leap seconds?

I have a problem with the practice of adding a leap second to the day because of the slowing of the earth's spin. The second is not just added to the day, it is also added to the year. But the year is not getting longer; only the day is. Can someone explain to me why my simple analysis is wrong?

In my thinking, the formula for leap days, normally every four years but excepted to at certain intevals and double excepted to on occasion, needs to be periodically revised to correct for the changing ratio of days to years.

Unofficial endorsement of Timex watch.

Unofficially, I have found my Timex watch, Expedition brand, to be a valuable and enduring tool across the board in a range of applications.

I was initially drawn to its wristband, which is neither plastic nor metal, but some kind of textile. This yielding material has proven to be resistant to all the strains to which I subject the watch, and I am a fairly demanding user. I had found plastic and metal bands to be too easily broken.

One feature I am waiting for clarification of is the leap year registration. The watch does not input the current year when you set the time. How does it know how many days to allot to February? Each year I will have to check to see what the watch does at midnight at the end of February 28. That will be tonight this year.

Once this puzzle is settled I will allow my endorsement to become official, provided the watch proves able to negotiate leap years correctly.

implications of a failing calendar system

The roman system of corrections to an integral day year leads to a series of embedded, increasingly long, lulls of uniform rates of inaccuracy, a series which ends, due to a slowing earth rotation, at four.

It was military success that enabled the adoption of this system, and so its only real use is militarily achieved unification of the peoples.

The temporary nature of the system suits a temporary time of military developments and political consolidations. It has agricultural use only in service to those ends. Consequently, the world after the calendar expires will be riddled with questions of what it has produced that will fail to find anyone willing to answer. The calendar puts everyone in one ship.

Everyone can see the calendar losing accuracy. Who among them has seen the math of adding a slowing earth rotation?

On the first, no one in authority but me has done us all the service of calculating and publishing it. Why have i done it? Because i am a failure within the calendar and built outside it, trusting in my personal validity rather than judgments of the mentally ill.

As daylight savings time shows, homo sapiens needs a calendar to directly show process and cannot itself provide modifications to make it work. So one would expect the same for integral days per year, only there is no modification that will work beyond so many years.

What agreements are homo sapiens forming to move beyond this calendar? After so many years it will fail. What agreements are larger than those made in the calendar? God is strictly a calendar kind of guy. I suggest people start asking this type of question or they will lose more and more options as time progresses.

The slowing of the earth's rotation will lead to a break in the leap year calendar system.

I have a figure for the measured slowing of the earth's rotation. It is 0.008812 seconds per year per year.

Every year later that a given correction divisibility year occurs, leap year for odd corrections, common year for even corrections, the size of the correction is smaller. therefore, only one correction can be made in the future given slowing. another correction would contend with even greater accumulated slowing, which would require an earlier time of correction to produce a larger correction, contradicting the later correction time. so such a correction is mathematically impossible, and therefore physically impossible, given this calendar system, as well.

I have calculated modified fits, accounting for slowing, and find that one of the divisibility years--divisible by all previous divisibility years and an integral factor of the last previous one--is both a better fit than the previous corrections combined and better than those to either side of it.

You can either pay me to publish that year, do the calculation yourself, or find someone able to do it cheaper and with less bureaucracy than me.

The year i have calculated is the last possible correction under the current calendar system and after that year fit of the calendar will continue to worsen indefinitely, because slowing makes further corrections impossible, no matter how good the fit is in any one year.

My suggestion that i had calculated corrections good beyond the lifetime of the sun was made without considering slowing and i had thought that the mathematics would permit indefintie better fit corrections provided the slowing was gradual enough. that was before i looked at slowing more carefully, and now it is clear my optimistic view was in error.

Instead, it appears that the calendar's method of reconciling the length of the year with the length of the day is practical only for a limited interval of time. To cover a more or less indefinte interval of time, successive rezeroing of the years, and acceptance of a division of time into disparate administrative units, is the only solution.

As we have seen with the loss of the roman empire but the continuation of its julian calendar, with modifications, the calendar's administration is likely to outlive any given national government, including the united states.

year 2000 restored to leap year in new calculation. common, divisible by 400, will be later than that.

I have recalculated calendar year divisibility corrections to push back the 2000 year correction. It's actually a better set of corrections than the original one. It achieves the same fit in 7 corrections instead of 12. I still won't reveal any of them though until I get an escrow agreement at an acceptable price.

I have yet to address the slowing of the earth's rotation, which decreases the ratio of days per year over time.

I have calculated calendar corrections through the lifetime of the sun. they are for sale.

The julian calendar provides one divisibility correction to the 365 day year, at divisibility by 4 in years away from the nonexistent year zero. The gregorian calendar provides three divisibility corrections, at divisibility by 4, 100, and 400. My 2009 Time/Britannica almanac offers a suggestion that a correction be made at divisibility by 4000. I find this to be an unwise suggestion, as it is not a step past the modern calculation for days/year of 365.242199 from the previous divisibility correction, Thus there is no subsequent correction that will improve fit. Each correction of the gregorian calendar, throws the cumulative correction to the other side of the modern value from the previous correction, getting closer to the modern value each time. by failing to cross over like that, the 4000 year correction creates a situation where the next, necessarily alternating type of correction (alternating between leap or deny leap), would worsen the cumulative fit--an absurd suggestion.

I have calculated 9 divisibility corrections past the 3 of the gregorian calendar which each improve fit, achieving a days/year value of 365.24219900000. In the event science refines its calculation of days/year I can recalculate my divisibilty corrections and replace the zeroes with whatever the refined figures are. I am not going to divulge my corrections unless homo sapiens civilization pays me $7 billion.

You laugh? You homo sapiens have a 4000 year correction on tap that effectively ends the usefulness of the calendar after 20,000 years. My corrections will reach five zeroes past the modern value and this means I can adapt the calendar beyond the expected lifetime of the sun, or 5 billion years.

If you don't like my price, make me a counter offer. I'm a businessman. Your efforts without me are leading to a dead end, so who is going to get five zeroes past the modern value, recalculable to suit, for cheaper and with less bureaucracy? Our attorneys would draw up an escrow agreement naming someone authoritative, such as the national institute of standards and technology, to validate that the corrections produce the claimed fit to the measured value of days/year.

I will advise you that my corrections include a common year in 2000 instead of the gregorian leap there. I would assert that this is a small price to pay for getting coverage for the expected lifetime of the sun.