1061: EST

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EST

Title text: The month names are the same, except that the fourth month only has the name 'April' in even-numbered years, and is otherwise unnamed.

Explanation

This explanation may be incomplete or incorrect: If you can address this issue, please edit the page! Thanks.

This comic is a reference to the paradox in complexity theory that if you attempt to simplify a system of problems by creating a new system of evaluation for the problems you have instead made the problem more complex than it was originally.

Randall advertises his idea for an "Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet". He combines calendar definitions with time zone definitions. The abbreviation EST is a joke on the American Eastern Standard Time.

• "24 hours 4 minutes" makes the days longer attempting to compensate the fact there are now only 360 in a year. Four days are still missing in this calculation.

• Running the clock 4 hours backwards after every full moon, giving 8 additional hours at each full moon, twelve times in a year. This fills the gap from before. This also makes the time between full moons close to 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days).

• The Epoch at EST matches the Julian calendar which was superseded by the actual Gregorian calendar. The Julian calendar is currently 13 days behind the Gregorian calendar.

• The different zone for the United Kingdom is because 1 yard is equal to 0.9144 meters. A pun on using imperial units instead of the metric system. At the United States the metric system is the official one, but the imperial units are still widely used.

• The one obvious reference is to Narnian time, a fictitious world of Narnia in CS Lewis's The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. In Narnia, time passes much more quickly than in the real world. You could be in Narnia for several days and only a few minutes would have passed in the real world.

• The year 1958 is relevant because January 1, 1958 is the epoch (time zero) in International Atomic Time (TAI), which is part of the basis for Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). (The main difference is that TAI doesn’t add leap seconds).

• The Gregorian calendar does not include the year "0", after "1" BC the next year is "1" AD. Randalls invention fixes this according to correct Mathematics.

• The title text may be a reference to the ancient (Pre-Babylonian Exile) Jewish Calendar, which did not name the months, rather assigning them numbers from 1 to 12. The names used in modernity are the names of the Babylonian months, derived from various Babylonian deities.

Transcript

XKCD Presents

EARTH STANDARD TIME

(EST)

A Universal Calendar for a Universal Planet

EST is...

Simple * Clearly Defined * Unambiguous

Free of Historical Baggage * Compatible with Old Units

Precisely Synced with the Solar Cycle * Free of Leap Years

Intermittently Amenable to Date Math

UNITS

Second: 1 S.I. Second

Minute: 60 seconds

Hour: 60 minutes

Day: 1444 minutes (24 hours 4 minutes)

Month: 30 Days

Year: 12 months

RULES

For 4 hours after every full moon, run clocks backward.

The non-prime-numbered minutes of the first full non-reversed hour after a solstice or equinox happen twice.

[Epoch]

00:00:00 EST, January 1, 1970 = 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970 (Julian calendar)

[Time Zones]

The two EST time zones are

EST and EST (United Kingdom). These are the same except that the UK second is 0.9144 standard seconds.

Daylight saving: Countries may enter DST, but no time may pass there.

Narnian Time: Synchronized.

Year Zero: EST does have a year 0. (However, there is no 1958.)

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Discussion

"24 hours 4 minutes" because the period of rotation of the Earth is 24 hours MINUS four minutes.

EST = Eastern Standard Time (USA) or England Standard Time (UK); there's no easy way to disambiguate this since it is a common time zone for English speakers in the USA and UK.

"Run clocks backward" a possible reference to the leap second.

"0.9144" because 1 yard = 0.9144 meters

"triple 4 hours after every full moon" = add on an additional 12 hours every full moon, to make the time between full moons exactly 30 "days" (in real life it's 29.5 days). 75.103.23.206 21:44, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Erm, just like to say, as a UK resident for all my life (five decades, adult and child), that I've never heard of "English Standard Time". GMT is Greenwich ('Gren-itch') Mean Time, which is for most purposes the same as UTC (which officially took over in the early 70s, but most lay-people still say 'GMT') and all the various other prime standards in use (give or take leap seconds, planetary rotation/orbitting adjustments, adherence to atomic clocks, etc) and BST (British Summer Time, i.e. GMT+1)has just taken over for this sun-tilted part of the year. A brief check of the usual reference sites reveals no sign of EST existing any time since any form of standardised "Railway Time" was originally instituted in the days of the Industrial Revolution, but I might have missed it.

