[HN Gopher] Pax Calendar
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Pax Calendar
Author : rfreytag
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-05-12 14:51 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (en.wikipedia.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (en.wikipedia.org)
| nayuki wrote:
| I don't think this reformed calendar goes far enough. Many of our
| services are billed monthly - Internet, phone, electricity,
| property tax, etc. I don't know if the pax week would be
| considered its own super-short month or fused into another month,
| but it massively complicates financial calculations and issues of
| fairness.
|
| Other people have pointed out issues like with 13 months, you
| can't divide the year into quarters.
| jmclnx wrote:
| Will make things rather hard for financial businesses that expect
| 3 months per quarter and 4 quarters per year.
| rmah wrote:
| finance is even weirder. for example the US/360 bond calendar
| assumes 12 months of 30 days each. to make various calculations
| easier, I guess.
| aranchelk wrote:
| I don't like leap weeks. I'd much rather have 1-2 leap days. Let
| them exist outside the months: year starts with 0 and every 4th
| year 00 then 0.
|
| For anyone thinking that will be a pain to code, side benefit,
| it'll hasten the adoption of sum types.
| bombcar wrote:
| Shire Calendar beats it.
| adamtheclayman wrote:
| [dead]
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| cf https://qntm.org/calendar
| dhosek wrote:
| I recently ended up in a wikipedia rathole looking at various
| alternative calendar systems, at least in part to be able to give
| a true but unintelligible answer to the question of when my
| birthday is. Among the oddballs were the Discordian calendar
| which divides the year into five seasons of 73 days each with
| 5-day weeks and the Pataphysical calendar which has 13 months
| each of 29 days, but for most months, the 29th day is imaginary.
| digging wrote:
| Pretty unpleasant to have an extra week once in a while, IMO.
| Seems this calendar would lead to confusing seasonal drift in
| more stable (pre-industrial) climate, but I guess there's no
| seasonal predictability going forward .
|
| As a fun thought experiment, I once devised my own Equal
| Terrestrial Calendar, intended to be both predictable and
| _actually_ secular.
|
| - Weeks are 5 days long.
|
| - Months are 6 weeks long (exactly).
|
| - Thus, a month is 30 days, and as close as possible to an
| average lunar month.
|
| - Every week/month/year begins on the same day of the week
|
| - Work weeks are 3 days long.
|
| - 3 intercalary holidays at the winter solstice, and 2
| intercalary holidays at the summer solstice (make it 3 every leap
| year)
|
| - 30 days/month * 12 months + 5.25 days (intercalary) = 365.25,
| but in a fairly even spread
|
| Not possible for a calendar to be perfect, but I'd really enjoy
| living in this world.
| NoMoreNicksLeft wrote:
| What if instead we were to go with non-24-hour days? We could
| fix even more problems with such a system, like:
|
| * Days starting at the same hour:minute all the time
|
| * The current impossibility of a decimal clock. We're
| constantly told how using base-10 makes math so much easier,
| who wouldn't want a day being 10 hours long and a week 10 days
| long? If the answer is 168, you've screwed up somewhere
|
| * The conceit that ancient deities like Apollo and Ra are so
| important that even after we've abandoned those religions, we
| must continue to allow our calendars revolve around their
| golden chariots. I say "no more!", we will spurn the
| astronomical bodies as well
|
| * The relegation of agriculture to the primitive past, where it
| belongs. I only eat Hot Pockets anyway. The chicken milkers and
| tomato tree people can go live in yurts or something if they
| believe caveman calendars are important
|
| * The ability to insert special 5-minute days into the calendar
| in emergencies, like when I have a new game on pre-order that
| is scheduled to come out in 60 days' time. We could easily
| reduce that to an effective 3 hours or so
| digging wrote:
| Sounds fun. But the day is evenly divided already, so there's
| less pressure to change it.
| chinaman425 wrote:
| [dead]
| smitty1110 wrote:
| Or we could go with a real classic from Ye Olde Days: The
| Babylonian calendar[1]. A visual explanation is here [2]. I
| rather like that they use the physical properties of a pendulum
| to link length and time.
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar 2:
| https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Sumerian...
| helmsb wrote:
| I've always been fascinated by alternative calendars (also
| alternative timekeeping). However, barring an apocalyptic event,
| I don't for see any alternative calendars taking off.
|
| For most of human history, we didn't need a standardized
| calendar, you just needed to agree with people that you
| interacted with. Religion pushed most of the standardization and
| later reinforced during the Industrial Revolution--helped along
| by colonialism.
|
| Now that we are a globalized society, it would require parties
| from every nation and every industry to agree to the change and
| coordinate a simultaneous migration. Given we can't get close to
| that level of cooperation when faced with potentially existential
| crises, it's doubtful we could do it because it's a "better"
| system than the current one.
|
| I'd love to be proven wrong though!
| halosghost wrote:
| At this point, I doubt there will ever be any proposal as easy to
| adopt and as radically-improved as Symmetry454 [1].
|
| One day, I hope to live in a world where I get to use this
| calendar and the average response isn't for people to look at me
| funny...
|
| For anyone looking for a tl;dr, Symmetry454...
|
| - is perpetual; one printed calendar will work, more or less,
| indefinitely
|
| - preserves the 7-day sabbatical week cycle (no intercalary days
| like IFC)
|
| - simplifies the leap rule to a formula which should work for a
| very long time (at least a few millenia from now)
|
| - preserves 3 months in a quarter, and 4 equal quarters making up
| a year
|
| - results in every week, month, quarter, year, etc. beginning on
| a Monday and ending on a Sunday; this also means knowing just the
| day number tells you exactly what day-of-week it is
|
| - ensures all months now consist of a predictable, whole-number
| of weeks
|
| ... it's just... so much better...
|
| All the best,
|
| [1]: http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/symmetry.htm
| tobr wrote:
| What about this idea for a calendar: every year is 1 month,
| every month is 1 week, and every week is 1 day?
|
| - Every year and month starts on a Monday
|
| - No leap days needed at all
|
| - You can use the same calendar every year (better yet, you
| might already have a blank piece of paper you can use)
|
| - Every day is your birthday
| halosghost wrote:
| You might be responding tongue-in-cheek, but you have
| essentially described an underspecified variant of FDN Rata
| Die [1].
|
| FDN R.D. does have a place in calendrical calculations;
| namely, it serves as the narrow waist for converting between
| calendars.
|
| All the best,
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rata_Die
| digging wrote:
| I'm not a fan of having some months be 25% longer than most,
| but it _is_ predictable. One thing to consider in calendar
| reform is monthly payments. They could easily be transferred to
| weekly payments in this system, or increased 25% for extended
| months.
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