Our Calendar Is A Mess. Here's How It Got That Way | Answers With Joe

this video is supported by simple contacts today is the last day of 2018 tonight we're all gonna stay up late toast the year that was and welcome in the new year auld lang syne and all that so chance to like over the past and you know embrace a new future of opportunities new possibilities we set goals we set resolutions all with purpose of making ourselves better people New Year's Day is a fresh start clean slate it's like a do-over we get every year of course I mean there's nothing really special about New Year's Day all we're really celebrating is that the earth has returned to this arbitrary point in its orbit that it was the last time we stayed up late to watch a ball drop it's only special because we decided it was special when we put it at the top of our calendar calendar that's friggin weird when you look at it you know why twelve months and why does some months have 30 days and some have 31 and what's up with February September October November December clearly correlate with the number seven eight nine and ten and yet they are on our calendars as the 9th 10th 11th and 12th months differ today more than ever we are ruled by calendars we run our lives by our calendars they're on our computers and our phones even in our cars but how did we come up with this bizarre system of time measurement and is there a better way the first thing to understand about calendars is that they're not really a measurement of time they're our measurement of cycles and this is what makes our calendars so weird we're actually measuring three different cycles the earth rotating on its axis the earth revolving around the Sun and the moon revolving around Earth and they do not choose to line up nicely for us the most immediate of these and the one that affects our life the most is the day in night cycles our circadian rhythms are literally encoded into our DNA so we got pretty accurate with this measuring the date of 24 hours with respect to the sun's 24 hours advised into four quarters of six hours each which roughly correlate to the position of the Sun depending on where you are in the world latitude wise and in the seasons and whatnot so the Sun rises six hours later it's overhead at noon six hours later at settings six hours later it's midnight and the cycle repeats now this is what's called a solar day because again it is in relation to the Sun but there is also a stellar day which is a little bit shorter at 23 hours six minutes and four seconds and this is in relation to the stars because the earth isn't just spinning it's also moving in its orbit so by the time the earth is rotated to face the Sun again it's actually moved from where it was before meaning has to rotate just a little bit further to line up with the Sun for three minutes and 56 seconds exactly so the Sun stays in our crosshairs but the Stars behind it have moved just a little bit from our perspective and over the weeks a month this adds up causing the stars to kind of move across the sky and as we move around the Sun we see different constellations in the sky because we're looking in different directions relative to the Sun so tonight while you're celebrating you might go outside and see Orion in the sky but go outside in June and you might see Scorpio this is obviously where zodiac signs came from back in the day it correlated with what constellation was behind the Sun at that time and the time it takes for the earth to revolve around the Sun is exactly 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and 46 seconds because I can't just make things easy can it but hey 5 hours and 48 minutes that's pretty close to 6 hours which as I said earlier four quarters of six hours make up a 24 hour day so at the end of every year we just kind of drop those six hours and then every four years we add an extra day to make up for it calendar nerds call these intercalary days of course we call these leap days mostly in line but there's still that extra 11 minutes and 14 seconds each year but we make up for that by dropping the leap year every 100 years except for the ones that are divisible by 400 why because math that's why this is of course the Gregorian calendar that we use in the United States and in most of the Western world there go gorian calendar was named after Pope Gregory the 13th which instituted this calendar in 1582 it was designed so that Easter would fall right after the spring equinox and in order to make this happen they actually had to drop 10 days from the Catholic calendar and we complain about having to set our clocks forward one hour of course not everyone is Catholic so it took a while for this kind of filter throughout the rest of the world Russia for example was kind of run by the Russian Orthodox Church and they actually didn't get on board the Gregorian train until the revolution in 1917 in fact the Russian Olympic team missed the London Games in 1908 because of this hole we're in a totally different calendar thing heywhere Russia I've been training my whole life for this let's do this let's kick some ass yeah we're all headed home what calendar son uh that's for what year we celebrate that was actually set in the year 525 by the monk dionysius Exodus who determined that Jesus was born in the Roman year 753 and he started counting from there meaning there are people living in the Roman Year 1278 who woke up one morning being told that it was actually the year 5:25 that would be like if tomorrow you were told that it's actually the year 1266 and here come the Viking hoards of course the years before Year Zero were designated BC four before Christ in the years after that where ad which many people think stands for after death it actually stands for Anno Domini the year of our Lord this is of course very Christians so in the interest of inclusion we started calling it BCE so before the Common Era and then we call the era when right now the Common Era