Comments on Microcentury

Ivo said:

If we consider optimal attention span, a microcentury is much two long. Two half microcenturies with a pause in between would be better.

Hillel Wayne said:

I like this analysis a lot! But there's one more twist to the story: are we even using the right definition of year? There's actually several different ways we can define a year:

• NIST-811 defines the light-year "year" as 365.2500 days and the "common year" as 365 days exactly.
• The sidereal year: the time it takes for the stars to return to a fixed point. That's 365.2563 days.
• The tropical year: the time between vernal equinoxes. That's 365.2421 days.
• The anomalistic year: the time between points where the earth is closest to the sun. That's 365.2596 days.

For each of these we can define the microcentury as a hundred microyears. So the sidereal microcentury is +35.81 seconds, while the tropical microcentury is +35.69 seconds. The NIST microcentury is +33.6 seconds, while the Julian microcentury is +35.76 seconds (as you calculated).

Personally, I'd define a calendar microcentury as a four-millionth of 400 years to match the leap year cycle. That'd give us +35.692 seconds.

François Best said:

We had a running joke in engineering school, that π seconds is close to a nanocentury by around 6 nanomonths, we obviously didn't go that far in calculations, so I wonder if it still holds.