Daylight Calendar
Daylight Calendar
[Danish is looking down at her phone which she holds up in her hand, while Cueball stands next to her]: Danish: Ugh, I hate November. It's 26:15 and the sun is setting again! Danish: 3-day days are the worst. Cueball: I like it. I know it's dark, but it's nice to have the extra time on deadlines.
[Caption below the panel]: In our new calendar system, the date changes after every 12 hours of daylight, regardless of how long that takes.

At the time of this posting, the United States had ended daylight saving time (DST) recently, on November 7, and returned to standard time. Daylight saving time is a practice of setting clocks ahead by 1 hour during warmer months to effectively 'borrow' some of the typically unused early morning light and pass it down to the late evening where more people can make use of it. In the United States, daylight saving time starts on the second Sunday in March and ends on the first Sunday in November.
A result of ending of daylight saving time is the sun setting earlier than people are used to, as people have become acclimatised to the shifted clocks — though it does mean an 'extra' hour of light has returned to the seasonally redarkening mornings. The start of the comic may be the start of a typical comment about how the sun seems to set earlier than usual in November; which it does anyway (north of the equator) but the clock-shift makes it even more obvious.
In this comic, however, Randall turns the normal talk about DST on its head by devising a calendar system where the dates "change" based on 12 hours of daylight. This causes shorter "days" in the summer months, which may get more than 12 hours of daylight in a "solar day" and longer "days" in the winter months which would have fewer hours of daylight in a "solar day". As mentioned in the title text, this change would be very pronounced near the poles, which may only get a few hours of daylight per 24 hours in the winter, but conversely may get 20 or more hours of daylight per 24 hours in the summer. Cueball says that he likes the new calendar system, as it gives him more "time" in the winter to complete work - if Cueball is given "3 days" to complete a task, each of those days could be longer than a typical 24 hours. However, this would be reversed in the summer, as each day would be shorter. Also, if this calendar system was in place, his boss could resolve this problem by just giving him 72 hours to complete his task instead of "3 days".
At temperate latitudes and above, as the calendar goes towards winter (for your hemisphere) the length of daylight per daily cycle shortens. Instead of having "long summer days" (i.e. periods of daylight) and shorter ones in the winter, but still the artificial pressures of a regulated 24-hour cycle to adhere to, the proposal seems to be that the date gets incremented whenever (and only when) twelve hours of daylight have passed.
In the summer, a day-count starting at sunrise could require a late-afternoon switch to 'tomorrow', which would in turn be switched earlier still the next day as it was already partly used up, with possibly two date-changes per astronomical day (early morning and mid-evening, for example). As winter draws on, not enough daylight will pass to guarantee a date-change in any single period. On the day of this comic's release - November 15, 2021 - Massachusetts, where Randall lives, gets ten hours and forty five minutes between civil twilights . It is possible that the last day-mark was late during the previous daylight cycle and the next one won't be until early in the following one.
Depending on how exactly daylight is measured, we may have more "days" in a year than the usual 365, since refraction of light near the horizon means that the sun is visible slightly more than 50% of the year on average. This effect is strongest near the poles, since the sun spends more time near the horizon. In addition, due the Earth's elliptical orbit, more northerly parts of the Earth receive more sunlight than southerly parts. Combined, these effects mean that a year at the north pole is 381 "days", compared to 369 at the Equator.
Exactly how the time is marked is not fully explained. Starting each day-period at 00:00 would be easiest, but could be a psychological step too far. One possibility is to set a nominal 00:00 six hours before a day-change, in line with an 'idealised' twelve-hours-of-daylight day, but disregard hours 'belonging' to a prior daylight period. Then keep the clock running (throughout any intervening nights and into the next daylight as necessary) until the date clicks over and realigns as necessary. Clock times would not reach 23:59 for most of the summer, and could far exceed that in the winter. Megan's clock has reached 26:15, by this sunset, and may well be due to be far into the 30-hours range before more daylight and the moving on to the new date and reset time, if not beyond.
Beyond the arctic (and antarctic) circle, twelve hours of daylight would be accumulated up twice per traditional day, at times, while being effectively on hold for much of the other six months, depending upon actual latitude.
[Danish is looking down at her phone which she holds up in her hand, while Cueball stands next to her]: Danish: Ugh, I hate November. It's 26:15 and the sun is setting again! Danish: 3-day days are the worst. Cueball: I like it. I know it's dark, but it's nice to have the extra time on deadlines.
[Caption below the panel]: In our new calendar system, the date changes after every 12 hours of daylight, regardless of how long that takes.
