This is actually happening right now! I’m about to spend my Christmas with a cold beer in my hand and my feet on the warm sand of the beach. Just come to the south hemisphere!
@@lucasmt.2000 Have a drink for me friend down under. The suggestion of not attaching dates to celestial movement would be fine, but would've sounded crazy a generation or two ago.
I proposed a leap year system in ninth grade that can resolve all the rounding errors in 86,400 years...until my geography teacher told me the length of a day is not consistent.
Why does everything have to be upside down here? I don't like summer! I could cook an egg on a piece of tin I left outside. And at Christmas? Gah. Heat and hot food don't go well.
+Kalani Giddey A cast iron skillet works better. Seriously, try it, leave the skillet out for a couple hours before hand, then right at the hottest part of the day, drop an egg in it. It works rather well.
We even have a 5th season down here in Melbourne called "fuck you!" Where the weather does whatever it wants, whenever it wants. I take my jacket off and put it back on about 6 times a day
Love the Australian christmas reference. People from the northern hemisphere are always amazed when I tell them christmas day is often celebrated out in the backyard with a BBQ and all the family around the pool/down the beach!
I guess depending on which way around the error is, years divisible by 8000 should either be double leap years (with 30 days in February?) or not leap years at all? But either way, people will cross that bridge in about 6000 years
+ThePCguy17 Well to be fair, he said in one of his Q&A videos that he has cancelled a bunch of videos that he deemed "too boring". I would imagine that as this video was in February 2012, he was planning a Leap Second video for June 2012, but ended up cancelling it altogether because one extra second isn't all that interesting, while a whole extra day is interesting.
Gregorian calendar is more accurate than the Julian calendar but not more accurate than the Hebrew calendar or the Chinese calendar. Out of these only the Chinese one is a true lunisolar calendar but I‘d say it still needs a little something to make it a lot more accurate. The worst calendar is actually the Muslim calendar where there are no leap [intercalary (from Latin intercalārius meaning "to insert" which the definition is based on the ancient Greek word εμβολισμος.) or embolismic [from French embolismique (Huh?! This is either a joke or a mistranslation.) via Greek εμβολισμος, "embolismos" from εμβολλειν, "embollein" meaning "to insert": β was a /b/ sound as in "boy" in ancient Greek, which is a /v/ sound as in "voice" in Modern Greek. σ is the "regular sigma" which is placed in the beginning or middle of words; ς is the "final sigma" which is only used at the end of a word instead of σ in Greek.)] days or leap months to make up the discrepancy in relation between the solar and lunar calendars and no way to add other things to sync the seasons.
I just need to share that because of this video, I have been able to explain to the elementary kids I work with how leap year works, and they were actually interested. Thank you for making such amazing and educational videos that are so accessible.
What's beautiful about this is that when the pattern repeats after 400 years, there has been 365*400+97 days, which is divisible by 7, so even the the weekdays will be the same as they were 400 years prior.
You’re on the right track. But in 2020, February 29 was on a Saturday, so will the years 2048 and 2076. I wouldn’t say it repeats every 400 years. It’s every 28 years unless you cross over a century not divisible by 400. In my prior example, the years 2048, 2076, 2116, 2144, 2172, and 2212 will be the same calendar.
@@oni741 A multiverse is a collection of universes. Multiverse means multiples "verses" (Basically just a big place with things) and a universe means one"verse" so having a multiverse necessitates multiple universes.
@@morthostalisint1720 There was no need for your "lesson" about the difference between universe 'n multiverse.. Everybody understands it with a jot of brains! However, thanks for your clarification. ;)
Hmm... He's talking about yearly math... He made a Starcraft reference at 0:36... He used some oddly familiar symbols at 1:20... And he made a Warcraft reference at 3:04... CGP... Are you... Are you a... a- Nerd‽
I apologize for replying to a comment you've probably already forgotten about, but that interrobang at the end literally just made my day. And your profile picture. Good day to you, fine sir :)
While trying to pause the video when the word "Huzzah!" was on the screen, I discovered a neat little Easter Egg. Now I will be forever stuck with pony videos clogging up my recommended videos.
Leap second could be sly solution for ironing out imperfections of calendar+random disturbances -- provided that its ɛ remains bellow say 1/4 of a second per year (or as low as possible). Milankovich (Milanković) presented his "reformed Julian calendar" in 1923 and it has such features. It's shame that no one mentions it in their thematic videos (neither M. Parker nor Vsauce).
For my D&D game we use a lunisolar calendar that always starts the month over on the first day of the full moon, and the year starts over on the first full moon following the winter solstice.
I've always been a fan of the 28-day month, 13-month per year calendar, with a 5 (or 6 for leap year) day new-year's holiday. This calendar also moves the beginning of the year back where it should be, the Vernal Equinox.
