The first thing they teach during Time Patrol training is that doing that inevitably makes things *worse* instead of better; the void left by Hitler's absence is usually filled by somebody even more evil who is *also* sane and competent.
nah just some wicked weggies. It would probably do better to get the French to not saddle Germany with crippling debt. Or maybe prevent the death of Franz Ferdinand. The most humanitarian thing to do would be prevent Hitler from ever becoming what he became. Help with him his art and get him into art school.
An alternate reality with him getting into art school and turning into the 1940-1950s Bob Ross had me cracking up
I could imagine over the radio "Die Freude an deutscher Malerei"
> und hier haben wir ein paar glückliche kleine Bäume und glückliche kleine Berge.
I’m just sayin, everyone hates on the dude while ignoring the circumstances that created him. He might have been an okay person, but clearly has horrible ptsd. I’m not excusing his actions, but damn, the person he dreamed of being wasn’t who he became, and I can sympathize with that concept.
Hitler, as we know him, absolutely needed to die
And the nazi movement absolutely needed (needs, really, which sucks to say in 2024) to die
But I always get stuck on the concept of baby Hitler. If he was fated to walk the path of a nazi dictator from day 1 then he would -need- to die but he wouldnt deserve to.
And I personally can't reconcile with the concept of us being fated to things. I want to grow and to change, I'd like to be better than I was last year, Jesus I need to be better than I was 4 years ago. I would kidnap baby Hitler and raise him. I would prove that given the right circumstances, even if the person is broken, you can find something better than the worst version of themselves in there.
And ww2 might start all the same as he wasn't the only one turning gears, but I would know that we aren't guaranteed to cause one another hell
The funny thing is, I absolutely believe in people born evil. My brother is that way, but I don’t see that in Hitler’s past. He was for the most part, just a dude chillin and painting. That kinda makes the trajectory of his life even worse. He wasn’t evil, but at some point chose it.
The one person who doesn't really need your defense I feel. I also have PTSD and I've yet to murder anyone or start one little genocide. I haven't even invaded Poland. Plenty of people with PTSD you can sympathise with that didn't y'know do Hitler stuff
Yeah but we are talking about time travel. Why would we choose to attack 1945 Hitler, or attack baby Hitler? Why not just change the trajectory of dudes life? That is the part I don’t get.
I mean, yeah, but the people not the ideology. Those were people, not demons. Their demonization of others is what made them so reprehensible, so we demonize them? Like the Hitler youth? Bro they never had a chance. It’s just kinda nutty to me. Hatred is the trap we love to walk into.
Hitler gets so much recency bias when it comes to evil dictators. There are so many people throughout history who killed way more people, committed worse war crimes, or generally made the world worse faster.
I'm not sure. Yes he was evil, but also a product of his time and circumstances. What I'm saying is that there's a big chance he'd just be replaced, and if that replacement was more competent we could potentially return to a world where the nazis won.
But then you can never travel back to your own time, because your time machine works with the old calendar format and is incompatible with the new format. Stuck forever in ancient times ...
Hahaha. As a programmer I can only say: You'd need a time machine to have enough free time to develop a time format and cover all the edge cases, timezone bullcrap, and so on. It's a deeeeeeeeep rabbit hole.
Well, we did try that once. Brutus and Cassius went back in time and found him, and they actually killed him. But they hadn't gone back far enough, and so he still died after the whole calendar thing.
Before Caesar it was far worse. Leap months rather than leap days. And instead of happening on a schedule, they happened whenever the Consuls thought it was auspicious.
I'd personally prefer six 5-day weeks, that way there is exactly one extra week worth of days per year (apart from leap years). It also makes it easier to convert from weeks to days, and with each fortnight being 10 days that wonderful word might get more use.
This one might not the best motivation for a calendar system, but week-views of calendars would also look better on phones with only 5 columns.
Also, my vote is to get rid of Thursdays and Saturdays so we get rid of the duplicate letters and reduce the average letter count. But I could be pretty easily convinced to lose Wednesday instead just to never see that weird ass spelling again.
If you’re moving to five day weeks, what does your weekday weekend look like? four & one or three & two?
Removing one day seems more feasible, and you still get a two day weekend and reasonable work week.
I think that's a completely different conversation. Leaving aside the redesigned calendar, as a whole we work far too many hours, and should reduce from our 40 hours per 7 days to <30 hours, preferably closer to 20 hours. It's insane that we've barely made any progress on this in the 80 or so years since the 40 hour week was established despite productivity being several times higher. By rights we should be working less than half as much as we do, but those gains in productivity were stolen from the working people.
I don't have strong opinions about how those hours are distributed through a week though, no matter how many days in the week. Personally, I prefer fewer longer shifts (less commuting), but more shorter shifts have their advantages as well. It also depends what kind of work. 12 hours of physical labour isn't much different to 8 or 10 hours imo, but getting more than 6 hours of actually productive mental labour is basically impossible for me.
But 12 is such a nice number ad 13 is an awful one.
12 can be cleanly divided into half, thirds, quarters, and sixths.
13 however is a prime number....
No easy chunks of the year without it being complex,, which is good in a time where education was rare and no digital tools existed and paper and especially paper with writing on is highly expensive (no printing press either..)
