The Hanover Collaboration

Being atheist, nihilistic and all that, kinda puts a person on bad footing in terms of holidays. They’re all sort of arbitrary. Like the whole calendar. Random month length is really stupid, just like putting the leap day not at the end of the year. I know, December already has 31 days and February was made the bitch of a couple too many Roman emperors. At this point in human history, changing the calendar to something sensible would be harder than convincing the United States to switch to metric.

But at the very least, we can make leap day a holiday. If it were up to me, I wouldn’t even make it a day of the week. This week would have gone Thursday, Leapday, Friday. Sure that could conceivably mess up somebody’s sloppy fortran code somewhere, but it won’t be that big of a deal. Who does meaningful calculations based on day of week? Everybody’s watch will say the wrong day until you fix it. So what?

Other fun facts:

1. In a binary solar system, the subsequent years are not the same length.
2. The Tsunami in 2004 took about a millisecond off the year.
3. The tides add about twice that much every year. This affect might be increased by the predicted half-meter rise in sea level over the next century.
4. That doesn’t sound like a lot, what is that, a millimeter at the equator. But when you do GPS you think of times in light-distance, 300 meters is pretty far.
5. Since the SI definition of the second (as 1/86400 of a mean solar day) by Newcomb (which was correct for the average of 1750 to 1892 and is estimated to be exact in 1820), we’ve picked up 2ms/day of this drift—a second every year and a half. Standardized clocks need to decide when and whether to make this correction.

Sorry for no citations, this was supposed to be a trivial little observation.