[HN Gopher] Searching for Lost Time in the World's Most Beautifu...
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Searching for Lost Time in the World's Most Beautiful Calendar
Author : benbreen
Score : 79 points
Date : 2023-04-15 19:00 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| billfruit wrote:
| Can anyone post a summary, obnoxious id/paywall on the article,
| not even allowing to read one sentence.
| vijayr02 wrote:
| https://archive.is/zXX4f
| nunodonato wrote:
| I've been toying the idea of building a totally different
| calendar app for a couple of years. Not that the current "square"
| approach doesn't work for what it is supposed to do, but
| sometimes its just cool to explore things.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| How about trying the French Republican Calendar [0], on this
| auspicious date: Decade III, Septidi de Germinal de l'Annee
| CCXXXI de la Revolution?
|
| It was still 'square' though. Perhaps alternative versions of
| the Periodic table might provide some insights.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
| davidy123 wrote:
| Please do. I can't believe basically every calendar app
| quantizes things to "months," with a disruptive jump from one
| to the next, which is just annoying when you want to access
| time as a day by day, week by week thing. We could get rid of
| "months," using week number instead for example, and it would
| not really matter, but we're all forced to that paradigm.
| madcaptenor wrote:
| Honestly weeks feel more relevant than months for day-to-day
| life. Source: my four-year-old understands weeks (because she
| can see the difference between weekdays when she has school
| and weekends when she does not) but not months.
| sslayer wrote:
| It's unfortunate as a society we don't punctuate our months
| with something as simple as an extended 4 day break.
| davidy123 wrote:
| I think it would be better for everyone to get four days
| a month to choose as days off. Then it would be better
| distributed. I would prefer this to a four work week.
| After a few days in a row the freedom really sinks in, so
| I'd love to be able to take a week off every month, guilt
| free.
| theK wrote:
| Its probably way too late to implement something like
| this but the idea is still a good one.
|
| Thinking of it, wasn't there a "metric" calendar or
| something that sort of did this?
| Nzen wrote:
| The French Republican Calendar had five/six complementary
| days [0] at the end of the year that were part of no
| particular month. They were, however, spent contiguously
| between summer and fall, rather than between each season.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calen
| dar#Com...
| matthewfcarlson wrote:
| I've been thinking about creating a budgeting app that
| finally does away with months. I hate setting a budget for a
| month and would instead love to do a 30 rolling window.
| philshem wrote:
| --> 28 day rolling window
| konschubert wrote:
| Please do it and tell me about it.
| doh wrote:
| This was the logic Brex started with when they first
| introduced their corporate cards.
|
| The rolling window started wrecking havoc very quickly. For
| instance, we gave all employees $300/month budget for
| parking garage. However, on some months they would charge
| the card on 5th of the month, on another at 11th, etc. It
| was literally unusable and we left for another provider
| (later Brex also went back to calendar days).
|
| While this might not be an issue for your application per
| se, the real world operates on calendar days. You will
| quickly run into situations where 30 day rolling window not
| only doesn't work but is explicitly causing problems.
|
| My 2 cents.
| nerdponx wrote:
| This is a great idea. It would be really useful if you
| could just put in income and expenses with dates attached,
| and have the app compute things in windows of various
| sizes, as well as traditional calendar-based periods.
| amelius wrote:
| You'd still have a disruptive jump between weeks.
| ff317 wrote:
| Yes, but those are "real". Most peoples' life patterns are
| actually altered by week and weekend boundaries. Mar 1 this
| year fell mid-week on a Wednesday. It made no difference to
| most lives except that it made everyone's calendar ugly
| with duplicated / grey-ed out days at the end of a February
| calendar and the start of a March calendar.
| amelius wrote:
| By the way, why don't we switch to a 8-day week. I.e., 5
| working days + 3 weekend days?
|
| Technological progress should have made this possible by
| now, I suppose. More spare time for side-projects :)
| Let's call the 8th day "Funday".