see this era so common so Dionysius Exodus actually changed the calendar about a thousand years before the Gregorian calendar window effect which means that he was working off of the precursor to the Gregorian calendar the Julian calendar Julian calendar was named after Julius Caesar who implemented this calendar in the year 45 BCE which was the year 709 in Roman years Roman years were based off of what year the city of Rome was founded the Julian calendar was pretty similar to what wound up being the Gregorian calendar they still had leap days every four years but it still got out of whack over the centuries now the big difference over the previous Roman calendar was that the Julian calendar was a solar calendar in the previous Roman calendar was a lunar calendar and this brings us to months now I haven't really talked about months so far but this lines up with the third cycle that I talked about earlier that of the moon revolving around the earth which takes exactly 27.3 two days early civilizations used cycles of the moon to determine all kinds of things especially when it came to like planting and harvesting crops so the earliest calendars were mostly lunar calendars later calendars like the Julian calendar actually incorporated both months and years these are called lunisolar calendars early Roman calendars were called the calendar of Romulus they were actually ten months long reflecting ten lunar cycles and incorporated a 50-day unorganized winter at the end of it they literally had 50 days of I don't know it's cold the first four months of the calendar were named after Roman and Greek gods and then after that they just kind of start counting the months I guess cuz they ran out of God's so the first month of the year was March or what they called it menses Martius named after Mars the Roman god of war then April or menses a Prue named for Aphrodite may was menses Maya's for the goddess maya and june or a menses eunice for the goddess juno after that they started numbering them quintilius sex Dilys September October and November and December and then the weird 50 day whatever period later updates corrector for this weird 50 day whatever period by adding January and February to the beginning of the calendar this explains why February so short and it also explains why the last four months of the year clearly don't line up with the numbers that they were named after Quinn Tillis was eventually renamed July in honor of Julius Caesar and sex Tillis was renamed August for Emperor Augustus and that is how we got this weird convoluted system of time management that runs our lives today by the way if you ever want to know whether the month that you're in has 30 or 31 days in it there is a trick that I know about and it involves your knuckles I don't know who came up with this and I don't know how common knowledge this is you may already know about this but you can use your knuckles to figure out whether a month has 30 or 31 days basically the hills and valleys of your knuckles correspond to long and short months so January has 31 days February has 28 it's a short month March 31 April May June July July and August both have 31 days so you come back over here 31 for August September October and November December I heard about this when I was a kid into this very day you'll see me like doing this I'm trying to figure out what how many days are in a month so all this begs the question that's the best we can do there have been many attempts to reform the calendar over the years usually with the purpose of making it a little bit smoother and universal and you know logical the French revolutionary calendar was created in France during the French Revolution which you probably could have guessed the French Revolution was all about starting from scratch and completely throwing out the old ways of doing things this is actually when the metric system took hold and the French revolutionary calendar was sort of an attempt at creating metric time it divided the day into ten hours made up of a hundred decimal minutes were made up of 100 decimal seconds they kept the 12 months in the calendar but divided the months into three weeks of 10 days each in every fourth year they added a leap day of which they called a six deal and we're just getting started with the weirdness they chose to start the year in autumn so the first day of their calendar would correspond with September 22nd on the Gregorian calendar and the months were completely renamed to remove any imperial or religious references and every day of the year was given a name that correspondent to nature of the elements for example December 31st would be granted in the month of naboth the years were counted from the beginning of the French Republic in 1792 again to take away any religious influences and weirdly they chose to count the years in Roman numerals which seems like it would be about as anti a metric as you can get which got them all the way up to the Year X because after ten years and many severed heads later they decided to go Gregorian again I can't imagine why in the 1930s another movement to reform the calendar got started this one was called the world calendar and it came really close to being accepted it was pushed by Elizabeth Achilles who headed up the world calendar Association who pushed this to the League of Nations and later the UN it looks a lot like what we've got now but the main goal was to make it so that the dates would always fall on the same day of the week so for example February 1st would always be a Wednesday basically divided the year into four equal quarters of exactly 91 days each quarter had a 31 30 30 cadence so January would have 31 days February 30 March 30 and then start over again in April with 31 the big difference was at the end of every year following December 30th they added what they called world's day it didn't have a number of designation just the W and it was kind of just an off the calendar day that would