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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

This is indeed a more logical clock, as it follows the natural cycle of activity. Equally, calendars that put the end of the year at the time after harvest ("autumn"), or at the start of agricultural work ("spring") are also more logical.

Positioning the beginning of a new day at noon, and a new year t a solstice, is just a technical convenience, because these are easy to detect with very simple astronomy tools.

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Only if everyone is a peasant farmer with the same crops in the same place. My activities are barely related to the height of the sun in the sky, and like the other residents of my city I don't take a ton of notice of harvest time. Bus timetables and cultural festivals are a much bigger deal (of which one in particular is indeed historically related to a harvest).

This "Day is 12 hours long" thing just doesn't work anywhere else.

I live far from the equator - "Dawn" is sometimes after breakfast, and "Dusk" can happen before I get off work.

As former Alaska resident, can confirm. December sunrises are often after 10am, and sunsets before 4pm. Vice versa in summer.

Then you get above the Arctic Circle, and there are days with neither. :D

My first thought as well as a swede. And coincidentally one of the things my old Kenyan classmate found the most strange about Sweden was the fact that the length of day was not even close to constant. That and when I explained to him that the sun being up doesn’t necessarily mean warmer weather, in the winter it’s practically takes the temperature further from zero as sun means no warming clouds…

What makes it more logical? The wheel turns all the same no matter where you mark the beginning. In the Northern hemisphere, there's actually something nice about starting the year in the dead of winter: it feels like the year is born in the spring and then dies away the following winter, not unlike a lifetime.

> it feels like the year is born in the spring

Then shouldn't the start of the year be when the year is "born"? Or alternatively, the end of the year when the year "dies"? January 1 is neither.

The year "dies" on the longest, darkest nights. (Dec 21, technically). We mourn its passing and celebrate it's life with drinks. I'm guessing there was in antiquity, a whole bunch of dreadful and exciting parties in the last 10 days around the longest nights.

It slowly grows after that and blooms later.

January 1 is so close to December 25 (when Jesus is believed to have been born) so if we wanted to count years since that -- and call it AD for "Anno Domini" (the Year of Our Lord) -- we could declare the year to begin on January 1st.

Which is exactly what we did.

> December 25 (when Jesus is believed to have been born)

I don't think anyone actually believes Jesus was born on Dec 25.

A lot of people believe a lot of things. I wonder why you don't believe that people believe this.

Now whether you yourself believe he was born then, another time or ever existed at all etc is another story.

I believe for example that everyone can believe whatever they want about those things as long as:

    They leave me alone when I tell them I don't believe that and I don't want to be convinced

    They don't try to kill me, enslave me, etc for being an infidel (yes that includes the Christian holy wars sort of thing but also current events)

To restate more precisely: It is well-established that December 25 is a highly unlikely date for the birth of Jesus.

Children and people who have only a superficial knowledge of Christianity might very well believe otherwise. But they are poorly-informed.

Arguments against include:

a) Calendar dates are generally fuzzy from that period, particularly for events that are not formally documented. So the likelihood of anyone ever having known the correct date is very low.

b) The mythology around the birth does not match the seasonal expectations for late December (more likely springtime).

c) Dec 25 was chosen in 336 AD, by church decree. Prior to that, there was no holiday nor even a strong claim of any specific date.

d) Dec 25 was already a festival day for pagan celebrations of Saturn (Rome) and Mithra (Persia), which was likely a factor in the choice of date, to coincide with existing customs.

There are no substantial arguments in favor of December 25 being the accurate birth date of Jesus.

I don't think anyone is arguing that December 25 is the birth date of Jesus (assuming he existed), the argument is just that there are people who believe it is. You seem to think only children and people who don't know much about Christianity would believe that, but I assure you there are lots of Christian adults who don't know the history you (correctly) laid out.

The point is that the "birth date of Jesus" being set on December 25 came 350 years after January 1 was chosen to start the new year.

No the point is that my parent said:

    I don't think anyone actually believes ...

when in fact, yes, people do actually believe this.

When this is pointed out, he explains why it can't be Dec 25th and that's all totally fine and correct but doesn't change the fact that yes indeed there are people that believe that, as well as lots of other things that can easily be disproved. It does not matter whether you can disprove it to us and others. These people that do believe it are in fact out there.

January 1st became the start of the year about half a century before Jesus was born.

25 of December is close to the winter solstice (around 22nd), and I suspect it was ascribed to that day for astrological reasons; there are a few other astrological clues around that episode, most prominently, the Bethlehem Star.

March should be the 1st month then I'd think. I'm pretty sure that's how the roman calendar worked. War started in spring.

