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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.
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 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 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, 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...)
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.
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