It's a fresh slate, a clean piece of paper, a new year full of possibilities. It's 20234! By now we were all supposed to have flying cars and jet packs, and vacation on the moon. Instead we have TikTok, Instagram, and "influencers" who somehow make a living doing all that. Fifty years ago, who could have predicted we'd be using all of the amazing technological advancements for people to stoke their egos?

Still, we have a fascination with clocks and calendars and odometers rolling over to a new set. Time is a human construct, where we've divided the year into days and months, and divided the day into minutes and hours. None of that makes any sense when held up against nature. Even the "New Year's Eve" countdown in bogus.

What?

As you well know by now, we have a leap year every 4 years (2024 is one of them). Why? Because a year isn't 365 days long - it's approximately 365.25 days. After 3 years, we are geologically almost a whole day ahead of the calendar, which is why we have to add a day to the calendar every 4 years.

That means if you want to celebrate a complete revolution around the Sun, it would be 6 hours later each year until the next leap year. So technically, NYE 2020 should have been celebrated at 6:00 AM on Jan 01, then 12:00 noon in 2021, and 6:00 PM Jan 01 2022. For 2023, we correctly celebrated at midnight, but it should have been when Jan 01 rolled over to Jan 02. At the end of 2024, because of the extra day, we're back at 6:00 AM on Jan 01 2025.

Yes, I'm the kind of nerd who explains this at parties. This is why I don't get invited back.

Anyway - it's a new year, and I hope you haven't stained your clean piece of paper yet. Here's to a better year (personally) than this past one. Also - practice writing 2024 so you don't mess up all those checks you write (LOL).