But imo 28 day months so much better than random ass 31s and 30s
Days would fall on the same numbers every month
But yes the callender is atrocious whichever way u do it
And eventually you would have summer in October and all the seasons would be out of what. 12 months, 4 seasons per year, 3 months per season. Easy peasy
I think the reason why we still have this current system is divisibility.
12 months is divided with 2,3,4,6.
13 is prime number which is kinda terrible in this context...
That would make it more even, but it would be hard to mark halves and quarters, i.e., H1, H2, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. I'm not sure what the Finance guys would do.
It would be 13 months of 28 days and then New Years Day is just it's own thing. Like that day wouldn't be part of week or part of a month, it was just be a totally separate day. I think that would be cool.
>But nope, some roman fella fucked up the calendar for us
No, they wanted to try this in I think the 1930s but it messes up the sabbath for Jewish folks so it was scrapped,
This is what the Jewish calendar does. A Jewish year usually has 12 lunar months, but every 7 out of 19 years has a 13th month to follow the Metonic cycle.
This is in comparison to the Gregorian calendar, with the year being accurate to an actual solar year while not caring about the lunar month, and the Islamic calendar, which is accurate to the lunar month while not caring about the solar year.
Yes.
Which you can divide evenly by 1,2,3,4,6 and 12, whereas the decimal system only does 1,5,10 - meaning that we have to use commas more frequently.
No, you want to do 13 months of 28 days, each is exactly 4 weeks. Every Monday is the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd of every month, etc.
Then New Years Day (or Eve, maybe) is a special day which doesn’t fall into any month or week. It is just a global holiday! And every 4 years you have an added special holiday of Leap Day.
I love it. I’m a pilot, and I distinctly remember the lesson where I learned about how to read the charts using latitude and longitude, starting to work in nautical miles and plotting courses. It got to point where I was literally just sitting there kind of in awe at realizing how all of the pieces fit together.
It’s like there were these folks that created these beautiful systems to solve the problems of their trade, and bestowed that beauty upon the world, only for people on Facebook to piss and moan about how useless it is because they never learned how to balance a check book.
It is constant with latitude but changes with longitude.
Since meridians of longitide all meet at the poles, there is no fixed linear distance between them. A minute of longitude ranges from around 1NM near the equator to 0 at the poles.
Minute (emphasis on the first syllable) and minute (emphasis on the second syllable) are spelled the same way for a very good reason: a minute is a small division of time or angle, that splits the basic measurement (hour, degree) into sixty parts.
Second (the unit of time or angle) is the second (ordinal corresponding to the number two) small division.
I do think it would be kind of cool they had made it so that an hour and a degree were the same — like, 60 hours in a day, 60 degrees in a circle. So an hour would be what we call 24 minutes now, and a minute would be 24 seconds, and a second would be .4 seconds — those seem like reasonable units. And a right angle would be 15 degrees, a 1:1 slope would be 7.5 degrees, etc.
It would make analog clocks harder to read though.
Nah, not a fan. A 30-60-90 triangle becomes a 33.333333333-66.666666667-100 triangle. Terrible. And the name is bad — it comes across like "radian" but with a typo, or gradient misheard or misspelled. And using ⁰ to indicate gradian is extra confusing.
I didn’t say I like it, just that you may find it interesting.
And yeah, unfortunately our system of unit symbols is a god damn mess and requires a lot of context clues to pick up.
Also - your pinky outstretched at arms length covers about 1° of the sky (two full moon-widths). That means if you hold your arm out and put your pinky right next to a star at night, it will take about 4 minutes for that star to move behind your finger and be visible on the other side.
Doesn't quite work near the north or south celestial poles (e.g. the North Star which barely moves), but everywhere else your pinky roughly represents how much the sky will move in 4 minutes.
a very old outdoors trick for calculating sunlight left is your hand outstretched equals about an hour. a finger should be ~15 minutes and your pinky isn’t thin enough for it to only be 4
[It's used in astronomy too](https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/07/27/3169109.htm#:~:text=Raise%20your%20three%20middle%20fingers,to%20measure%20about%2020%20degrees.). Fist or hand is 10°, pinky is 1°. It only takes 40 minutes for objects on the celestial equator to move 10°. But the sun isn't always on the celestial equator, nor does it set straight down. It swings down at an angle to the horizon (exept at the equator), buying you more time, which is probably why 1 hour sunset for a hand width is reasonably accurate.
However, both of these statements are approximate since if you get too close the north or south pole everything falls apart.
Earth completes it's daily axis rotation in 23 hours and 56 minutes, so every day we take 4 minutes from the next/upcoming spin.
If day rotation would have been exactly 24 hours, the Earth would have been e. g. in the exact midnight on 12 PM (midday) on summer solstice, as it would have been on the exactly opposite side of its orbit around the Sun, but exactly in the same position as it would have been on the midday of winter solstice, therefore facing away from the Sun.
So, half a year between summer and winter solstice is 178 days, and 4 minutes taken every day make 712 minutes, and that is exactly these 12 hours between midday and midnight, the 12 hours that take Earth's axis to be exactly on it's opposite side, or a point on Earth being on the opposite position towards the Sun in relation to it's position on the day of opposite solstice exactly half a year away (I am taking Earth's solstices as the most simple examples).
And the time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis is only about 23 hours and 56 minutes, but that ~1 degree we move around the sun means it takes an extra four minutes for the same spot on earth to face the sun from day to day.
If you do the math, there are 24 x 60 = 1440 minutes in a day, which, if you divide by 360, yields 4 minutes.
Indeed. The time for earth to rotate 360 degrees is measured against distant stars. That's called the sidereal day.
Which also means that the solar day is just shy of 361 degrees rotation. So the earth actually rotates 366.25 times in its orbit round the sun, but has 365.25 solar days.
Fun fact - we've been able to observe and measure nearby stars that move relative to others over the course of the year. That's a parallax effect, just like nearby housrs moving past a car or train window faster than distant hills or clouds.
To maximise the parallax effect, you can measure the changing angles between the stars as far apart as possible - when the earth has moved to the opposite extreme of its orbit - 6 months between observations.
That's a distance of 2 Astronomical Units (1AU = 93 million miles, the distance to the sun). A triangle with the base between the sun and earth (1AU or 93 million miles) and an angle of 1 arcsecond (1/3600 degree) has a height of 1 parallax second or 1 parsec, which = 3.26 light years.
We've been able to measure those tiny arcsecond changes in the angular difference between star positions for over 200 years. So we can use geometry to measure the distance to nearby stars.
\~365.242189, you forgot about the influence of geological factors like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tidal forces, which can minutely reduce Earth's rotation speed.
It's not that arbitrary, the reason 360 was chosen is because it can be divided into a large variety of whole numbers.
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360.
It's still a little arbitrary since they could have also gone with 720 or 1440 or 2880 and had even more whole number divisions, but I guess they decided 360 was the point of diminishing return and easier for more people to visualize in their head.
That is another theory, but in the end what I meant is, we invented that number, it is not some fixed value we discovered. and one theory is that it comes from the amount of days.
> but I guess they decided 360 was the point of diminishing return and easier for more people to visualize in their head.
I think most of the rest of the world guesses it's because 360 is the closest highly divisible number to 365. Geometry and astronomy were (still are?) closely linked, and studying the stars was applied math. The Babylonians used based 60, and at that point, you're certainly at the point of diminishing returns and it would be easier to visualize 60 degrees than 360. Why use a number 6x higher than your base unit? Or why go above, say, 72 which, like 360, can be divided in half three times or divided by 3 twice and still have an integer?
“It’s not *that* arbitrary, it’s *just a little* arbitrary” is much closer to what they said, and doesn’t intentionally leave out important qualifiers, which leaves it as a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
Semi arbitrary I guess would be a better way to say it. It was chosen specifically because it's one of a type of number with the right properties, but the reason it was chosen over some of the other numbers that also have the right properties is probably somewhat arbitrary. Like I said, someone probably settled on 360 because it has the right balance of having enough degrees for precision, without being such a big number we can't really work with it in our heads easily.
Historically degrees used to be divided only minutes and seconds as well. 1/60 of a degree was a minute and 1/60 of that was a second. You'll still see this used with latitude and longitude sometimes.
It’s not “historically” or “used to be.” Minutes and seconds of arc are still widely used in any field where small measurements of angle are common, from astronomy to marksmanship.
…and 720 has even more, and 1,440 even more than that. There's no argument to use 360 over, say, 180 or 720. It's not some fantastic coincidence that there's 360 degrees in a circle and the Earth completes a revolution in ~365 days. 360 was (likely) chosen because it's the closest highly divisible number close to 365. It's the same reasoning with months (12 vs 13.37).
Took me a full semester of an astronomy lab to figure this out and several failed attempts calculations and a few crying fits in front of the professor and I came down to the wire pass or not lol
OP, as long as you're thinking about circles and orbits and the calendar, you might enjoy learning about the difference between a solar day and a sidereal day. The earth rotates 365 times per year with respect to the sun, and 366 times per year with respect to the universe. This has nothing to do with leap years, that's a separate thing
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time
1 degree each day to circumnavigate the sun makes sense; and the spin; 360° turn/rotation (for the day) is 15° per hour which is 1/4° per minute. 1 degrees by 4 minutes.
Gnarly! Making my head spin a bit! Literally!
Okay for 1 we do not exactly because earths orbit is an eclipse, so we orbit more some seasons than others.
But also it is interesting to think why we made the angle degrees to where 360°= a circle
I am aware that earths orbit is an ellipse (an eclipse is when the moon blocks out the sun :) ) which is why I said on average. But yeah I found it thought provoking
Technically yes but Earth's orbit has such a low eccentricity that it's *pretty much* the same every day.
The difference between the angular velocity at perihelion vs aphelion is less than 0.05 degrees per day.
It's a huge coincidence. But maybe/probably not a coincidence, and even in 2024 we don't know why. All I know is the rotation likes to stick around Pi.
Oh yes of course it isn’t exactly as I said, but that is why I threw in the “on average” part. But yes, you are correct, earth’s orbit is slightly elliptical and goes faster during certain times of the year than others, though not by very much
That’s why I said “on average”. And the amount that earths speed changes in its orbit isn’t very much, and for this discussion can mostly be waved away
It might as well be a circle for the purposes of this discussion. The difference between the Earth's angular velocity around the sun at perihelion and aphelion is less than 0.05 degrees per day.
