Sunday, 20 April 2025

400/28..Carry The 1 Every Leap Year...

Ever since we began counting days we seem to have failed to get a full grasp on the calendar, adding the odd days here and even losing eleven of them at one point so what we have now is a year of 52 weeks split into months of 4 weeks 3 days, or 4 weeks 2 days one or 4 weeks exactly or 4 weeks and 1 day every four years which seems overly complicated especially if you don't know the '31 Days have September' poem.
How we divide up days, months, and years has been tinkered with over the years and many people have come up with ideas of how to simplify the passing of time such as he 1963 idea where the year is divided into five 73-day seasons which was silly and obviously quite rightly ignored.
In the late-1990s Swatch introduced Internet Time , a digital metric-based on time zones where instead of hours and minutes, days were divided into beats with each lasting 1 minute and 26.4 seconds but again, it went away with other 90s ideas such as Tamagotchi's and  Britney Spears singing career.
The Mayan Long Count Calendar was suggested but it ended on December 21, 2012 with doomsday predictions and the end of life on Earth (spoiler: It never happened) and in the 1950's a bunch of Americans tried to apologise for the Nuclear Bomb and the future career of Seinfeld but creating The World Calendar with the year split into 4 quarters, each with 91 days and the League of Nations took a proper hard look at it but the Religious leaders poo-pooed it as it would disrupt weekly worship.
Stalin had a go with his The Soviet Revolutionary Calendar which had a five day week and no weekends but after some (very brave) workers complained he changed it to a six day week before quietly reinstating the 7-day week and to prove that Revolutions are a ghreat time to make calendar changes, the French dreamt up the Republican Calendar which had 12 months of three 10-day weeks and decimal time so 10 hours in a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute but the French ignored it and Napoleon binned the idea all together.
One idea, The International Fixed Calendar, does have some merit, it simply makes a year 13 months of exactly 4 weeks or 28 days long but we would still have to have a leap year every 4 years because the Earth inconveniently doesn't go around the Sun in exactly 364 days so no different to what we are used to now which is we get a leap year if the year is divisible by 100...but not by 400 and not for the first three leap years every 400 years or if there is a Sunday on the 12th of the Month...or something like that. 

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