Leap Days May Be Going Away In the Not Too Distant Future 165
StartsWithABang writes: The need for a February 29th, once every four years, doesn't just give us an extra day this year, but it keeps the calendar from drifting and failing to align with the seasons. Even so, the scheme we have worked out today, where years divisible by 4 but not those divisible by 100 unless also divisible by 400 get an extra day, isn't perfect, and will get worse as time goes on. The current misalignment between our calendar and the actual Earth's orbit is big enough that we'll be off by a day every 3,200 years, but bigger news is that the Earth's rotation rate is changing, as our day lengthens and our spin slows down. In another 4 million years, we won't need leap days at all, and if we extrapolate backwards, we can find that early Earth had a day that lasted just 6.5 hours.
4 million years == 'not too distant' (Score:5, Insightful)
SINCE WHEN?
Re:4 million years == 'not too distant' (Score:5, Funny)
SINCE WHEN?
We're just about to discover a cure for aging [washingtonpost.com].
Didn't you get the memo?
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If you go by the news we've been five years away from curing cancer for the last twenty years and twenty years away from cold fusion for the last fifty years.
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Need more than just aging. (Score:2)
We're just about to discover a cure for aging. Didn't you get the memo?
Four million years will take a bit more than just a cure for ageing.
A couple decades back a Cryonics organization ran the numbers on expected lifespan if ageing and disease were eliminated, but other causes of death remained about like the then-current catastrophic accident rate of people in the prime years of life. As I recall that came out to something like 850 years.
Of course trauma repair is also subject to (and has been experienci
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So I expect that, even with a perfect cure for ageing, being still active to take advantage to the earth's rotation averaging out to an integer multiple of turns per orbit, is a "solution" only available to a lucky few.
I'm not sure I would call those people lucky. The psychological toll would be immense.
Re:4 million years == 'not too distant' (Score:4, Funny)
Since about 4 million years ago, clearly.
Re:4 million years == 'not too distant' (Score:5, Funny)
When all your friends are geologists.
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1% of the life of the Earth, or ~80x the time since homo sapiens speciated...
Re: 4 million years == 'not too distant' (Score:3)
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Since Ethan "Spamswithablog" Siegel wanted to clickbait you into going to Forbes by making you think the IEEE date and time standards had changed, when instead it's the same dreck he usually peddles in order to get clicks.
Thanks, Slashdot management, for linking to the actual content instead of Ethan's Forbes-hosted malware vector!
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It all depends on scale.
To that granite uplift in Utah, 4 million years is the blink of an eye!
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given that our calendar and timekeeping that requires leap days is a little bit less than 5 billion years old, 4 million years is a bit.
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I wouldn't worry about it. Not in a million years.
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Yeah, there are more pressing concerns such as fixing the Y2K38 bug.
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Your job responsibilities obviously do not include change management. There are a great many organisations (mainly Government entities) for whom 4 Million years is "short term".
It is, for example, far to short a period to remove all the bugs from a popular Operating System (which shall remain nameless for obvious reasons).
Not too distant future.... (Score:5, Funny)
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It'll take that long to get through a Republican Congress if a Democrat authors the bill!
Re:Not too distant future.... (Score:5, Funny)
If it exceeds my expected lifespan, it is "the distant future".
I eat a lot of red meat. Tuesday is the distant future.
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I eat a lot of red meat. Tuesday is the distant future.
Perhaps so, but at least you're going to enjoy your remaining time.
Animals... yum.
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There is no reason to expect that the orbital motion of a planet and it's rotational motion to be related in a simple ratio. (Except in the case of tidal locking, where the ratio is 1:1). So, unless you're going to go around adjusting rotation rates or orbits, then the slip between the two measures of time is just something you're going to have
God must have been pretty amazing (Score:5, Funny)
Re:God must have been pretty amazing (Score:5, Funny)
Kind of explains the platypus, though, doesn't it?
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Kind of explains the platypus, though, doesn't it?
No, he was testing cannabis when that happened.
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We'll get a hotfix for that after it ships.
Re:God must have been pretty amazing (Score:5, Funny)
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I think it might influence the coriolis effect a bit, which is suspected to have some influence on the weather.
Not too distant future? (Score:5, Insightful)
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You did - look at the submitter.
Also, since we don't know when we got the moon (we're not even sure how we got it), we can't just extrapolate backwards to a day of 6.5 hours.
