Gregorian Calendar and the Leap Year
This year we celebrate a Leap Year. Which means we have a 29th day at the end of February.
The leap day exists to keep our calendar aligned with the movement of the Earth around the Sun. Each of our orbits lasts roughly 365.24 days. So as a way to keep things in check every four years we have an extra day in February.
Encouraged by a member of staff, three of us grouped together to see how hard it would be to construct an alternative, more uniform method of mapping the passage of time.
The solution we came up with drew inspiration from previous ideas from across a wide span of time, from the French Republican Calendar in 1793 to Swatch Internet Time introduced in 1998.
The Alternative
After literal hours of deliberation and poor mathematics the solution we came up with has been tentatively dubbed The Annielogian System, it is a unified time and calendar system that we claim eliminates the need for a leap day.
Our system has 360 days split across 9 months with 40 days each, split into 4 weeks of 10 days. We took the opportunity to name the months using a consistent theme – having decided that the previous naming strategy pulled inspiration from too many places. We used Latin names for 9 elemental concepts, ordered in a way to compliment the passage of the seasons with the start of the year (Mors) being the height of summer.
| 01 Mors | Death | 04 Aqua | Water | 07 Lux | Light |
| 02 Ignis | Fire | 05 Tenebris | Darkness | 08 Terra | Earth |
| 03 Fulgur | Lightning | 06 Aether | Air | 09 Vita | Life |
We were happy with our more organised feeling calendar, but we were aware that we had a remainder of 5.24 days! Even more leap days than we originally had.
Beats
In the late nineties Internet time was introduced to the world offering a timekeeping solution to people connecting across continents for the first time. It was adopted in a number of places including by one of the best video games of all time, Phantasy Star Online.
The concept is that the day as it is, is divided into 1000 equal segments called Beats. Each beat is equivalent to 86.4 seconds making up the 24 hours that we traditionally use.
We wondered if we could create our own Beat, ever so slightly longer than 86.4, that would allow us to average out our remainder. Comparing the average number of seconds in a Gregorian year versus our 360 day year; our Beat would need to last 87.6582 seconds, 1.2582 seconds longer than Internet time. This addition per beat would account for our 5.24 days, removing the need for any leap days.
Counter Beats and Solar Beats
Our Beat would be longer, resulting in our day being longer too. As the hamster wheels in our minds slowly rotated it struck us, it’s not just a second per beat, we’re talking an additional 20 minutes worth of time per day! Our Annielogian day is longer than a solar day! We realised our method of tracking time would slowly drift out of sync with our expectations of daylight.
The solution one of our trio suggested was that our main Beat wouldn’t be linked to traditional time zones, but would be an international standard, an International Time Beat (ITB). And in order to allow people around the world to track sunlight hours we would introduce a Counter Beat.
Thinking in terms of an analog clock, our Beats would run clockwise in sync worldwide. Regionally, the Counter Beat would run alongside it at the rate of difference between a solar day and our day (1.2582 p/b) starting at the appropriate time in each region. This would allow for a worldwide understanding of time as well as allowing for regional daylight tracking by visualising the difference between Beat and Counter Beat. It was explained that this could be imagined as kind of like a sundial.
A less convoluted method was suggested by another one of us and this version ultimately won out. We include a Solar Beat, essentially a beat that’s length is timed more in line with traditional internet time. On an analog clock this would be like having two hands, one showing the ITB, and one set to match local conditional allowing the viewer to anticipate the position of the sun. Digitally, this would again just mean two numbers, International and Solar Beat, ITB and SB.
Ok?
As I wrote this article, the person who suggested the Solar Beat solution created a functional digital clock, allowing us to compare Gregorian and 24 hour time formats against our Annielogian system. This has been added to our internal Landing page, allowing anyone who’d like a look to check out what we came up with.
Concluding my report; I’m aware that there is still work to do on our system, despite that I am quite fond of the system we have produced (no matter how convoluted it may seem to people who are used to the existing convention). But I don’t want to get too excited; after all, until we run a controlled test over a prolonged period of time, I guess there’s no way to know for sure whether our way, or the leap day method of tracking time is better.
Enjoy your Leap Day everyone, who knows it might be our last one.