Slashdot Mirror
Leap Days May Be Going Away In the Not Too Distant Future
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.
SINCE WHEN?
1 day difference in 3,200 years? Better bump this up to high priority
Four years is "not too distant." Four Million is at least a little bit "distant."
To build the world and everything in it in 6.5 hour days. Wow.
Might as well face it I'm addicted to data.
False. I feel like I just got click-baited.
Go away, troll.
About stuff that won't happen in my lifetime... or really for the next however many more generations.
or make DST permanent. just stop changing the clocks. each US state can make that choice. it's not a federal thing.
That's it, game over.
Can someone make StartsWithABang end with a bang please?
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.
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
There are fixes that simply updates the leap-year conditional and bumps the problem 32k years or so. See also Leap Years: we can do better (standupmaths) or google Adam Goucher.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
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.
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 so we need to take a day out every once in a while.
In less than 8 million years it'll be one day per year!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Just look at how much their kind whined last June about the leap second. Even Google did respect it. They did a leap smear instead.
Was it you Jehovah? Don't look at Allah like that. Zeus did it last time, which mean's it is your turn.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Even Amazon is anti science. They made each second 1/86400 longer last June 30th.
Seriously. Surely there is something more pressing that needs doing that figuring out the problems that we will (not[1]) be having in 4 million years.
[1] By which time if some natural disaster has not wiped us out, we will have handily have done ourselves.
If it wasn't for JFK standing up to the republicans, we should have never gone to the moon. Never gone to the moon.
Here's to February 30th, 3200. Should be a blast.
In the tradition of technology companies everywhere, let's have a beer bash in anticipation of the imminent ship event!
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.
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...
--
https://technet.microsoft.com/...
Who gives a F... ?
insert what you like better: uck, art, lick etc....
Now, now... Stick with your script. Space is corporate spending and makes children starve, starve to death! Those xian rethuglicans give money to corporations to waste in space while children starve! They hate us and want us to die, to die!
Keep it up! silly summary, for sure. I'm glad to see new submitters and content coming in here.
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/ (most of you won't even need to click the link, I'm sure)
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
I think you meant "space."
But if JFK wanted to get elected today, he'd have to be a republican. That is their hypocracy.
Corporate welfare is all about making sure children starve.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
The last time the Federal Government changes the "time" and "date" (to extend Daylight "Savings" Time) it cost USA businesses $Billion.
That's a terrible waste.
That's a terrible move in the midst of a sputtering economy.
That's a human tragedy in the making.
Whisky-Tango-Foxtrot?
Some one or ones have absolutely too much free time!
...then dinosaurs would "weigh" around 4.5% less than they should at today's gravity. Totally explains why they all died...as the earth started slowing, they eventually became too heavy to survive and all sank into the earth to become fossils. Quick! Get me some paper! I'm publishing a new textbook!
- 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, 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 level is 403 ppm, and no scenario of fossil fuel usage is consistent with a return to thousands of ppm.
- The fossil record shows that polar bears have survived the comings and goings of multiple glaciations -- each one accompanied by a change in sea level that was about 120 times greater than climate models are predicting will occur in the next century.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
If this will happen in 4 million years than I can wait. Can you? Nope. You're a dumb arse generation X'r.
n/t
are the slashdot editors? For humans, 4 million years is a rather long time. Even 3200 years is a long time.
linquendum tondere
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.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
So. Any chance we can get rid of the poster of this drivel at some not too distant point in the future? Preferably sooner than in 4 million years. How about right now? The submissions are ... worthless drivel. Consistently.
Ronald Reagan would be considered left-leaning by current Republicans.
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.
...may not be "distant" time from Terra's perspective...
...but our current calendar is only about 300 years old and the one it replaced was about 1500 years old.
Perhaps Ethan should follow their example?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
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 experiencing) rapid technological improvement. But even so, some accidents (like getting crushed to a pulp or burned to a crips) will no doublt remain unsurvivable. Meanwhile, diseases keep evolving to evade the currently deployed treatments. And then there's "enemy action" - like wars, assaults with a suitably deadly weapon, designer personalized diseases, etc.
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.
Also not all that practical - because day duration s an AVERAGE. Like a spinning skater pulling arms in to speed up the spin,, the Earth's rotational rate varies with the amount the atmosphere is expanded or contracted by weather. It's enough to measure, and it adds up over time.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
We should switch over to skipping one leap day every 128 years, which is much closer to fixing the discrepancy than the not-by-100-unless-by-400 rule.
https://xkcd.com/605/
"...whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive...it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it..."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date
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 this.
How would we know when to vote?
Just saying....
Casts out his lines behind his boat trolling his lures.
It takes Earth 365.25 days to orbit the sun. So a full year has a quarter of a day. To counter the calendar drifting through the the wobble of our planet (which account for the seasons and length of day,) we add 1 day every 4 years. So it takes 1461 days to completely orbit the sun 4 times.
Dinosaurs (if you believe they existed) experienced much shorter days and data suggested due to being slightly closer to the sun and the faster speed of the rotation and orbit, it was warmer back then.
Due to green house gases and chain reactions with volcanic activity when a certain amount of land is covered by ashy clouds, Earth would experience a cooling. Once it cooled and a certian amount of land mass was covered by snow, the white surface reflected solar radiation and heat back into space. Earth was brighter back then if you stood on Mars. This explains the multiple ice ages aka multi snowball/partial snowball Earth theory. In case you assholes were wondering.
As the Earth and our solar system age, I'd expect Earth eventually freezing permanently as the Dynamo of our core cools and solidifies. Our atmosphere will be stripped off our planet and we will be the new Mars.