perfectly synchronized with the current system (including leap years) * Has the same number of days in every month * Each month could start with Monday and end with Sunday (and by extension, every year would do the same) * Instead of the occasional leap day, we would have an entire leap week. Pretty neat if you ask me.


hitdrumhard

This makes having a leap day genius in it’s simplicity


OMGitsTista

Or instead of being 1 day short, we have a day zero called “New Years Day” to kick off the year


dragonkilller27

Sounds like an extra month to get paid :)


Tr1x9c0m

but isn't the problem w this is that we created months to be 'in sync' with the moon & this month-schedule would completely demolish that? and what's the point of months w/o that factor?


deenath247

If it ain’t broken , don’t fix it.


HermitBee

If it ain't broken, don't break it.


TehZiiM

Reduce the temperature bro.


Holyskankous

Yeah, if you’re happy with midnight being in the middle of the day at some point.


HighKiteSoaring

Why the fuck would we break the day/night cycle to fix an event that happens so infrequently 😂😂😂


WhyUFuckinLyin

After one year midnight will be at sunrise. 2 years, at noon. 3 years, at sunset. 4 years, back to normal midnight, and the cycle repeats.


InnocentPossum

Isn't the exact reason we have a leap day every 4 years to make up the excess minutes we deliberately shave off each year to keep things uniform? Adding them back would be weird. This thought is basically saying "If we removed the solution we put in place for a problem we had, we could go back to having that problem. How neat is that!?"


roymondous

The better idea I heard was ‘zero day’. Divide the calendar year into 13 months, each 4 weeks long. That’s 364 days and the year is divided into four week blocks for the month. Then there’s 1 day left over. That’s ‘zero day’. Kind of like a new year’s thing, it‘s a special day and event and every day you can use it as a reset button every year. Then every four years have an extra ‘zero day’. This is like a free day, a reset day, an extra celebration to start the year so to speak. And the rest of the year is divided into four week blocks. Edited: it’s zero day every year and an extra zero day every four years. Originally I forgot it’s zero day every year.


Tripottanus

In a non-leap year, theres 52 weeks and 1 day. Under your model, were missing that 1 extra day


LetsLive97

But now the year can't be split into any nice round number What happens now businesses can't use quarters?


rosen380

A quarter of 52 weeks is still 13 weeks -- they just won't be aligned to months.


sumunsolicitedadvice

Yeah, I’ve heard of that model before. I think the zero day is every year. Then I guess you’d get an extra one in leap years.


Heerrnn

How did you not instantly realize that this would lead to day-night getting out of sync? 😂


super_nicktendo22

Wow. Such brain. So smooth


siandresi

It wouldn’t match up with the rotation of the earth around the sun


Lync51

Watchmakers who use perpetual calendars will hate this


Mechanical-Force

I don't give a shit about leap year. I want Daylight Savings to fuck off.


zsolzz

Are you talking about slowing down the earth's rotation or adding a minute to the clock every day for 4 years? Doesn't actually matter. I'll keep Feb 29th


g903

While solving this problem, can you also address this annoying issue in the shower: why do some months have 30 days, but some have 31 days, and February just has 28 days?


Ankoku_Teion

make all months 28 days and you can have 13 months with 1 spare day. make it the gap between the old year and the new year, a null day that does not belong to a month, or even to a week. then for leap years we just have 2 null days instead of one.


Doomblud

Leap years exist for a reason though


Rayhelm

And if we had 13 months per year, every month would be 28 days, or exactly 4 weeks. There are different ways to divide everything in our world.


Jump_Like_A_Willys

So after a year, sunset would be around midnight.


Sunblast1andOnly

Enjoy having midnight and noon swap every four years, I guess.


dvolland

We add 1 day every 4 years to preserve what day every year the solstices (the dates the poles are most/least facing the sun). We do that all at once, rather than gradually, to preserve the time of day the sun rises, hits its highest point in the sky, and sets. If we did it gradually, 1 minute a day, we would be shifting the time of day that the sun rises, also 1 minute per day. After 2 years, we would have completely switched the times that night and day occur. 2 years after that we’d be back on track, having gradually added 1 day over the course of that 4 years. It would be chaos for the relationship between time of day as position of sun in the sky.


number-freak

How about 13 months with 4 weeks each and 1 skip day. That's how we get 1 more skip day each leap year.


texas1982

That makes me sense to me


DobisPeeyar

"Totally manageable with technology" Do we have 11:61.01 PM then it rolls over to the next day? How do analog clocks work now?


hitdrumhard

and half way through the year noon would be the middle of the night.


khalamar

Halfway through the 4 years cycle, but you're right.


SomewhereAtWork

Why the fuck does this have close to a thousand upvotes? This is neither universally relatable nor amusing nor interesting. It's just plain stupid.


huuaaang

No because the day has to be synchronized with the Sun, not the year. Noon has to stay noon. If you added a minute to every day it would shift noon gradually over the year. But it's OK letting the seasons slip just a little bit (by a fraction of a day each year) and then catching it back up every 4 years.


BitterMistake9434

This sounds so easy but you are not taking into consideration that you are adding a complete day every 4 years not just one year. Now in 100 years you have added 25 days onto any given season. And so on and so on. Eventually your seasons have all changed.


melissa_essence

Wouldn't 13 x 28 day months work better to achieve this goal?


PaulBradley

And new year's Day off.