be treated like a holiday so December 30th would be a Saturday and then you would have world's day and then January 1st would start on a Sunday leap years would be handled the same way adding a leap year day after June 30th which was a Saturday and before July 1st which was a Sunday the benefit of this was that every single year would line up exactly the same way so you wouldn't have to like buy a new calendar every year just change the year number at the top the calendar did run into objections by religious communities that worship on a seven-day cycle because the whole world Day thing would interrupt there 7 days you know honor the seventh day and keep it holy kind of thing this actually gained a surprising amount of acceptance at the UN but ultimately failed to be accepted although the world calendar Association is still around one last calendar that's worth mentioning is the honk' Henri calendar which was actually just introduced in 2011 this one works a lot like the world calendar in the sense that it's a permanent calendar it's the same every year and it operates on 91 day quarters but this one uses a thirty thirty thirty-one cadence and instead of adding world days or leap days to make everything line up they actually added an entire intercalary week at the end of the calendar every five or six years that they called extra week that's the week we all act over the top plan boy and I guess so extra now this gets around the religious issue that I mentioned earlier but it also conforms to the date and time standard ISO 8601 protocol that also wouldn't have worked with the world calendar links to information about all these down the description below finally let's look way into the future what happens when we go to Mars and we start colonizing other worlds in our solar system how do we keep time and synchronize with each other without basing it on the cycles of a planet that you don't live on anymore like what would a stardate system from Star Trek look like it might look something like unix time units of course references the UNIX computer operating system and the programmers that set that up created its own time that started in January 1st 1970 and it literally just keeps track of seconds every day being 86,400 seconds know weeks months or years no seasons no cycles nothing that connects it to the rhythm of the earth just a continuous time that we can all keep synchronized unless we start traveling at relativistic speeds but that's a hold of the video now I know I left a lot of calendars out of this discussion this is very goog Orion centric but there's a lot of ancient calendars like the Mayan calendar that's really interesting worth talking about but also modern-day calendars that are still in use the Hebrew calendar the Islamic calendar the Chinese calendar I could go on and on each of these really interesting in their own ways and heavily influenced by the culture that created it the cycles of life and the calendars that document them have a really strong pool on our psyche I think that's kind of why I don't think you nextime would really work because there's nothing really to emotionally connect us to that you know when I say March that means something to you you might think about green clovers growing out on the lawn or you know they're starting to get windy when I say September you might start thinking about school getting started or the summer heat starting to break now there's a reason why we use months named after gods that haven't been worshipped for thousands of years these are ancient constructs that give our life structure and meaning so in that sense New Year's Day isn't just some arbitrary day it's the celebration of a passage of another cycle of life when we get precious few of and one that binds us all together so with that I wish you all a happy and healthy 2019 may your new year be so prosperous and wonderful that you just can't even see straight and if you can't see straight today's sponsor is simple contacts [Applause] [Music] [Applause] hey 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people that have added to the tribe here I'm going to just destroy their names real quick we've got Christian Bergman Ryan Garden I'm Philip Estrin Jeremy Sartori Jack shed Matt's are down Doug my mark Benton Marvin Ullman Christian Warren Shane Miller Erin patty T Joel Davis squiggle nut Matt D McCall rhymer Quran I think Marcus bones ski bike hike Thomas Erskine Dennis B Russ Henderson Blair LaDuke and Shane Guthrie and Dario thank you guys so much there's actually a lot more names that I have not gotten to yet I've got a big backlog and I apologize to those of you who are waiting we'll get your names out eventually but if you would like to join these guys and get access to early videos and behind-the-scenes stuff and just get to hear from me on a regular basis you can go to patreon.com/scishow joe please like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe check out this video Google thinks you'll like that or any of my other videos and if you do like them maybe subscribe because I do come back with videos just like this every Monday and Thursday t-shirts as always are available at the store answers with TOCOM slash shirts lots of really cool nerdy designs buy a really cool guy benefits the channel benefits him and it benefits you because you look cool so go check it out thanks again for watching you guys have an eye-opening 2019 I hope you have the most wonderful New Year and prosperous 2019 you can possibly have well you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 347,728

Keywords: answers with joe, new years day, calendars, gregorian calendar, julian calendar, calendar of romulus, lunar calendar, solar calendar, lunisolar calendar, leap years, intercalary days, world calendar, hanke-henry calendar, unix time, french republican calendar, metric time

Id: WZXnSF-hO-A

Length: 16min 54sec (1014 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 31 2018