Monday, November 9, 2009

Burning Questions

For some reason, I woke up this morning wondering why there are leap years. It seems kind of silly to have to remember that every year that is divisible by four that can NOT be evenly divided by 100 unless it CAN be divided by 400 is a leap year. I understand that we do that to keep the Gregorian Calendar we follow in sync with the Earth's revolution around the sun, but wouldn't it make more sense to just redefine the word "year" to mean 365.2425 days (the average year since the Gregorian Calendar was introduced) instead of 365? If you like whole numbers, there could still be the current 365 days a year, but a "day" would have to be redefined to be 24.016 hours. And if you want to keep that number at the current 24, of course, an "hour" would have to be redefined to be 60.04 minutes, etc.

Now I know there'd be some resistance from, oh say, the Timex company at first, since they'd have to redesign all their watches, but in the long run I think it would be a good thing.

I think about these things.

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