21st Century Progress

There’s this very cool Twitter account called @year_progress that tweets every time the year has elapsed 1%. The author, Filip Hráček has built other counters in his progress bar page, mainly to keep track of the current quarter, month and workday. Overall a pretty intersting hack.

Inspired by that hack and based on the fact that I wanted to try out some of the AWS Lambda features, I started to think about how to calculate the progress of the entire 21st century. Given we are in 2019, assumption would be that we are roughly 19% in so far of the century. Then I started obsessing about it a little bit thinking on ways to calculate it. At the end, I learned a whole bunch about time calculation on a very long timespan. For instance, the fact that we have leap years makes the calculation far far interesting. A naive approach would be to think that every year elapsed will mean that 1% of the century has occured. And not really, since the leap years will unbalance that out:

>>> from datetime import datetime, date, time
>>> start = datetime(2001, 1, 1, 0, 0, 0)
>>> end   = datetime(2100, 12, 31, 23, 59, 59)
>>> (end - start).total_seconds()
3155673599.0

So if we split all of those seconds into 100, to get 1%, we don’t necessarily end up by the end of 2001 or early beginning of 2002:

>>> (end - start).total_seconds() / 100
31556735.99
>>> start + timedelta(0, 31556735.99)
datetime.datetime(2002, 1, 1, 5, 45, 35, 990000)

We are actually 5 hours and 45 minutes into the new year: 5h 45m 35s to be exact. On the other end, we are logically roughly the same distance away:

>>> start + timedelta(0, 31556735.99 * 99)
datetime.datetime(2099, 12, 31, 18, 14, 23, 10000)

Moreover, contrary to popular belief, not every four years a leap year happens. 2100 is not a leap year. So in the 21st century there’s 24 leap years:

>>> import calendar
>>> leaps = []
>>> for i in range(2001, 2100 + 1):
...     if calendar.isleap(i):
...             leaps.append(i)
... 
>>> 
>>> leaps
[2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024, 2028, 2032, 2036, 2040, 2044, 2048, 2052, 2056, 2060, 2064, 2068, 2072, 2076, 2080, 2084, 2088, 2092, 2096]

So by the end of 2019, 4 leap years have elapsed in the century, which are 345600 seconds (4 times 86400 seconds).

So when 2019 comes to an end, we won’t really be at 19% elapsed sharp:

>>> end_2019 = datetime(2019, 12, 31, 23, 59, 59)
>>> full = end - start
>>> ( ( end_2019 - start).total_seconds() / full.total_seconds() ) * 100
18.998466735912885

Time is a pain in arse but also kinda fun. Go follow @century_bar for more of this fun. A bit more of the explanation is at the GitHub repo here.

dm