The Longest Year in Human History (46 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis4 HN recommenders · 2021–2024
7.4M views · explainer · evergreen · Uploaded 2019-04-24
Historia Civilis tells the story of 46 BCE, the 445-day year in which Julius Caesar reformed the Roman calendar. It covers the political context, including the civil war, Cato and Cicero.
Recommended as an entertaining and well-explained account of why our calendar looks the way it does.
18:13Try to Rule Fairly and You'll Be Overthrown
CGP Grey
43:43Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order by Ray Dalio
Principles by Ray Dalio
4:48London Swallowed a City but Couldn't Digest It.
CGP Grey
12:08Why Some Diseases Only Traveled One Direction
CGP Grey
2:27:498. The Sumerians - Fall of the First Cities
Fall of Civilizations
1:18:02The Spider's Web: Britain's Second Empire | The Secret World of Finance
Independent POV
5:15The UK Is a Country Made of Countries
CGP Grey
1:00:22Tiedustelueverstin arvio Venäjästä | 3.12.2018
fin_topsu
5 comments from Hacker News
> Why don’t we use TAI or GPS time for generic world wide coordinated computer time? I think that is valid as long as systems are talking to systems, but the interface with the world (when things are happening in the world) is where the solar day or year is still relevant. I'm sort of joking, but watching Interstellar made me kinda cringe about what interstellar gravity wells is going to do to time-keeping, even if we use something like an atomic clock to keep time. We will slowly get better at this until we discover something new, but the switch doesn't mean anything until the costs outweigh the change. And the leap second is going look like 46-45 BCE[1]. [1] - [VIDEO]
The Longest Year in Human History (46 B.C.E.) - [VIDEO] gets into the "why the year we have is designed the way it is" ... though it takes 22 minutes to get to that part. It wasn't really better as the 30 * 12 + 5 approach needed manual application of the + 5... which is what the new calendar was trying to avoid.
I didn't appreciate until recently that the calendar we live by today was personally designed by Julius Caesar. Like not by some forgotten technocrats incidentally during his time, but Julius Caesar himself as a subject matter expert, as a side-project. With consultation, certainly, but by his initiative, from long-standing engagement with the problem in one of his early jobs from long before he was a main character of the Roman story. Digestable and entertaining (fragment of a) video on the topic: [VIDEO]
Ha, a proof that by watching YouTube videos you learn something. This was covered by one of my favorite series on YouTube. Here is the particular video: [VIDEO]
Historia Civilis has a great video explaining how Caeser used the longest year to his advantage in war: [VIDEO]