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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.
SINCE WHEN?
1 day difference in 3,200 years? Better bump this up to high priority
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.
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."
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
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.
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....
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.
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
...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!
Hush... You're dicking with the hysteria narrative.
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.
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.
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..."
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 survive in an incredibly diverse spectrum of environments, from the Sahara to the high Arctic.
I could get into how none of the climate models have proved correct, and none of the predictions made my climate doomsayers have come true. How many times do you have to hear a "climate expert" say something like "all the glaciers in region X will have melted by 2007" -- when in reality, nine years after that prediction's expiration date, all the glaciers in region X look pretty much like they always have -- before you begin to question the legitimacy of climate experts? Quoting David French,
In January, 2006 -- when promoting his Oscar-winning (yes, Oscar-winning) documentary, An Inconvenient Truth -- Gore declared that unless we took "drastic measures" to reduce greenhouse gasses, the world would reach a "point of no return" in a mere ten years. He called it a "true planetary emergency." Well, the ten years passed today, we're still here, and the climate activists have postponed the apocalypse. Again.
Gore's prediction fits right in with the rest of his comrades in the wild-eyed environmentalist movement. There's a veritable online cottage industry cataloging hysterical, failed predictions of environmentalist catastrophe. Over at the American Enterprise Institute, Mark Perry keeps his list of "18 spectacularly wrong apocalyptic predictions" made around the original Earth Day in 1970. Robert Tracinski at The Federalist has a nice list of "Seven big failed environmentalist predictions." The Daily Caller's "25 years of predicting the global warming 'tipping point'" makes for amusing reading, including one declaration that we had mere "hours to act" to "avert a slow-motion tsunami."
But for sheer vivid lunacy, nothing matches this Good Morning America report from 2008. The images show Manhattan shrinking against the onslaught of the rising seas -- in 2015. Last year. Gasoline was supposed to be $9 per gallon. Milk would cost almost $13 per gallon. Wildfires would rage, hurricanes would strike with ever-greater intensity. By the end of the clip I was expecting to see the esteemed doctors Peter Venkman, Egon Spengler, and Ray Stantz step forward to predict, "Rivers and Seas boiling!" "Forty years of darkness!" And of course the ultimate disasters: "Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together . . . Mass hysteria!"
Can we ignore them yet? Apparently not. Being a climate hysteric means never having to say you're sorry. Simply change the cataclysm -- Overpopulation! No, global cooling! No, global warming! No, climate change! -- push the apocalypse back just a few more years, and you're in business, big business.
In reality, I respect the wild-eyed rapture-pastors far more than the climate hysterics. They merely ask me to believe, they don't use the power of government to dictate how I live. Pastors aren't circumventing the democratic process to impose dangerous and job-killing environmental regulations.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.
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.
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 starvation, thirst or kill each other. The rest are "survivors" not "adaptors".
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
"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 infrastructure) can relocate without costing anyone a single penny. The list goes on and on and on. You started well, then ignored logic to reach your desired conclusions. You are not very good at this whole "science" thing, it appears.
Just saying....
Casts out his lines behind his boat trolling his lures.
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 we shouldn't take Good Morning America seriously, I'd be inclined to agree. Read the IPCC reports instead.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes