Abolish Leap Year! (by 2035)

Guys, I think I solved it.

If you think Leap Year logic is random and confusing, the calendar before 46 BC was absurd. At the end of February, there was a 50% chance that a high priest (dubbed the “pontifex maximus”)  would declare “Intercalaris,” a bonus month. It was somewhere between 22-28 days, had a 50% chance of occurring, and you only had a few months notice. The stated reason was to sync their lunar calendar with the sun, but it was really a tool for manipulation. The priest would stretch time as needed to mess with elections, term lengths, and the timing of holidays. Time was tampered. Rigged.

The Julian Calendar was an attempt to bring stability to time (sounds noble, but Julian Caesar was an eponymist: a special kind of asshole who coins terms after their own name for immortality). With the help of an astronomer named Sosigenes, they introduced a 12-month, 365 day calendar. They knew that a true solar year was 365.25 days, so every 4 years they’d add one more day to sync up with the sun. It was called a Leap Year. 

It was predictable. It was safe from abuse. Unfortunately, the math was wrong. A solar year is actually 365.242 years: a rounding error. They were off by 11 minutes a year. It wasn’t even noticeable at first, but several empires later they realized their fuck-up. By the 16th century, astronomers realized the solstices were 10 days off from when they were supposed to happen. Let’s call this “solar drift.”

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So in 1582, Pope Greg and his sidekick Luigi did some napkin math and came up with the Gregorian Calendar (another eponymist name-grab where the astrologer gets no credit). They needed fewer Leap Years to be more aligned with the sun, so they introduced 3 “Leap Year Omissions” within a 400-year “Leap Cycle.” For example, the years 1700, 1800, and 1900 did not have Leap Years, even though they were supposed to in the Julian Calendar (2000 wasn’t skipped, and I feel cheated out of experiencing a Leap Year Omission Day in my lifetime).

It was a solid plan to get us back in sync with the sun, but we had to do the unimaginable: skip 10 days. In Spain, Portugal, and Italy, people went to bed on October 4th, 1582 and woke up on October 15th. The masses, who didn’t really get why such a change was necessary, were disturbed and disoriented. Birthdays went uncelebrated. The religious ones who assumed Judgment Day was coming on a fixed date within their lifetime assumed the government cut 10 days off their life. There were protests and attempts to resist. To add to the confusion, not every country agreed to this. It took between 2 months and 300+ years for everyone to sign onto the Gregorian Calendar. This was the greatest episode of time dysphoria in civilized history.

Now that we all finally agree that the end of February warrants a complex logic, it’s worth pointing out that the math is still wrong. A solar year is actually 365.24219 days. Another rounding error. Every year, our calendar drifts 26 seconds away from the sun. Thanks to Gregory, we’re drifting 25x slower than before, but we’re still drifting.  

Every 3,300 years we’ll experience a full day of solar drift. 

In 600,000 years, we’ll experience a “solstice reversal,” where the Earth and the calendar are so uncalibrated, that the summer months will have winter weather and the winter months will have summer weather. This seems impossibly far away, but a leak is a leak. The Gregorian Calendar is set up to go through over 8,000 solstice reversals before the sun explodes.

The Gregorian calendar didn’t fix the problem, it just slowed it down. It’s a quintessential example of tweaking a bad design instead of finding a real solution. Instead of saying, “maybe Leap Year is fucking stupid?” we doubled-down, adding Leap Cycles and Leap Year Omission Days.

The hard question is: how can we sync an annual calendar to the sun without fiddling with days? Pre-Julian, we added months, and Post-Julian, we added days; maybe we need to keep thinking smaller…

We’re dealing with a surplus of .24219 years beyond our tidy 365-day calendar. Let’s break that down. That’s 5.81256 extra hours per year, or 348.7536 extra minutes per year, or 23,085.216 extra seconds per year. That seems like a lot of seconds. But how many seconds are in a full-year? 31,536,000, damn, that’s a lot of seconds. So what happens if those ~23k orphan seconds get baked into the 31 million seconds we already have? Each second would be .0007320273973 seconds longer.

If we made every second 0.73 milliseconds longer, we wouldn’t need to use a Leap Year to catch up to the sun.

In the spirit and tradition of the eponymists, I’m going to coin this new unit of time as, “The Dean Second.” A vote for The Dean Second is a vote for calendar sanity. No more arbitrary days! It dissolves the Leap Year, the bastard of time, and redistributes it into the smallest unit we have, the second. Note: 0.73 milliseconds is imperceptible. It is less than 1/1000th of a second. The most perceptive gamers in the world can’t even notice visual changes under 10 milliseconds. The best part of the Dean Second is that no one will even notice it. There will be no time dysphoria, no existential conundrums, and no serious birthday disruptions (people born on February 29th are already used to celebrating on the 28th). 