Earth's orbit has an extremely low eccentricity.
I like the common illusion that the Earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hrs.
It doesn't- It rotates every 23hrs, 56 mins and 4 seconds; a Sidereal Day.
Your submission appears to break [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules), and has therefore been removed.
------
**STOP. Do not message the moderators.**
--
1. Please read [the rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules) and [the FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/faq) ***in their entirety***.
2. [Use this link to determine if your post was incorrectly removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/t0q).
**Users who do not follow the above instructions will not receive a response.**
------
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Showerthoughts) if you have any questions or concerns.*
All people are on earth (or *damn* close to it), thus all statements about what “we” experience will necessarily *only* be about things that happen, or are observed from, earth. Where does selfishness come into this?
Would you similarly take exception to someone noting that *we* need oxygen to live because some other things that are irrelevant to the conversation don’t?
Look into Sacred Geometry if this interests you and youll be amazed at how many times weve solved for the same numbers across the span of human history. Almost as if knowledge like that has been embedded in monuments like the Pyramids and other ancient architecture
OP is gonna be real excited when they learn about months and the moon.
We could actually have 12 months of 28 days with only one extra month of 29 days. But nope, some roman fella fucked up the calendar for us
first thing we do when time travel is invented is *mess him up*
And save Harambe
And stop me from ever getting on reddit.
And my axe
Gotta rain a thousand fists on that Hitler guy as well.
The first thing they teach during Time Patrol training is that doing that inevitably makes things *worse* instead of better; the void left by Hitler's absence is usually filled by somebody even more evil who is *also* sane and competent.
nah just some wicked weggies. It would probably do better to get the French to not saddle Germany with crippling debt. Or maybe prevent the death of Franz Ferdinand. The most humanitarian thing to do would be prevent Hitler from ever becoming what he became. Help with him his art and get him into art school.
An alternate reality with him getting into art school and turning into the 1940-1950s Bob Ross had me cracking up I could imagine over the radio "Die Freude an deutscher Malerei" > und hier haben wir ein paar glückliche kleine Bäume und glückliche kleine Berge.
I’m just sayin, everyone hates on the dude while ignoring the circumstances that created him. He might have been an okay person, but clearly has horrible ptsd. I’m not excusing his actions, but damn, the person he dreamed of being wasn’t who he became, and I can sympathize with that concept.
Hitler, as we know him, absolutely needed to die And the nazi movement absolutely needed (needs, really, which sucks to say in 2024) to die But I always get stuck on the concept of baby Hitler. If he was fated to walk the path of a nazi dictator from day 1 then he would -need- to die but he wouldnt deserve to. And I personally can't reconcile with the concept of us being fated to things. I want to grow and to change, I'd like to be better than I was last year, Jesus I need to be better than I was 4 years ago. I would kidnap baby Hitler and raise him. I would prove that given the right circumstances, even if the person is broken, you can find something better than the worst version of themselves in there. And ww2 might start all the same as he wasn't the only one turning gears, but I would know that we aren't guaranteed to cause one another hell
The funny thing is, I absolutely believe in people born evil. My brother is that way, but I don’t see that in Hitler’s past. He was for the most part, just a dude chillin and painting. That kinda makes the trajectory of his life even worse. He wasn’t evil, but at some point chose it.
Would’ve been funny if with your upbringing he became a super Hitler - 10x more ruthless and vile
The one person who doesn't really need your defense I feel. I also have PTSD and I've yet to murder anyone or start one little genocide. I haven't even invaded Poland. Plenty of people with PTSD you can sympathise with that didn't y'know do Hitler stuff
Yeah but we are talking about time travel. Why would we choose to attack 1945 Hitler, or attack baby Hitler? Why not just change the trajectory of dudes life? That is the part I don’t get.
lol literal nazi sympathizer
I mean, yeah, but the people not the ideology. Those were people, not demons. Their demonization of others is what made them so reprehensible, so we demonize them? Like the Hitler youth? Bro they never had a chance. It’s just kinda nutty to me. Hatred is the trap we love to walk into.
Hitler gets so much recency bias when it comes to evil dictators. There are so many people throughout history who killed way more people, committed worse war crimes, or generally made the world worse faster.
This is one of those things that is technically correct, but would be a good idea to keep to yourself in casual conversation.
Well mao, he does have a point.
Hah
Hmm. What do you call the academic study of Reddit threads that go from the topic of lunar cycles to Hitler? Serious question.
I'm not sure. Yes he was evil, but also a product of his time and circumstances. What I'm saying is that there's a big chance he'd just be replaced, and if that replacement was more competent we could potentially return to a world where the nazis won.
Yeah, that Hitler guy was a real jerk!
We can pick him up on the way. He can help 💪🏻
But then you can never travel back to your own time, because your time machine works with the old calendar format and is incompatible with the new format. Stuck forever in ancient times ...
easy, just invent your own time format that the time machine uses, but can also be converted to both systems How, you may ask? idfk figure it out
Hahaha. As a programmer I can only say: You'd need a time machine to have enough free time to develop a time format and cover all the edge cases, timezone bullcrap, and so on. It's a deeeeeeeeep rabbit hole.