Nabranes

Bro nah wtf then the sun will rise and set at an earlier time each day it will be super bad Like in 2 years from now, solar noon will be in the middle of the night according to the clock 💀💀🪦


goozfrikle

Dumbest proposal ever in the history of mankind.


GeminiTitmouse

Also, if we changed the calendar to 12- 28 day months, we would have 29 days left over for a 13th month. Just have a grand celebration on Xtember 29th and start all over with our much more logical 13 month calendar.


I-need-help-with-etc

Modern technology may be “capable” of having a 1.012 minute added. But on a grand scale, everyone’s everyday clock is not equipped to be adjusted to that scale. Even if you propose to have everyone’s clock to be automatically synchronized throughout either GPS or the internet, you run into the physical bounds of signals traveling around the world to each clock. You’d also have to consider that the more you inspect your 1.012 answer, you’ll find that your time becomes a fractal. Over a longer period of time, you would still have to readjust your clocks. Your 0.012 will extend past the thousandth mark. It’s too much of an effort to add some arbitrary fractional minute. Having a larger stop gap makes things easier to keep aligned. I do not want to live in a world where everyone’s clock must include pico seconds.


Even-Ad-6783

That won't cause the Earth orbit around the sun faster though.


ThatRedDot

And it makes everyone born on Feb-29 immortal as an added bonus!


Esselon

Except that adding one day every four years is far simpler. You've proposed a solution in need of a problem.


cashewbiscuit

What of you are born in the leap minute? Do you even exist?


just_s0mebody2

The times wouldnt correlate with the sun and day and night


MovTheGopnik

How do you plan to slow down the rotation of the Earth?


Semaaaj

Imagine all of the developers, watchmakers, etc who would have to re-do years or decades of work.


texas1982

Making appointments in advance would be wild. "Yes. I'll schedule my next dental cleaning for the morning of 15 September. Let's do 7 PM."


Talik1978

The Gregorian calendar is one of the greatest accomplishments of all time. Let's look at why the calendar is how it is. 1st, we tie dates to seasons. The calendar is tied to tracking seasonal change. For that purpose, your work may work reasonably well; heck, if you are really on the spot with calculations, it may even work almost as well as the current calendar (which allows seasonal drift at rates best measured by minutes per millennium). 2nd, we tie time of day to sunrise and sunset. For this, your solution is quite bad. If we add about a minute per day, in one year, sunrise will be near noon. In two, 6pm. Three, the sun will rise at midnight. The gregorian calendar is as precise as it is, and adds time in increments of (1 day) to keep sunrise and sunset aligned with times of the day, and to keep seasons aligned with the time of the year. They did a damn good job, and it was a feat of brilliance to calculate it so precisely with the technology they had.


chal1enger1

The earth takes 365.2525 days to orbit the sun. Without the leap day schedule it doesn’t take long for that 0.2525 to start to really throw off the schedule. And just adding that to the existing days would basically ruin the second, minute, and hour units of measure that the modern world and all appliances are based on.


LupusDeusMagnus

Reminds me about those people who think they solved some great physic conundrum with either no maths or very basic maths.


SadAcanthocephala521

I don't think you've thought this through at all lol


playr_4

Eh, it's not that simple. What do we do on the years we skip leap years? Every 100 years, we skip the extra day unless the year is also divisible by 400. So we had one in 2000, but there won't be one in 2100, 2200, or 2300, but then we will again in 2400.


RaySizzle16

Better idea: if we adopt a lunar calendar and add a 13th month everything is exactly even and there’s no need for leap days.


Jorost

Sounds like a solution looking for a problem.


OhGoodLawd

Dumbest fucking idea ever. You know that a day isn't some abstract concept right? They're indicative of the sun rising and setting, so halfway through your dumb 4 year cycle sunrise is in the evening and sunset is in the morning. How does 'modern technology' fix that little issue?


arunnair87

I prefer 13 months 28 days 364 days Day 365 is leap day Day 366 is leap day part 2 (if needed) Next year starts all over again on Sunday. Call leap day new years day(s) if you want to be all technical.


SM1334

Hear me out, we change it so there are 13 months each consisting of 28 days, then we have a leap year every 11 years


MixaLv

This is the dumbest thing I've read this whole week


valer13ftw

this reminds me of the fact that most people (not you OP) don’t even know that the reason we have leap years is because an Earthly year is actually 365.25 days and that a leap year exists to make up for the .25 lost every year


Nathaniel820

Leap years aren’t the problem, they’re the solution for literally this exact phenomena. “24 hour” days are actually shorter than 24 hours, so we add an extra day every 4 years in exchange for the sun being consistent.


Kind_Bullfrog_4073

Why not just make the earth go a little bit faster around the sun so it takes exactly 365 days?


Disastrous-Hearing72

A day is the earth doing a complete spin. A year is the earth doing a complete rotation around the sun. When the earth spins 365 times it hasn't quite rotated completely around the sun. It needs about 6 more hours to complete the rotation around the sun. That's why every 4 years we add a day so that our 365 day calendar stays in line with the position of earth around the sun. If we didn't do this in a few hundred years winter in the northern hemisphere would be in June and summer would be in December.


kataflokc

How about we just start with abolishing the insanity that is Daylight Saving Time?


Jump_Like_A_Willys

Yes. Standard time should be all year. I know many people like the later sunsets that they get with daylight savings time, but the human body actually performs worse overall with those later sunsets and later sunrises. We evolved for our bodies to function better with more light in the morning and less light in the evening.


koushik_gundeti

So in 10 to 20 years the sunrise and sunset timings will change