Comment by antognini | Hacker News Reader

Comment by antognini | Hacker News Reader

The article mentions this, but for those who just read the comments, the missing eleven days was not the only weird thing about 1752. Prior to this year, New Year's Day in England was observed on March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation). So, for example, March 24, 1741 would be followed by March 25, 1742. This was known as "Annunciation dating" and was common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages. By the 1700s most of Europe had moved New Year's Day to January 1 (known as "circumcision dating" because it fell on the Feast of the Circumcision), but England had stayed on the old system.

In 1750, Parliament had had enough and harmonized the calendar with the rest of Europe. By decree, 1752 would begin on January 1 the day after December 31, 1751. This meant that January and February of 1751 did not exist! In fact, in England 1751 had only 288 days.

Since England's calendar was unusual by European standards people had adapted "dual dating" techniques to avoid confusion [1]. The most common was to write a date with two years, one on top of the other. So you would say January 15, 1748/49, with the 48 on top of the 49.

And 1751/52 weren't the only weird years in history. When the Julian calendar was adopted, the previous calendar had drifted so far from the seasons that two leap months needed to be added, which made the year 46 BC 445 days long.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating

[Edited to correct Assumption to Annunciation.]

> By the 1700s most of Europe had moved New Year's Day to January 1 (known as "circumcision dating" because it fell on the Feast of the Circumcision)

Do we know why this happened? In a world context, beginning the year in spring is normal; beginning it in the middle of winter is very weird indeed.

And it's not like this was a restoration of an older tradition. Four of the months are still literally named on the assumption that the first month of the year is March.

It kind of was the restoration of an older tradition: http://www.britannica.com/story/why-does-the-new-year-start-... though it is apparently not very clear who exactly started it and why that person did it.

March 25th is roughly the spring equinox. January 1st is roughly the shortest day of the year. Both seem like reasonable choices.

December 21st is the shortest day of the year.

Sometimes. Sometimes it's the 22nd. Neither of which are a long way from January 1st. Hence "roughly".

> In a world context, beginning the year in spring is normal; beginning it in the middle of winter is very weird indeed.

The character of the seasons is rather local. For example take the Greek legend of Persephone and Demeter and the Sumerian legend of Dumuzid and Inanna. Both explain the seasons by a god being trapped in the underworld for half the year, but the Greeks considered winter the dead time while for the Sumerians it was summer.

I seem to recall that the myth of Persephone is generally taken to be an import the Greeks brought with them when they arrived in Greece, since the weather patterns it describes don't really correspond to Greek weather.

> Four of the months are still literally named on the assumption that the first month of the year is March.

Right. Also, with March being the first month of the year, the variable-length month becomes the last one. On leap years, you add a day at the end of the year. Which is reasonable, unlike the current situation.

They had a perfectly sane calendar system and somebody just had to break it.

The Solstice is when the days start getting longer again. I feel very time crunched at that time of year. The ancients probably did not use precise clocks to detect Solstice. Its farthest south sunset on the horizon and easy to observe when sunsets begin moving north again.

> The ancients probably did not use precise clocks to detect Solstice.

This is most definitely false; tracking the solstices with pinpoint accuracy was a goal of ancient cultures since before the beginning of recorded history.

But the tax year stayed 365 days and so it now starts on April 6th, the 11 days comes from correcting the drift between the Julian and Gregorian calendars. Russia switched later and had to add more days.

Calendars are such ugly hacks. We should fix the year so we can design a properly engineered calendar... what would it take to shift Earth into another orbit?

I suspect do that would be more acceptable than removing day light saving.

A lot of energy. Probably more than the world uses in an entire year, but I'm going to leave it as an exercise for the reader.

(Kind of reminds me of the analysis of how much energy the death star would require to destroy an entire planet, and what kind of energy density would be required to do it from a facility that is the size of a "small moon.")

I mean, it really depends on what's meant by "another orbit". Even the most minuscule change is "another orbit".

> Probably more than the world uses in an entire year, but I'm going to leave it as an exercise for the reader.

My back of the napkin estimate says about 7 orders of magnitude more, just to eliminate leap years.

I mean, at some point (hopefully) humans will be living on more than one planetary body in the solar system.

Once you have people on Mars and Earth, you're never going to harmonize the two, without shifting both to the same orbit.

So you could just give up on having the planet's orbit define the calendar, design a pleasing civil calendar for your civilization that is probably roughly a Earth year long, but without all the hacks to make it exact or synchronized, and just let your cell phone add a calendar event for when spring, etc starts.

I liked Kodak's division of the year in 13-months with roughly 28 days. Only one month would be different, with 29 or 30 days.

The International Fixed Calendar was a work of elegant beauty and it’s a shame we are not using it.

Plus the Earth is erratic in its movements compared to atomic clocks. When they switched the definition from a fraction of an astronomical day to wavelengths of a particular Cesium photon, they would have to add a leap second a few times a decade. Last year they were considering subtracting a second because the Earth speed up its orbit for unknown causes.

Small nitpick: it's "Annunciation", not "Assumption". Both feast days are associated with the Blessed Virgin Mary, but Assumption Day falls on 15th August whereas the Annunciation is celebrated on 25th March.

You are correct, my fingers got ahead of my brain. :)

That’s very interesting. In Iran, the New Year still starts with the first day in spring. It makes more sense to me since spring feels like everything starts anew.

> Prior to this year, New Year's Day in England was observed on March 25 (the Feast of the Annunciation).

In the UK, but also here in Canada and in many other Commonwealth countries, the fiscal new year is April 1st. This is why, if you ever wondered.

In some official places (for instance, Presidential proclamations), dates will still be given counting from July 4, 1776.

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