CGP Grey, you make my brain hurt, but your videos are always amazing, educational, and funny! Thank you for doing your research and making important videos entertaining. You're awesome!!!
Or, rather, our distant descendants' unavoidable doom. Even if humanity or earth life or the machines into which our descendants upload their brains survive billions of years into our future, there's no way we personally are going to.
When we get the technology we should displace mass to make the length of the year precisely 364 days. 364 is divisible by 7, and 28, so division of dates won't be an issue. And since I said precisely, if we maintain this the seasons will never drift.
xkcd's What If series covered this question pretty thoroughly here: what-if.xkcd.com/26/ Suffice it to say, speeding up the rotation of the Earth by even a single millisecond would take hundreds of massive asteroids and probably wipe out humanity. Speeding up the Earth by an entire day would probably destroy the entire crust unless we take a couple million years to finish. Either way, the extinction of humanity probably isn't worth it.
omgosh, we had to design a programme in c++ in class to identify leap years and I never understood why one of the requirements was that the year should be divisible by 400 and our teacher wasn't of much help either. Thanks to you I finally understood now!
I love how you put a picture of Australia in the background when you said Christmas celebrations in the summer would be crazy.... But I guess some people don't know the temperature it is over here sometimes XD
My question has always been: Why have 4 months with 31 days only to have a 28/29 day february? Why not take a day off two of those 31 day months and give them to february. Thus 2 months always have 31 days. 9 months always have 30 days, and february changes between the two. Instead of two completely different values.
While it would make sense to do something like this and many new calendar systems that rearrange months and weeks have been proposed, including some that would make a week either 5 or 10 days, everything is pretty much situated on the calendar we have now and everyone has pretty much decided that the amount of confusion involved in changing things like birthdates, anniversaries, and holidays (especially religious ones like weekly sabbaths) would be more difficult than simply having a weirdly numbered month in the late winter.
Because the Romans were annoying. January and February were originally the last two months of the year (which is why February is the short month, and also why SEPTember, OCTober, NOVember, and DECember have names meaning 7, 8, 9, and 10 despite currently being the 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th months). February also used to have 29 days (30 on leap years). However, when the month of Sextilus (which had 30 days) was renamed Augustus in honor of Caesar, it was decided that it couldn't have fewer days than the month named after Julius (which had 31) days, so they stole a day from Februarius and put it onto Augustus. This is also why you have two months in a row with 31 days.
Brandon Fisher Leap years coincide with campaign years giving us an additional day to be miserable, except in 2000 when we were miserable for four years.
Why not a calander wich is based on some distant constant and light speed, every time light passes this constant one time passes by. And as an extra the time of the day . Means after x hours its the date 9342.582 16:43
+KTChamberlain Earth's axis will complete a rotation in 26,000 years. It has already completed 13,000 years. Currenty, earth 's axis is pointing towards polaris star. After 13,000 years, one rotation of axis will be completed and earth's axis will be pointed towards Vega star and our seasons will be flipped.
Alright before i watch the video, ima say what others have told me, even though it is very likely *wrong*. *a leap year adds and extra day because every year is not 365 days, but 365.25 days. so that means that every four years it would add up to 367 days.*
Sorry to correct, but to be even more precise, it's 365,24, and then even more numbers. This comment is not supposed to be offensive or rude, but to help others.
Ok so if i donate to NASA then I WON'T die in a fiery Apocalypse? .....but the new iphone 6s did just come out....oh well at least if i burn, i'll burn in style!
I love the Warcraft 3 reference. You have to be old school to get that. Also, observant; being observant helps too. If you didn't catch it, 3:05 in the bottom left corner.
2:57 Well, no. The calendar drift has nothing to do with our measurement techniques. It's not a technological problem that you can science your way out of. As long as humans are living on earth, we will have to deal with it. And so leap years will continue to exist.
I love your videos, there absolutely great. I was wondering tho, if you could make a video explaining this whole Kony 2012 thing. I'm sure it would be quite helpful!
0:57 That's how we celebrate Christmas here in Chile (and in the rest of the Southern Hemisphere). It just seems crazy to the creator of this video because he lives in the other side of the world.
Lessoned learned: Give money to Nasa organisations or we're guaranteed to be fucked by our Sun. Noted. Already knew but still we should really get on that.
It's not 8000 years. The Gregorian Calendar is off by 1 day every 3226 years. 1/(365.24250 - 365.24219) = 3225.8, where 365.24250 is the length of a year in the Gregorian Calendar and 365.24219 is the length of the Mean Tropical Year.
Yes you can divide it nicely! 5 months of 73 days, bam! Nice months that are always working. And leap days are called overflows, and it’s a day off! Or that’s how I want it.