Re:Not too distant future? (Score:5, Insightful)
A submitter that has had dozens of articles accepted, but has posted exactly one comment, and that was merely to make a correction to his/her submission. I frankly would not be too upset to see a rule implemented that says if you're not an active participant on the site, you don't get to submit articles. It might help to curb some of the unabashed clickbaiting.
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You did - look at the submitter.
A submitter that has had dozens of articles accepted, but has posted exactly one comment, and that was merely to make a correction to his/her submission. I frankly would not be too upset to see a rule implemented that says if you're not an active participant on the site, you don't get to submit articles. It might help to curb some of the unabashed clickbaiting.
Great idea - hopefully whipslash is running a script to see whenever their nym pops up and will consider your idea [slashdot.org].
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Correct answer (we can't simple extrapolate backwards) but for the wrong reasons (it's not uncertainty about the date of formation of the Moon that's the issue, it's the variable torque between the oceans and the seabed).
I didn't bother to follow Ethan-ends-With-A-Whimper's links, but I welcom his movement from Forbes.com to the Torygraph and Nat.Geo (both Murdoch ra
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That is an effect. But rock is so much stiffer than water (and for that matter air) that the integral of force versus distance moved results in there being more work done by the hydrosphere (and atmosphere) than by the lithosphere. (The work also scales by mass moved as well as distance, so the contribution of the atmosphere is matched by the top 15m of the oce
let's abandon DST first (Score:5, Insightful)
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I don't know, it's kind of fun to think of Arizona as cranky old curmudgeons that just refuse to get with the program. If everyone started doing that, it would be far less special.
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meh, we had a good run. (Score:2)
Bang (Score:5, Insightful)
He's getting really annoying and any of his post isn't news nor relevant.
No leap days soon? In 4 million years. Right.
And I'm saying that as someone who is interested in astronomy.
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You mean US.
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Maybe we could use him to SWAB the deck?
There are easy short-term fixes. (Score:1)
Silly Calendar - Make it metric(ish) (Score:5, Interesting)
Why have months be uneven? Why add the extra leap year day to February of all the worst of months? I wish they would do 13 moon phase months and then we get a little extra at the end of the year at Summer Solstice and every four years we could have an extra day then.
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Personally, I always observe the Shire Reckoning:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re:Silly Calendar - Make it metric(ish) (Score:5, Funny)
Why add the extra leap year day to February of all the worst of months?
This! Yeah, adding another day of winter is just so depressing. They should add the day in July, maybe next to July 4 so we could have a four or five day weekend in the summer when it is nice and sunny and warm out.
But don't worry, in a few years it will be warm and sunny in February, and you won't want another day in July when it will be unbearably hot.
and then we get a little extra at the end of the year
I think there ought to be a system where we can bank extra days if we don't want to use them and let them roll over into the next year or maybe two years later. That way, if we're having a good year we can extend it by a week or two, and if we're having a bad year we can end it early.
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But don't worry, in a few years it will be warm and sunny in February, and you won't want another day in July when it will be unbearably hot.
You mean like it has been practically all month here, except for the occasional (quite welcome) rain days? It has been an incredibly mild winter, even by Southern California standards.
Re:Silly Calendar - Make it metric(ish) (Score:5, Informative)
I think there ought to be a system where we can bank extra days if we don't want to use them and let them roll over into the next year or maybe two years later. That way, if we're having a good year we can extend it by a week or two, and if we're having a bad year we can end it early.
Yeah, the Ancient Romans tried that system. Originally, months began with the new moon, and the high priest was tasked with declaring when that happened. (The day was the Kalends [wikipedia.org] of the month, meaning "called out," since it was the day the new month was announced by the priest -- it's where we get our word "calendar.)
Anyhow, calling out the new moon was a bit of an imprecise business, since when is that last sliver gone and when does the new one begin? It's a bit of a judgment call. High priests were known to take bribes to delay the Kalends or move it up a day.
In the later Republic, the various month lengths were more standardized and no longer depended on the moon. But they didn't add up to a year exactly (355 days), so every so often they'd need an intercalation [wikipedia.org] to introduce an extra month, named Terminalia, which happened after the 23rd of February. (Why did it happen then? Probably because that was toward the end of winter and not much tended to be going on business-wise, so it wasn't disruptive to commerce or other cycles to have the calendar messed up then.)
Anyhow, the priest could get a bigger bribe for inserting or not inserting the intercalation MONTH in a particular year. If your friends are in office, they get a longer year; if your enemies are in office, they get a shorter year. You get the picture. (Also, the Romans had a lot of superstitions around particular days and months of the calendar; doing an intercalation in a pivotal year of war or something could be problematic from a luck perspective.)