At this point, you might be thinking: “You can’t just change the second!? It’s defined by an atomic clock!” 

When you understand how the atomic second was defined, you realize how bogus it is. By the 1950s, the scientific community needed a stable way to measure “one second,” and realized that Earth’s orbit and rotation was too unpredictable to base satellite systems on. Their search led them to Cesium-133, nature’s most stable element. Its electrons emit radiation at such a predictable interval, that it was pitched as a naturally ocurring pendulum. They consistently measured 9,192,631,770 billion Cesium vibration cycles within one traditional “solar” second, and so that became the “atomic second.”

So yes, an atomic clock has impressive PICOsecond-grade precision (to the billionths), but, they're basing their Cesium measurements on a bad unit: the solar second. This is (another) quintessential example of precision without accuracy.

The solar second isn’t just an old unit (FFS, it is Sumerian: pre-civilizational), it is blind to the whole historical dilemma of calendars, leap years, and solar drift. You get a solar second by breaking a “solar day” (one spin) into 86,400 units (24 x 60 x 60). 24 was picked because it’s double 12 (a superstitious and supernatural number), and 60 is a “composable” number from the sexagesimal system (it can divide easily into many parts: 30, 20, 15, 10, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1). This is a nifty invention for a mud-hut civilization, but it ignores the .24219 year surplus on a solar year. 

If society agrees that Leap Years are unbearable and that a Dean Second makes more sense, then we could redefine an atomic second to be derived from a Dean Second instead of a solar second. In case you’re an atomic scientist reading this, a Dean Second contains 9,199,361,028 Cesium cycles per second (only 6.7 million extra cycles).

As you might expect, the clock people don’t give a shit about the priorities of the calendar people. Unlike me, they don’t see the existence of Leap Year as a serious (and dangerous) design flaw that needs to be remedied immediately. This is (yet another) quintessential example of inter-department coordination problems. Thanks to Pope Greg, the calendar people are basically off the hook for 10,000 years–they have no incentive to fight for their cause–and the clock people have their own motives. They freaked out over a 1.5 millisecond discrepancy in Earth’s orbit in 2016, and yet, a 26 second solar drift (17,000x worse) is just out of scope. Either they don’t know about solar drift, or they don’t care because they believe no one will even use calendars in 3,300 years after the species becomes transhumanist light beings that live inside a Cesium-powered server.

In any case, it’s no surprise that our extremely precise atomic clocks are out of phase with a true solar year, so what do we do? We invent Leap Seconds. Instead of solving this problem holistically, we decided to create a committee called the International Earth Rotation and Reference System Service (IERRS) to add or delete Leap Seconds as they see fit. Since 1972, these guys have fucked with time on 27 separate occasions. They announce these decisions in advance to other timekeepers on June 30th, but they don’t have Twitter and haven’t updated their website since 2013.

The IERRS is not just a symbol of “paradigm blindness” (the willingness to triple-down in wrong domains instead of considering new solutions), it’s also a logistical pain. There’s a formal movement by the GCPM (General Conference of Weights and Measure) who are the “supreme authority” over the IBPM (International Bureau of Weights and Measurements, since 1875) to formally Abolish the Leap Second by 2035. This is a real movement in the scientific community. Their stated goal is to “shift from Solar time to Cesium time,” but even if that works, we are still drifting 26 seconds per year. Atomic time doesn’t fix the Julian/Gregorian Drift Problem: no matter how deep you round, you’ll never actually match the calendar to the sun.

This is an opportunity to sneak in a slight amendment. If we’re going to abolish Leap Seconds by 2035, we might as well abolish Leap Year too by introducing the Dean Second.

It works. It’s catchy. It’s non-disruptive. You don’t have to skip 10 days. You won’t even notice The Dean Second, and yet, you magically get 63 extra “original” seconds per day. We can abolish Leap Year, reverse two thousand years of band-aid solutions, and eliminate the cognitive dissonance to the 5 million kids who are born once every 4 years.

I’m not yet sure if this is just a timely joke post or the beginning of a project. I’ve only been a calendar-clock integration specialist for 3 days. I’m willing to admit this whole scheme is batshit and blind to a very obvious wrench. Is it even possible to update the world’s 400 atomic clocks at the same time, or will that actually lead to a Y2K-grade disaster? 

How hard could it be?

Either way, it was fun to pitch a new fundamental unit of reality through a Substack post. Every re-stack of this post is not just a vote to Abolish Leap Year, or a vote for the Dean Second, but a vote for integrated design thinking. Plus, if you re-stack this and I go viral and get permanently famous as “Leap Year guy,” then that puts me in an ironic position of trapping myself in a niche that’s only relevant once every 4 years.

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