The Math of Leap Days 225
The Bad Astronomer writes "We have leap days every four years because the Earth's day and year don't divide evenly. But there's more to it than that... a lot more. A year isn't exactly 365.25 days long, and that leads to needing more complicated math and rules for when we do and don't have a leap year. If you've ever wanted to see that math laid out, now's your chance, and it only comes along every four years. Except every hundred years. Except every four hundred years."
Complicated? (Score:5, Insightful)
I think we have different definitions of complicated.
Re:Our whole calendar is messed up. (Score:5, Insightful)
The whole 7 day week is rather random too- based on some out-of-date dogma that is probably mistranslated. (the original word in Genesis translated as "day" was more accurately "a period of time" although it was often "day" but not necessarily) - so we force the meaning of "day" onto it and have a 7 day week. Silly number.
Let's make a week 10 days- a much more logical number.
Actually 7-day week makes sense if you have a 28-day month.
Re:Complicated? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Our whole calendar is messed up. (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly my point.
Nobody's going to listen to any ideas of changing this at this point because there is no need, and a lot of pain involved.
If you planned it for 10 years you would still have 50% of our automated infrastructure stuck on old time keepers. Bazillions of contracts, deeds, etc would need rewrite, and virtually all historical texts would need corrections.
The only place where there is anything to gain is in date computations in computers, and we have that solved.
Its a mess, but not a debilitating one.
Converting to any other system would be all pain, and zero gain.
Re:Duh. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the REAL nightmare for programmers is daylight savings time. Especially in the spring, when local times jump back and repeat. Ugh.
That's why you should save the time in UTC format, and then let the OS help you translate that into a display time.