Anyhow, this crap got the calendar so messed up that eventually Caesar came in and had to create the so-called "Year of Confusion" (46 BC), which was 445 days long [wikipedia.org], just to get the seasons aligned correctly again.
So, yeah -- I'd advise against this sort of calendar tampering. Bad stuff happens. Heck, Caesar died only a couple years later, which maybe goes to show the Roman superstitions on intercalation were right. (or not...)
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to introduce an extra month, named Terminalia, which happened after the 23rd of February. (Why did it happen then? Probably because that was toward the end of winter and not much tended to be going on business-wise, so it wasn't disruptive to commerce or other cycles to have the calendar messed up then.)
The roman year ended in February and started in March, hence they added the extra days at the end of the year.
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Nice try south-of-the-equator-er!
Just say no to pushing Christmas back once every 4 years, and when it's so damn close.
As a purely objective solution, it should be after a floating holiday, so that extra weekend day. Or better yet, repeat the day. Who wouldn't want Oct 31 (v1) and Oct 31 (v2) on the calendar every four years?
You might say, non-Americans who don't celebrate Halloween. But Christmas is only for Christians, and July 4th an
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Some are better than others, but none is enough of an improvement to make it worth the switch.
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The best calendar reform schemes seem to involve a year made up of four quarters, with months of 30, 30 and 31 days. The months start on Monday, Wednesday and Friday within each quarter. But to make it all balance out we add a New Year's day at the front, and on the regularly peer cycle a leap year Day between the second and third quarter.
What is the point of that system? It's easier to remember which months have how many days?
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Because February was last month of the year.
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Because until recently we had 12 zodiac signs, it feels convenient to have one per month.
Older cultures indeed had 13 months each 28 days long and a festival period for the other days. Christians destroyed those cultures, at least in Europe, no idea about other continents/areas.
This might be interesting for you: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Also interesting is the use of two overlapping calendars simultaneously: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Or if your life is centered a bit around poetry and zen: ht [kurashikata.com]
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February? Start of the farming season? Not here. We have deep snows, often 4' of snow pack the end of February. Farming season is still months away. I know, I am a farmer.
In another 4 million years (Score:5, Funny)
Just so we're clear, is the last year with a leap day the year 4,000,000 or 4,002,016? Asking for a friend...
And then it turns around (Score:3)
In less than 8 million years it'll be one day per year!
Who forgot to wind the earth? (Score:2)
Feb.30th (Score:2)
Well when is it? (Score:2)
Can you give us a date? I need to set a notification on my phone to when we won't be using leap days anymore.
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Thursday, August 2nd.
Leap days are programming tests (Score:4, Insightful)
Those of you who didn't cut corners or use the wrong functions for manipulating date and time pass the test. Your reward is the lingering possibility of being fucked over by vendors who have failed the test.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en... [microsoft.com]
--
https://technet.microsoft.com/... [microsoft.com]
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I'll just leave this here [infiniteundo.com].
Honest (Score:2)
Who gives a F... ?
insert what you like better: uck, art, lick etc....
Extrapolate! (Score:3)
if we extrapolate backwards, we can find that early Earth had a day that lasted just 6.5 hours.
How simplistic is such a backwards extrapolation?
https://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com] (most of you won't even need to click the link, I'm sure)
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Excessively simplistic, for the reasons I gave in a post somewhere up thread.
Time is running out (Score:2)
There are only a few thousand years left to replace our Christian-Roman calendar with a more accurate one before we accidentally celebrate Easter on the wrong day.
If a day is 6.5h... (Score:5, Insightful)
More interesting things about early Earth... (Score:1)
- For most of Earth's history it had no polar icecaps whatsoever. That is the most common state of this planet. The only reason we currently have polar icecaps is because we are still emerging from the most recent glaciation (i.e., ice age).
- Only 50 million years ago, there were thousands of ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere, [wikipedia.org] and Antarctica was covered with lush beech forests. The subsequent decrease in CO2 caused the continent to become a barren wasteland of ice; it was not good for life. The current lev
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Hush... You're dicking with the hysteria narrative.
The fate of the hoax (Score:2)
Lol, I'm not trying to dick with it, I'm trying to utterly demolish it, as should be done to all hoaxes, especially the misanthropic ones like AGW. So mod me up! Some kool-aid drinker has already modded me down.