If you DO start in March, your days/month fall into a neat little pattern:

Mar 31 - Aug 31 - Jan 31

Apr 30 - Sep 30 - Feb 28/29

May 31 - Oct 31

Jun 30 - Nov 30

Jul 31 - Dec 31

That highlights a few interesting cycles you can use to calculate dates from a simple count of days from the start of the year:

153 days every 5 months

61 days every 2

31 days per month

An "early reset" occurs every second month, jumping to the next 2-month cycle after the second day 30. Another occurs after every fifth month, jumping into a new 2-month cycle halfway through the last one of the 5-month. And of course, end of the year breaks the third "5-month" cycle WAY early, just before even its first 2-month is finished.

I won't try to detail the process of generating dates from this here, but I'm sure most of us here can work it out with just a little effort. Instead, here's a couple more fun facts to consider:

If you DO start the calendar from March, counting it as month 1, September (7) through December (10) map rather nicely to their own numeric positions. That seems a pretty strong hint, to me.

And I REALLY love this one:

The Gregorian cycle consists of four centuries. The first three are 36,524 days each: 100 years x 365 days + 24 days for the leap years. The hundredth year (ending in 00) is NOT considered a leap year, EXCEPT for every FOURTH hundredth. So that's 4 centuries * 36,524 days = 146,096, plus 1 more for the leap century, for 146,097.

That number is EXACTLY divisible by 7, which means the week cycle repeats WITH the Gregorian one. Good thing! Otherwise, we'd have to wait 2800 years!

Zeller's congruence for the day of the week (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeller's_congruence) exploits this:

- months are counted as 3, 4, 5, ..., 14, with 13 and 14 being January and February of the following year

- the contribution of the month to the day of the week is floor(2.6 * (m+1)) - the 2.6 comes from the 13 "extra" days (over the approximation 1 month = 4 weeks) in every 5 months.

March was the beginning of the year not all that long ago.

That's why there frequent confusion about George Washington's birthday, along with other historical dates of that era: The New Year started in March when he was born, but changed to January during his lifetime (The British Empire switched in 1752). So being born in February, there's an ambiguity about the year, unless you specify which calendar you mean:

"George Washington was born on February 22, 1732, according to the Gregorian calendar. However, when he was born, the Julian calendar was in use, which would have placed his birth on February 11, 1731."

If the year is “born in the spring” then surely you would want the year to start in the spring (if not the spring equinox, then March) and not winter?

Of course, and -- if you were Roman, for instance -- you could, for example, call the 8th month a name with "octo" (Latin for "eight") in it, or the 10th month something with "decem" (Latin for "ten").

The whole lives of the societies which have actually invented these calendars were built around the vegetation cycle, which ruled pastures, fields, and orchards. So the yearly cycles of food availability, work, seasonal migrations, and the correlated weather pattern changes were all reasonably aligned with the start / end of the year.

Peoples as diverse as Celts, Romans, Slavs, Babylonians, Hindus, and various peoples in China all used a variety of a calendar where the yearly changes were aligned around modern October-November and modern March-April.

A calendar with the year starting in January and with astronomically (more) precise years was promulgated by Julius Caesar in -46. (I suspect the introduction of the concepts of Babylonian astrology to Rome a century before may have played a role in the desire to align the calendar to stars and not to earthly affairs.)

Positioning of the new year at the Equinox shouldn't be any harder than doing it at the solstice (since equinoxes are halfway between the solstices), and it makes much more sense IMO. First half of the year: more day than night. Second half of the year: more night than day.

You forgot to precede your entire post with ‘Provided you live on the equator,’ which Kenya is.

If you live on the 45th parallel like I do, it isn’t logical at all since the length of a day is constantly shifting.

The problem with "more logical" here is that it's completely subjective.

The beauty of the "English clock", which isn't English at all, is that it simply defines a way to refer to the same point in time with a number (never mind that Daylight savings" nonsense) and you can refer to it whether you are a farmer, a software developer, a waiter, you live Africa or the arctic circle all the same.

didn't the julian/gregorian calendar started that way and drifted?

Of course not. Gregorian Calendar didn't drift, it just fixed drift in Julian calendar, which was like a couple of weeks by 1582. And "new year" in Julian calendar was 1st of January, same as now. It was inherited from previous Roman tradition, because Romans already had the custom to mark 1st of January as a new year, because since 153 BCE it was the date when consuls were inaugurated. So it's an entirely political thing and makes no real sense whatsoever. We are celebrating the day of Roman consulate inauguration for more than 2000 years now.

And before that they they started years from 1st of March, which is much closer to one of the Equinoxes, which is what all sane people (including french revolutionaries) consider to be the proper start of a year.

very informative, thank you

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