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New Years Eve
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 31 Dec 2025
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The point isn't arbitrary. It's the winter solstice. It just drifted a bit due to history and stuff.
It's Xmas that highjacked the winter solstice. New year used to be the start of spring (March) then the Romans decided to acknowledge the first 2 months, and then changed the start of the year to January so they could elect some officials to govern Spain instead of waiting an extra 2 months. It's about as arbitrary as it can get.
https://youtu.be/RrGHtl5qJfk About 24 minutes in to skip to ^
Is the fact that the start of spring is 2 months after the solstice arbitrary? Seems a pretty clear cause and effect.
But honestly we should make a new calendar that starts on the spring solstice, is subdivided by solstices, and doesn't have weeks (I just don't like them).
It'd still be a mess anyway. How do you subdivide your two year halves? What do your months look like? If they still exist.
Assuming you use equinoxes too, you can split your year in 4... Except since you've got 365 days to split, it will never be a perfect split.
And turns out the Earth doesn't care about synchronizing rotation and revolution and the year is actually about 365.24 days. so you still have freaking leap days every four years, except not every hundred year, except yes please every 400. Or whatever rule you make to fix the inevitable deviation.
I mean we define year as being from one spring equinox¹ to the next, no matter if it's 365 or 366 days. So if we made next year 1 it would be from 20th of March 2026 14:46 UTC to the next 20th of march 2027 20:25 UTC (The first day of the year could be day 0, the last of the old year but still also in new year, to account for the fact that it's not midnight.). The months would be replaced with quarters(seasons), ending on: June 21, September 23, December 21. Every year the dates would slightly shift because of the way orbits work, but there is no leap year math.
The first quarter, spring, has 93 days, the second, summer, 94 and so on. These will probably be subdivided a multitude of ways. Quickly sketching I found 6 * 4 * 4 - (3 or 4) which seems to work, though I'm naturally draw to base6 due to it being highly composite. This makes 24 days in a quarter-season. A nice analogue to the hours.
I think this calendar works better because it doesn't attempt to add any human control over a completely chaotic system: Earths orbit speed and rotational period. The underlying principle is chaotic and humans should build systems that are build on top of this natural disorder. By attempting to define and control disorder you must create so many convoluted rules (Like the leap day rule). Our calendar is an example of the human desire to "fix" nature to our own way of life instead of leaning to coexist with the natural disorderly processes that govern our lives. It's the same mindset that gives us the blatant disregard for the natural resources or climate.
This is a rather anarchic position but that's because I cannot help but inject anarchic rhetoric into my thought process due to so much of the way we live has been in blatantly build using archic concepts, even the calendar is dripping with it.
¹: Accidentally called it solstice sense I forgot there's a different word.
The 365.2422 days per celestial year is a math error we can fix.
We need to adjust the length of days and seconds but we can get rid of it completely if we wanted to.
It's not like noon means the maximum of the suns arc or sunset and sunrise don't already shift throughout the year.
The only thing that stops it is the momentum of a human measurement error.
If we use 366 we just get slightly shorter days by about 3 minutes. All of these time measurements are more arbitrary than feet and inches. Science back filled the bullshit with physical constants and there is no reason we cannot tie a proper system into alternative physics constants.
A year is a rotation of seasons. It has nothing to do with the day-night cycle. That should absolutely be separate.
And the 365.2422 isn't a math error. It's a mathematic ratio, rotation around the sun / rotation around itself. and it should absolutely be upheld.
The mathematical error os not basing our time counting on that ratio. The number is only 365.2422 because our second, hours, days are too long/short.
We can just decide we want one rotation to be exactly 366 units and then work backwards from there to determine new units.
A day is defined as a single rotation around earths axis. A year is a single rotation around the sun. The 356.2422 is the result of those two definitions. Earth takes 356.2422 rotations around its axis to rotate around the sun. That is a fact. You could define a unit to be 366th of a rotation around the sun, you could even call it a day, but as a result you lose the reason a day is a useful unit: It's the time it takes for earth to spin around its axis, a far more useful definition than 366th of a year.
Days are defined by a different natural cycle, that of the earth's rotation around its axis. That happens 365.2422 times every time we go around the sun. You can't just assign the length of a day to something more convenient
A year is exactly 3 days!
But it's the middle of summer!