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Pointing out that the hysteria over the fate of the polar bears is completely unfounded equals having a small mind? Umm, ok.
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What I found is even worse than that: "the rate of oxygen production by photosynthesis was slower in the Precambrian, and the concentrations of O2 attained were less than 10% of today's".
But the current hysteria is not about oxygen levels changing from 2% to 21% over any timescale; it's about CO2 levels changing from 0.028% to 0.045% -- while much larger changes have occurred naturally, over much shorter timescales than billions of years.
Humans are eminently adaptable. Even prehistoric humans found ways to
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Humans are eminently adaptable. Even prehistoric humans found ways to survive in an incredibly diverse spectrum of environments, from the Sahara to the high Arctic.
Humans as a species, yes.
Individual humans, not so much or not at all.
Also you mix things up, I would not count selling my beach front in Florida before it is unsellable and buying some slightly higher house in Brittany "adaption". Nor would I call entering a plane and flying over there "adaption".
90% of mankind won't "adapt" they die either to s
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"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" - you are pretty close, but the conclusions you've drawn are lacking substantiation and seem to gloss over an incredible number of factors as if they don't exist. If you are trying to demolish AGW, you have to not only show why the evidence we have is wrong, but show the world how you re-worked basic physics to make it so. You also need to show how prehistoric humanity barely living in inhospitable environments means modern humanity (with its cities and infrastruc
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To giver Gore his due, I think we may have hit a point of no return in the past ten years. We're going to get more than two kelvins (why they always call it degrees Celsius I don't know) warmer than we were, and 2k is the amount people were really really hoping we wouldn't exceed. You can pass a point of no return quietly. You can cross the event horizon of a sufficiently massive black hole without noticing what you're doing. Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon was peaceful in execution.
If you're saying
What species (Score:2)
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Whiplash (Score:5, Informative)
I was just thinking that the new owners cleaned up a bit, and we hadn't seen this abusive clickbaiter in a while. Alas, not so.
Whiplash please check out StartsWithABang's stats.
0 posts on Slashdot
500+ attempted submissions.
125 submissions actually made it to the front page.
100% of submissions are links to his own blog on forbes and previously medium.
Nearly all of his slashdot submissions have comments that are primarily complaints about his garbage posts, clickbait summaries, incorrect science, and the fact he uses slashdot as a personal advertising platform.
I'm not asking you to do anything about it other than read his previous submission comments and draw your own conclusions.
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That's a pretty good rate, actually. I wonder what mine is.
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Surprising that our rates are so similar.
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Are each of your submissions to articles you wrote yourself, sometimes with multiple submission? (Yes I've seen some of his crap posted more than once for the same article in the firehose).
But there's another nice comparison, a stat I left out:
In this thread alone you RockDoctor have double the amount of comments ever contributed by StartsWithABang. In this thread alone you have shown to be twice the community member he is (and his first and last comment was in 2014).
I've seen your stuff. Lots of things fro
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Unless you're sure you won't find yourself in his shoes, I'd temper the criticism from some of the more rabid critics.
He has a right to put food on his table as much as I have a right to complain about how he does it. Switching to a real world example: would you still feel the same way if someone was busking outside your bedroom window at 1am? That was real world because the city I lived in a few years ago had just that drama. They banned busking in the streets after a certain time due to resident complaints and the argument was exactly the same.
Now if you'll excuse me I need to put some food on my table and these ransdsom
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I'm starting to feel nostalgic for Bennett Haselton.
Blue hipster fixietard (Score:2)
Perhaps Ethan should follow their example?
128 year system (Score:2)
Am I doing this right? (Score:1)
https://xkcd.com/605/ [xkcd.com]
Bad Extrapolations (Score:2)
Given that the Human race is arguably somewhere between 500,000 and one million years old, it doesn't seem likely that we humans will ever need to worry about that before our race ends, or we leave this planet. Ben Franklin's Poor Richard's Almanac had an excellent analysis of the "new" Gregorian calendar system; it will, most likely, be accurate as is for another 24,000 years. And all we'll need to do to fix it for the NEXT 24,000 years will be to add an extra leap day.
Worry about IMPORTANT things, not t
And was this info a part of climate change models? (Score:2)
Just saying....
Casts out his lines behind his boat trolling his lures.
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Re: But since Republicans hate science... (Score:1)
If it wasn't for JFK standing up to the republicans, we should have never gone to the moon. Never gone to the moon.