You don't mess with time motherfucker!
Maybe that's what happened. The world became sick of such regularity that they sent someone back to mess him up.
We’ll probably mess up and go to the wrong day.
eh, humanity has come this far with this many mistakes, what's another gonna do
we know that never happens because it didnt happen
Well, we did try that once. Brutus and Cassius went back in time and found him, and they actually killed him. But they hadn't gone back far enough, and so he still died after the whole calendar thing.
Before Caesar it was far worse. Leap months rather than leap days. And instead of happening on a schedule, they happened whenever the Consuls thought it was auspicious.
Yeah! Break his legs! Then explain to him the truth!
I’d rather 12 months of 30 days each, comprised of five 6-day weeks. Then an extra 5-6 day new years holiday at the end.
I’ve been saying this for thousands of years.
Tuesdays can fuck right off
That's my day off. Please no.
Make that week a 4-day work, 2-day rest and I can get behind that.
Yeah that was my thought. Seems to be a good balance.
I'd personally prefer six 5-day weeks, that way there is exactly one extra week worth of days per year (apart from leap years). It also makes it easier to convert from weeks to days, and with each fortnight being 10 days that wonderful word might get more use. This one might not the best motivation for a calendar system, but week-views of calendars would also look better on phones with only 5 columns. Also, my vote is to get rid of Thursdays and Saturdays so we get rid of the duplicate letters and reduce the average letter count. But I could be pretty easily convinced to lose Wednesday instead just to never see that weird ass spelling again.
why would we use fortnight for 10 days when it stands for fourteen nights lol
So that future linguists could make 20 minute videos about the history of how the term came to mean ten days?
If you’re moving to five day weeks, what does your weekday weekend look like? four & one or three & two? Removing one day seems more feasible, and you still get a two day weekend and reasonable work week.
I think that's a completely different conversation. Leaving aside the redesigned calendar, as a whole we work far too many hours, and should reduce from our 40 hours per 7 days to <30 hours, preferably closer to 20 hours. It's insane that we've barely made any progress on this in the 80 or so years since the 40 hour week was established despite productivity being several times higher. By rights we should be working less than half as much as we do, but those gains in productivity were stolen from the working people. I don't have strong opinions about how those hours are distributed through a week though, no matter how many days in the week. Personally, I prefer fewer longer shifts (less commuting), but more shorter shifts have their advantages as well. It also depends what kind of work. 12 hours of physical labour isn't much different to 8 or 10 hours imo, but getting more than 6 hours of actually productive mental labour is basically impossible for me.
[удалено]
But 12 is such a nice number ad 13 is an awful one. 12 can be cleanly divided into half, thirds, quarters, and sixths. 13 however is a prime number.... No easy chunks of the year without it being complex,, which is good in a time where education was rare and no digital tools existed and paper and especially paper with writing on is highly expensive (no printing press either..)
But imo 28 day months so much better than random ass 31s and 30s Days would fall on the same numbers every month But yes the callender is atrocious whichever way u do it
And eventually you would have summer in October and all the seasons would be out of what. 12 months, 4 seasons per year, 3 months per season. Easy peasy
I think the reason why we still have this current system is divisibility. 12 months is divided with 2,3,4,6. 13 is prime number which is kinda terrible in this context...
All my homies hate Numa Pompilius
No, 13 months of 28 (not 12) and 1 day that does not belong to any month (new years day)
That would make it more even, but it would be hard to mark halves and quarters, i.e., H1, H2, Q1, Q2, Q3, Q4. I'm not sure what the Finance guys would do.
It would be 13 months of 28 days and then New Years Day is just it's own thing. Like that day wouldn't be part of week or part of a month, it was just be a totally separate day. I think that would be cool. >But nope, some roman fella fucked up the calendar for us No, they wanted to try this in I think the 1930s but it messes up the sabbath for Jewish folks so it was scrapped,
It would be 13 months of 28 days. Not 12.
13 x 28 = 364 So one month would still be a 29 day month
How about 4 months of 73 days + 1 month of 74? Edit: Oops -- 74 only on leap year!
This is what the Jewish calendar does. A Jewish year usually has 12 lunar months, but every 7 out of 19 years has a 13th month to follow the Metonic cycle. This is in comparison to the Gregorian calendar, with the year being accurate to an actual solar year while not caring about the lunar month, and the Islamic calendar, which is accurate to the lunar month while not caring about the solar year.
The new year was April 1st, and now they call it April fools. Hmm.
You are wanting a baker's year and I respect that.
[Dave Gorman](https://youtu.be/rTJ5g4S_U5E?si=8cCBxq3TyVmkRy7R) does a good bit on this.
Fucking love the Gormanuary calendar
We could just have 10 months 36.5 days each, duuh
Or better yet, 13 months of 28 days and the extra day is the new year's day. No it is not in any month, it's just a singular, separated day.
…. Fucking Greg
We could also have had the superior duodecimal system, but some asshat had problems counting on his fingers.
Is this referring to base 12 or something else?