| xwdv wrote:
| At first I thought when he said a "different" calendar app,
| it would be something perhaps that didn't measure and record
| events in standard units of time, but perhaps I guess that is
| too different to be useful for most people.
| beerandt wrote:
| >too different to be useful for most people
|
| So is what he's talking about. You just don't realize it
| until you try to implement it.
|
| Some things are the way they are for arbitrary reasons.
| Most things timekeeping have a pretty good reason for how
| they came to be.
|
| But then again I argue the same thing for US system of
| measurements vs metric, as well.
| robto wrote:
| I really like the Fastmail calendar because it has months on
| a giant scroll, so one leads seamlessly into the next. It
| works quite well for me because I really think on a "weeks"
| basis but knowing the month is still important.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Not in the week view, which makes it super annoying - I
| often want to move/copy events from one week to the next,
| and I can't do it through drag and drop, because (like
| almost every webapp out there) Fastmail app doesn't
| understand interactions like "scroll by one day only" and
| "if I drag to the edge of the canvas, it means I want you
| to scroll it".
|
| Month view, yes, has this nice continuity you mentioned. It
| also has a ... I can't pin exactly what's wrong, but I
| almost always get confused which month I'm looking at,
| because the month name label above the calendar seems to
| often be off by one month relative to what month is visible
| on the screen. But the bigger issue is, of course, that in
| a monthly view, you can hardly fit any useful amount of
| events.
| garciansmith wrote:
| Thunderbird also has a calendar view like this called
| Multiweek, though I do like Fastmail's smoother scrolling.
| antognini wrote:
| The Romans had an interesting calendar. The lengths of their
| months were fixed and they had a 13th "intercalary" month that
| got inserted every few years to keep the months roughly in line
| with the seasons.
|
| Because everything was completely regular, everything was the
| same one year to the next, so you didn't need a unique calendar
| for each year. Consequently, calendars would be engraved in
| stone on public monuments and the wealthy would have a calendar
| painted onto a wall in their home.
|
| The year would be written out as a set of 13 columns, with each
| column being a month. They would then have the list of days in
| the month going down, and would note any holidays for the day.
|
| The only wrinkle in the Roman calendar were the "nundinae,"
| which were (very loosely) a sort of Roman weekend. But the
| nundinae happened on an eight day cycle, so they didn't line up
| from one year to the next. The way they handled this was that
| they labeled each day in the year sequentially with a letter
| from A-H. Then all you needed to know was which letter
| corresponded to the nundinae for that particular year. (And, of
| course, whether that year had the extra 13th month.)
|
| Here's what a typical Roman calendar looked like:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_del_Teatro_Romano_d...
| oh_sigh wrote:
| How about: 13 months, each is always 28 days/4 weeks. At the
| end of the year there is a public holiday. Every leap year
| the public holiday is 2 days long. The hard part will be
| thinking of the name for the 13th month.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > The lengths of their months were fixed and they had a 13th
| "intercalary" month that got inserted every few years to keep
| the months roughly in line with the seasons.
|
| This is precisely how the current Hebrew calendar works.
| antognini wrote:
| Yes, pretty much every civilization that used a lunar
| calendar relied on an intercalary month getting added to
| keep the calendar in sync with the seasons.
|
| What made the Roman calendar unique was that it did not tie
| the months to the lunar phases. In the Hebrew and
| Babylonian calendars the month started on the first day
| that the lunar crescent was visible after a new moon. Since
| the synodic period of the Moon is about 29 and a half days
| this meant that the length of the month varied. In fact,
| much of the early development of Babylonian astronomy was
| likely motivated by the need to predict in advance how long
| a month was going to be (and whether a 13th month was going
| to be necessary).
|
| But because the Romans didn't care what the phase of the
| Moon was (at least by the middle Republic), they could fix
| the lengths of the months to be same every year.
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(page generated 2023-04-17 23:01 UTC)