The World Calendar was almost adopted after WWII but unfortunately lost due to social inertia. In this calendar *every quarter* of three months is identical, year after year, world without end. This is accomplished by inserting an extra day between weekdays every year and two on leap years. Four 91-day quarters add up to 364 days or exactly 52 weeks, and simply slipping in an extra World Day when needed keeps the calendar the same every year. Identical quarters also make it easier to compare business activity from one quarter to the next. There is a World Calendar association which thinks it owns this idea, as I found out when trying to suggest changes in some of the details, but humans just love to form their little empires, don't they? My biggest suggestion was to have the year start on the northern hemisphere solstice instead of ten days *after* the solstice, which it does now. My other suggestion was to count the months in a quarter by 30, 30 and 31 days instead of 31, 30 and 30. Why? Because then you could express a date by a simple three-digit number, the quarter number from 1 to 4 followed by the day number from 1 to 91, 92 (for December) or 93 in leap years. The months would be obvious as they would start on days 1, 31 and 61 every time, and so would the days of the week after a while. And figuring out days between dates would be trivial!
"that refuses to be divided nicely" except by 13 with just a solitary New Year's Day left over! i realize that this is almost never going to happen now because of how incredibly disruptive it would be to the everything, but if i had the opportunity to design the calendar system from scratch, i'd make it thirteen 28-day months with a monthless New Year's and Leap Day tacked on at the end/beginning. you could even keep seven-day weeks and days would land on the exact same dates every month. while having the New Year's and Leap Days also be "dayless" would certainly be in keeping with the tidiness of the system (so that you could reuse the exact same calendar every single year), i can also see the appeal of the days getting offset by 1 each year just for a bit of variety. with the inclusion of the Leap Year day, now i kinda want to crunch the numbers now to see how long before days land on the same date again in this system... or how long the whole cycle takes to repeat...
@@samd2612 china made a really large hydroelectric dam which stopped the flow of a relaly big river which slowed the rotation of the earth by a few milleseconds
Why can't we have one calendar for every year? Hear me out! Just have the last day of the year last longer and even if you use the leap year system have the extra day at the end of the year instead of February. Then make January 1st start on a Thursday every year regardless of what day of the week the year ended. Why Thursday, so we can have a long new years holiday and back to work come Monday.
A day is 24 hours long because that's the time it takes to make one rotation. If the last day is made 30 hours long, it might help keep the seasons in sync, but your day/night cycle will keep getting shifted by 6 hours each year before it syncs again after 4 years.... hope I am making sense... :)
jackrussel13 Take away making the last day longer part. Just put the leap days at the end of the year and start the year on the same weekday is still a good idea.
For the Romans, the founders of our chalendar, the year originally ended with February (count it, September was originally the seventh month (septem = seven), October the eigth (octo = eight), November the ninth (novem = nine), and December the tenth (decim = ten)). So the leap day actually was added at the end of the year. The calendar was shifted because of the roman law, that said that gouvernors of all areas of the Roman empire (back then not yet an empire) had to come to Rome to account for their actions (and also elections, I think). The chalendar was shifted to make it easier for the gouvernors to travel. The Mare Internum isn't a place you want to be in the middle of around end February-begin March, it's stormy and dangerous. December on the other hand, gives you a relatively calm sea to sail on. This change in chalendar was just Roman problem-solving.
There is a proposal that's been floating around for awhile that is similar to this. It is called the World Calendar. It is set up so that each quarter year, the first month has 31 days, and the other two 30 days. In the middle of the year, between June and July, there would be a day with no numerical date or month, which isn't part of any week, called "World's Day". On years where we need a leap day, you add another similar "World's Day" to the end of the year. The benefit of this calendar is that every particular date always falls on the same day of the week, every month always starts on a particular day of the week etc. Of course, a lot of people don't like the idea of having days that aren't part of a week, it can screw up a lot of things, so the idea hasn't really caught on.
Whoops, meant warcraft. I've put hundreds of hours into both games, but I just recently got the new starcraft, so that was on my mind at the time lol. I had been living on Brood Wars for SC until now. :P
Because for the Romans it was an important month (purification) and when Caesar decided to change the calendar from a lunar one(28 days per month) to a solar one(30 days per month but adding 1 day more to some months) he decided to let february with 28 and use it as the month where a day would be added in leap years(they already added days to keep in sync with the seasons, the problem was that it wasnt something automatic but the job of the Pontifex Maximus (Caesar all that time) but if for some years he wasnt able to do so (like in the Roman civil war) then all the calendar went downhill very quickly
haha I never knew about that crazy rules. I knew why there is a leap year but I really though they just left it at that :) God damn calendar designers, I have much more respect for them now.
Oh and since our aim is to not drift out of the seasons, the precession of the equinoxes, a 26,000 year-long cycle, will have to be incorporated into the calendar as well, so that we don't go out of sync.