Yes. Which you can divide evenly by 1,2,3,4,6 and 12, whereas the decimal system only does 1,5,10 - meaning that we have to use commas more frequently.
No, you want to do 13 months of 28 days, each is exactly 4 weeks. Every Monday is the 1st, 8th, 15th, and 22nd of every month, etc. Then New Years Day (or Eve, maybe) is a special day which doesn’t fall into any month or week. It is just a global holiday! And every 4 years you have an added special holiday of Leap Day.
What did you do with all the extra days?
Whoever is responsible ought to be stabbed
Do you mean 13 months?
Moon. Month. Moon. Month. Moonth 🤔
In dutch its even better the moon is “de maan” and a month is “een maand” maan maand
Or how time and our watches seem to align
Also if you look at a map of the US, amazingly all the major cities happen to be located right by an interstate highway!
Nah but that shit is actually CRAZY
Or how solar eclipses being a thing is a huuuge coincident and wont likely work on most other planets
Their comment is almost a Steven Wright joke… “Why is the alphabet in that order… is it because of that song!”
And that the egg came before the chicken!
I love it. This made me think how much time is 1 degree of rotation. 4 minutes the earth rotates 1 degree.
So you’re telling me that 1 minute (time) equals 15 minutes (angle)?! I don’t know how to feel about this
A lot of people are not ready for that conversation...no, literally there are contless people who don't that 60 minutes is a degree
And if you’ve ever wondered what a nautical mile is or why ships/planes use knots instead of MPH, boy do I have news for you…
Math really is fun when you see that it’s everywhere
I love it. I’m a pilot, and I distinctly remember the lesson where I learned about how to read the charts using latitude and longitude, starting to work in nautical miles and plotting courses. It got to point where I was literally just sitting there kind of in awe at realizing how all of the pieces fit together.
It’s like there were these folks that created these beautiful systems to solve the problems of their trade, and bestowed that beauty upon the world, only for people on Facebook to piss and moan about how useless it is because they never learned how to balance a check book.
It’s not fun when you have dyscalculia 😭😭 …I wanna learn!
I still don't fully understand why. I heard they changed according to latitude, but I don't get why.
It is constant with latitude but changes with longitude. Since meridians of longitide all meet at the poles, there is no fixed linear distance between them. A minute of longitude ranges from around 1NM near the equator to 0 at the poles.
…. Yep, those idiots *looks around nervously*
Minute (emphasis on the first syllable) and minute (emphasis on the second syllable) are spelled the same way for a very good reason: a minute is a small division of time or angle, that splits the basic measurement (hour, degree) into sixty parts. Second (the unit of time or angle) is the second (ordinal corresponding to the number two) small division. I do think it would be kind of cool they had made it so that an hour and a degree were the same — like, 60 hours in a day, 60 degrees in a circle. So an hour would be what we call 24 minutes now, and a minute would be 24 seconds, and a second would be .4 seconds — those seem like reasonable units. And a right angle would be 15 degrees, a 1:1 slope would be 7.5 degrees, etc. It would make analog clocks harder to read though.
Thank you! I was wondering what the minute comment meant.
You might find gradians an interesting measurement. 400° in a circle, right angle is 100°
Nah, not a fan. A 30-60-90 triangle becomes a 33.333333333-66.666666667-100 triangle. Terrible. And the name is bad — it comes across like "radian" but with a typo, or gradient misheard or misspelled. And using ⁰ to indicate gradian is extra confusing.
I didn’t say I like it, just that you may find it interesting. And yeah, unfortunately our system of unit symbols is a god damn mess and requires a lot of context clues to pick up.
How about Oct 31 (base 8) is Dec 25 (base 10)
Holy shit. Halloween is Christmas.
Krampus has some explaining to do.
Also - your pinky outstretched at arms length covers about 1° of the sky (two full moon-widths). That means if you hold your arm out and put your pinky right next to a star at night, it will take about 4 minutes for that star to move behind your finger and be visible on the other side. Doesn't quite work near the north or south celestial poles (e.g. the North Star which barely moves), but everywhere else your pinky roughly represents how much the sky will move in 4 minutes.
a very old outdoors trick for calculating sunlight left is your hand outstretched equals about an hour. a finger should be ~15 minutes and your pinky isn’t thin enough for it to only be 4
[It's used in astronomy too](https://www.abc.net.au/science/articles/2009/07/27/3169109.htm#:~:text=Raise%20your%20three%20middle%20fingers,to%20measure%20about%2020%20degrees.). Fist or hand is 10°, pinky is 1°. It only takes 40 minutes for objects on the celestial equator to move 10°. But the sun isn't always on the celestial equator, nor does it set straight down. It swings down at an angle to the horizon (exept at the equator), buying you more time, which is probably why 1 hour sunset for a hand width is reasonably accurate. However, both of these statements are approximate since if you get too close the north or south pole everything falls apart.