Anyway, as such, the two ESTs is surely a constructed part of the joke not (as I read it) some fact from RL that needs explaining. Yes, there's EST (Eastern Standard Time) for the US (and versions for Australia and elsewhere?), as well as main Egyptian time-zone and European Summer Time (actually a over-term for the three varieties: Western, Central and Eastern). (The UK roughly matches up to Western European Time and Western European Summer Time accordingly, but that's by no means official except possibly by convention/shared heritage of definition.) But I think the joke with the two 'EST's is purely to do with something like the whole Yard/Metre(/Meter) thing. Although initially I imagined it might be something to do with UK/US Gallon differences, albeit that we now tend to have to use Litres. Or, if you prefer, 'Liters'. ;) 178.99.20.83 21:49, 1 April 2013 (UTC)

I seem to recall that Narnia time ran usually much faster but sometimes much slower than real-world time. 130.160.145.224 20:51, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

I always thought that Taiwan, Province of China missed a golden opportunity here to establish propaganda that they founded it. Instead they are known as a township in the US. 66.88.136.254 20:01, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Think of what Jack Bauer could have done with 4 more minutes! 108.162.254.101 (talk) (please sign your comments with ~~~~)

Not all possible attempts to make the calendar simpler would make it as complicated (or worse) than it is. For example, removing one day each from January and August to make February have 30 or 31 like the rest of the months would make the calendar (slightly) simpler and more logical going forward.173.245.50.174 18:39, 7 September 2015 (UTC)

You'd have to rewrite Zeller's congruence and find a replacement for the Knuckle mnemonic, both of which depend upon the existing pattern, or you'd upset a lot of people!

For the former, it relies upon the pattern of starting after February and observing that the days are 31,30,31,30,31 for March...July, the same again August...December and starting the same pattern again for January and, as far as it goes, February. Adjusting Zeller to use 12/5ths instead of 13/5ths might work out well. That seems (...back of an envelope calculation) to allow for 31 day months being March, June, August, November and January (italics were 30 days), all the rest being 30 (demoting four previously 31-day months) except for the leap-February for which the extra-extra-day causes no knock-on-effects.

But you also could bring down every month to 30 days (use the factor 10/5ths, or actually just assuming the straight constant shift of +2 weekdays per month without needing to round down anything at all), except February which now has 35-or-36 days.

(Even simpler, every month other than Feb could be 28 days - see how they like it, and Feb now be more than double the size to make up for historical wrongs. Which'd be reason enough to retain the year-downshift of Jan/Feb, but otherwise removes any month-number terms in Zeller, just the (adjusted) year-number bits because the year still ≠mod7 days.)

...but I'd be sad to lose the Knuckles coincidence. Whatever other 'improvememts' you might think I'm suggesting! 172.71.178.22 15:27, 3 September 2023 (UTC)

This might be a reference to the old TV show Babylon 5 here, but that's unlikely because the show is never mentioned anywhere else.208.97.36.166 3:18, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Perhaps it's just a coincidence, but it should be noted "1958" could also refer to the Discordian calendar, in which that is the year 3125 (5^5, 5 being the by far most significant number in a religion especially obsessed with numerology).--141.101.105.29 22:10, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

The historical Jewish calendar did have month names; four of them happen to come up in the Old Testament. Some do suspect that the names were only used rarely.
The modern Japanese calendar - and I think a few others - does have numbered months only; don't recall if any historical ones do, unfortunately. 141.101.80.44 09:53, 8 October 2015 (UTC)

I agree that the connection to the Jewish (or for that matter Japanese) calendar is nonexistent. Will remove. Jkshapiro (talk) 02:58, 10 July 2020 (UTC)