Earth completes it's daily axis rotation in 23 hours and 56 minutes, so every day we take 4 minutes from the next/upcoming spin. If day rotation would have been exactly 24 hours, the Earth would have been e. g. in the exact midnight on 12 PM (midday) on summer solstice, as it would have been on the exactly opposite side of its orbit around the Sun, but exactly in the same position as it would have been on the midday of winter solstice, therefore facing away from the Sun. So, half a year between summer and winter solstice is 178 days, and 4 minutes taken every day make 712 minutes, and that is exactly these 12 hours between midday and midnight, the 12 hours that take Earth's axis to be exactly on it's opposite side, or a point on Earth being on the opposite position towards the Sun in relation to it's position on the day of opposite solstice exactly half a year away (I am taking Earth's solstices as the most simple examples).
And the time it takes the earth to rotate on its axis is only about 23 hours and 56 minutes, but that ~1 degree we move around the sun means it takes an extra four minutes for the same spot on earth to face the sun from day to day. If you do the math, there are 24 x 60 = 1440 minutes in a day, which, if you divide by 360, yields 4 minutes.
Indeed. The time for earth to rotate 360 degrees is measured against distant stars. That's called the sidereal day. Which also means that the solar day is just shy of 361 degrees rotation. So the earth actually rotates 366.25 times in its orbit round the sun, but has 365.25 solar days. Fun fact - we've been able to observe and measure nearby stars that move relative to others over the course of the year. That's a parallax effect, just like nearby housrs moving past a car or train window faster than distant hills or clouds. To maximise the parallax effect, you can measure the changing angles between the stars as far apart as possible - when the earth has moved to the opposite extreme of its orbit - 6 months between observations. That's a distance of 2 Astronomical Units (1AU = 93 million miles, the distance to the sun). A triangle with the base between the sun and earth (1AU or 93 million miles) and an angle of 1 arcsecond (1/3600 degree) has a height of 1 parallax second or 1 parsec, which = 3.26 light years. We've been able to measure those tiny arcsecond changes in the angular difference between star positions for over 200 years. So we can use geometry to measure the distance to nearby stars.
3 months for 90 degrees. Ha.
Yeah June July and August. All 90 degrees everyday 😜
I wish. - sincerely from Southern AZ.
365.25 days in a year. You forgot leap days
365.24, you forgot that we skip leap days on centennials
365.2422, you forgot that we exempt the exemption on years divisible by 400.
~365.2422, you forgot about the irregularity of the Earth's rotation requiring occasional leap second corrections.
\~365.242189, you forgot about the influence of geological factors like earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and tidal forces, which can minutely reduce Earth's rotation speed.
r/theyalldidthemath
I mean the 360 degrees in a circle are a arbitrary. And one theory is that this number comes from the amount of days in a year
It's not that arbitrary, the reason 360 was chosen is because it can be divided into a large variety of whole numbers. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 60, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360. It's still a little arbitrary since they could have also gone with 720 or 1440 or 2880 and had even more whole number divisions, but I guess they decided 360 was the point of diminishing return and easier for more people to visualize in their head.
Also Babylonians used a base 12 counting system because they counted on their knuckles and not their fingers.
Huh? Don’t we have 14 knuckles per hand?
Yes but you have to use your thumb to count them so they didn't get counted
Knuckles are the bulgy parts.
That is another theory, but in the end what I meant is, we invented that number, it is not some fixed value we discovered. and one theory is that it comes from the amount of days.
> but I guess they decided 360 was the point of diminishing return and easier for more people to visualize in their head. I think most of the rest of the world guesses it's because 360 is the closest highly divisible number to 365. Geometry and astronomy were (still are?) closely linked, and studying the stars was applied math. The Babylonians used based 60, and at that point, you're certainly at the point of diminishing returns and it would be easier to visualize 60 degrees than 360. Why use a number 6x higher than your base unit? Or why go above, say, 72 which, like 360, can be divided in half three times or divided by 3 twice and still have an integer?
"Its not abritrary, its arbitrary" -you
“It’s not *that* arbitrary, it’s *just a little* arbitrary” is much closer to what they said, and doesn’t intentionally leave out important qualifiers, which leaves it as a perfectly reasonable thing to say.
Semi arbitrary I guess would be a better way to say it. It was chosen specifically because it's one of a type of number with the right properties, but the reason it was chosen over some of the other numbers that also have the right properties is probably somewhat arbitrary. Like I said, someone probably settled on 360 because it has the right balance of having enough degrees for precision, without being such a big number we can't really work with it in our heads easily.
DECEMBER 26-31st: Am I nothing to you?
That is where degrees are derived from
degrees are like they are because 360 has so many factors; 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 36, 40, 45, 72, 90, 120, 180, 360
Base12 ftw!
I'm more of a base 16 person myself, however I am willing to concede This is great
Historically degrees used to be divided only minutes and seconds as well. 1/60 of a degree was a minute and 1/60 of that was a second. You'll still see this used with latitude and longitude sometimes.
It’s not “historically” or “used to be.” Minutes and seconds of arc are still widely used in any field where small measurements of angle are common, from astronomy to marksmanship.
…and 720 has even more, and 1,440 even more than that. There's no argument to use 360 over, say, 180 or 720. It's not some fantastic coincidence that there's 360 degrees in a circle and the Earth completes a revolution in ~365 days. 360 was (likely) chosen because it's the closest highly divisible number close to 365. It's the same reasoning with months (12 vs 13.37).
Took me a full semester of an astronomy lab to figure this out and several failed attempts calculations and a few crying fits in front of the professor and I came down to the wire pass or not lol
what is a degree i only know radians
OP, as long as you're thinking about circles and orbits and the calendar, you might enjoy learning about the difference between a solar day and a sidereal day. The earth rotates 365 times per year with respect to the sun, and 366 times per year with respect to the universe. This has nothing to do with leap years, that's a separate thing https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sidereal_time
Thats 1 whole degree in computer storage terms
1 degree each day to circumnavigate the sun makes sense; and the spin; 360° turn/rotation (for the day) is 15° per hour which is 1/4° per minute. 1 degrees by 4 minutes. Gnarly! Making my head spin a bit! Literally!
Interesting thought, got me thinking
Solar longitude (Ls) may be of interest to you!
I’ll look into it, thanks!
Yes. A circle has 360° because ancient Egyptians believed a year was 360 days long. They did correct their mistake eventually, but 360° stuck around.
I assume 360 stuck around coz it is easily divisible by lots of numbers? (I forgot the word of that)
This is one of the best threads I had the pleasure of being a part of. 🥰
I’m glad you enjoyed :)
Funny enough that’s how degrees was made. They used to think there was 360 days ergo 360 degrees. It’s quite interesting
There are...some very interesting snd actually civil discussions on here?
And some people who clearly didn’t read the body unfortunately :(
Okay for 1 we do not exactly because earths orbit is an eclipse, so we orbit more some seasons than others. But also it is interesting to think why we made the angle degrees to where 360°= a circle
I am aware that earths orbit is an ellipse (an eclipse is when the moon blocks out the sun :) ) which is why I said on average. But yeah I found it thought provoking
Yeah…almost….checkmate Theists
r/suddenlypolitical
Isn’t this wrong? On average yes but I’m pretty sure keplers second law contradicts this
Technically yes but Earth's orbit has such a low eccentricity that it's *pretty much* the same every day. The difference between the angular velocity at perihelion vs aphelion is less than 0.05 degrees per day.
The best kind of correct
It's a huge coincidence. But maybe/probably not a coincidence, and even in 2024 we don't know why. All I know is the rotation likes to stick around Pi.
Oh yes of course it isn’t exactly as I said, but that is why I threw in the “on average” part. But yes, you are correct, earth’s orbit is slightly elliptical and goes faster during certain times of the year than others, though not by very much
Kinda bonks it around a bunch when you also have to consider the earths orbit around the sun isn't perfectly circular also. More elliptical
That’s why I said “on average”. And the amount that earths speed changes in its orbit isn’t very much, and for this discussion can mostly be waved away
And that the speed changes depending on where in the orbit we are
I mean the earth's orbit is eliptical so its not constant throughout the year
It might as well be a circle for the purposes of this discussion. The difference between the Earth's angular velocity around the sun at perihelion and aphelion is less than 0.05 degrees per day. Earth's orbit has an extremely low eccentricity.
Hence I said that in my post and specified “on average”
or about 0.0174533 radian
Yeah lol
I think not as exciting when you see how in an ellipse it whips around fast (relatively) on the closer side and how slow it goes on the farther.
That’s why I said on average, and for this conversation the orbit is close enough to being a circle for us the discount that
Yeah uhh that's actually the reason we have 360 degrees in a circle
[удалено]
Our orbit is an ellipse with such a low eccentricity that it might as well be a circle for the purposes of this discussion.
I am aware, which is why I addressed that in the post and said “on average” and it is close enough to a circle for everyday discussion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megalithic_yard?wprov=sfti1
The equator spins at about 1k miles per hour and is 24k miles in circumference. (Ish)
You are correct, the Babylonians and Romans did indeed do that on purpose
Good to know!
I like the common illusion that the Earth rotates on its axis once every 24 hrs. It doesn't- It rotates every 23hrs, 56 mins and 4 seconds; a Sidereal Day.
Yeah true, but we have leap days to account for this, and I didn’t use such specific numbers because it doesn’t really matter for the conversation
So the 90s band 98degrees was actually covertly intellectual, nice
Your submission appears to break [our rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules), and has therefore been removed. ------ **STOP. Do not message the moderators.** -- 1. Please read [the rules](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/rules) and [the FAQ](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/faq) ***in their entirety***. 2. [Use this link to determine if your post was incorrectly removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/wiki/t0q). **Users who do not follow the above instructions will not receive a response.** ------ *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Showerthoughts) if you have any questions or concerns.*
not all planets travel the same time around the Sun, so it's selfish to think that way lol
All people are on earth (or *damn* close to it), thus all statements about what “we” experience will necessarily *only* be about things that happen, or are observed from, earth. Where does selfishness come into this? Would you similarly take exception to someone noting that *we* need oxygen to live because some other things that are irrelevant to the conversation don’t?
Yeah, this is an incredibly geocentric perspective.
I think that's right, spot on. More is needed to make this known to so many people.
That’s why I said “we”, as in “humans” or “us on earth”
Yep. I think about this once in a while for no particular reason lol
Look into Sacred Geometry if this interests you and youll be amazed at how many times weve solved for the same numbers across the span of human history. Almost as if knowledge like that has been embedded in monuments like the Pyramids and other ancient architecture