[HN Gopher] The world nearly adopted a calendar with 13 months o...
___________________________________________________________________
The world nearly adopted a calendar with 13 months of 28 days
Author : benbreen
Score : 116 points
Date : 2023-11-05 03:53 UTC (19 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| camel_gopher wrote:
| That sounds awesome
| causi wrote:
| Having months that actually line up with the lunar cycle would be
| very handy.
| elevaet wrote:
| The one extra day a year would mean the full moon would fall
| back by 1 day every year relative to the months. Which still
| would still be pretty handy.
| acjohnson55 wrote:
| But they wouldn't, because the lunar cycle isn't 28 days.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_month
| aardvark179 wrote:
| The lunar cycle is not 28 days, or even a whole number of days.
| yieldcrv wrote:
| if our orbit around the sun was a perfect circle instead of
| elliptical we could ignore the orbit completely, or at least I
| would be willing to, and focus on the moon or just some
| interval of rotations - day/night cycles
| kalnins wrote:
| Winter/Summer cycle is more about the angle of Earths
| rotational axis and not the distance from the sun.
| osigurdson wrote:
| Lining up with the solar cycle / journey is more useful though
| (away from the equator at least). I suspect that is why people
| landed on a ~365 day calendar.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| Handy for what?
| em500 wrote:
| Most civilizations started with a lunar calendar (still used in
| Chinese and Islamic calendars), because it was much easier to
| observe the lunar cycle than the solar cycle. The solar
| calendar was the more useful one for getting good harvests, but
| technically much more challenging (requiring several tweaks
| over may centuries get the calibration right).
| dclowd9901 wrote:
| Our dumb calendar. Daylight savings time. Hell, time zones
| themselves. How many more dumb decisions of the past will we have
| to continue enduring just for the sake of, well, keeping things
| the same?
| 77pt77 wrote:
| One of the most relevant countries in the world still uses
| length measurements based on the foot of the length of their
| previous despot and they absolutely refuse to change.
|
| Nothing will change for a very long time.
| defrost wrote:
| What country are you talking about?
|
| The USofA standard foot has been officially defined in terms
| of the SI International System of Units since 1893.
|
| Since 1866 if you date it from the specification proposed by
| US Congress.
|
| https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot
| zzo38computer wrote:
| It is good that they define foot, inches, etc by SI units,
| because SI units are well-defined scientific units (except,
| until recently, the definition of kilogram was no good),
| and for the appropriate purposes the foot, inches, etc can
| be reasonable measures (while SI units are good for general
| purposes, the others are good for the specific purposes),
| so now they are also well-defined units.
| wpm wrote:
| And it'll never stop being funny how mad this makes the rest
| of the world for really no apparent reason at all.
|
| (inb4 link to mars reconnaissance orbiter wikipedia page)
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Get over yourself.
|
| No one's mad.
|
| It's just mildly amusing in a tragic way, like a slow
| motion train-wreck.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| Crashing satellites because one party did.'t git the
| conversion right?
| floitsch wrote:
| It's very annoying when reading books or watching movies in
| English.
|
| "A 5-feet tall monster ...". As a reader I have no idea if
| that's big or small.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| But... You kind of know basically how long an average
| literal foot is, right? Within an order of magnitude at
| least, and surely a lot more precisely and usefully than
| that. A 5-foot monster will be a few times bigger than a
| house cat, a few times smaller than a camel.
| Approximately.
|
| How long is a literal meter? However long whoever says,
| by definition.
| gpvos wrote:
| It's annoying since you are culturally dominant and we read
| and watch a lot of your output. We're not mad, but aware
| that it could be so much better.
| jcranmer wrote:
| You're alluding to the US customary units, but as far as I
| can tell, at no point was the US foot or any antecedent unit
| ever based on the length of someone's foot, let alone a
| ruler's foot.
|
| The primary length standard at the time of US independence
| appears to have been the length of a physical yardstick,
| which first appears to have come into existence sometime in
| the Middle Ages. What was used to determine the size of the
| various yardsticks is _extremely_ unclear, but at no point
| does it seem to have been based on anybody 's foot (although
| an arm is one of the suggestions).
| hervature wrote:
| I grew up in Canada where we use SI for everything official
| but Imperial for most daily things. For instance, I only know
| my height in cm because of the license I was issued when I
| was 16. The funny thing with units of measure is that they
| are all mostly irrelevant to daily life because people
| inherently think in things they deal with. For example, 12 Mg
| is just as useless to both SI and Imperial. But, if you say
| "as heavy as 6 cars", everyone immediately understands. SI is
| nice because you can attempt to change 12 Mg into something
| like 12 kL of water (since every L of water weighs a kg) or
| the amount of water in a pool of size 1m by 1m by 12m. Still,
| 6 cars is much easier to reason about.
| kergonath wrote:
| > For example, 12 Mg is just as useless to both SI and
| Imperial. But, if you say "as heavy as 6 cars", everyone
| immediately understands.
|
| I'm confused. Everyone understands what 12 tonnes are here.
| Besides, is your average car really 2 tonnes? That sounds
| like an awful lot, and it varies depending on location.
|
| > SI is nice because you can attempt to change 12 Mg into
| something like 12 kL of water (since every L of water
| weighs a kg) or the amount of water in a pool of size 1m by
| 1m by 12m.
|
| SI is nice because it does not depend on your cultural
| background. A gram is a gram regardless of your daily
| experience. So you can be sure that it will be understood
| the same way by anyone on Earth, contrary to overly heavy
| cars.
|
| > Still, 6 cars is much easier to reason about.
|
| I think this is highly culture dependent. As a matter of
| fact it is very rare to see this sort of analogies here
| (it's more common to see football pitches for large areas,
| for example).
| gpvos wrote:
| A tonne is 1000 kilo isn't it? I have to look it up every
| once in a while.
| kergonath wrote:
| Yes it is. Or 1 Mg in new money :) .
| zzo38computer wrote:
| Yes, it is. But, I don't like this word "tonne". I think
| that "megagram" is better.
| gpvos wrote:
| A litre is exactly the size of a carton of milk over here,
| so that is a very common amount that you use every day. A
| cubic metre or if you really wish a kilolitre (kl, not the
| Americanism kL) is an easy to imagine amount since we work
| with metres every day as well. Cars differ widely in size,
| and I have barely any idea about their weight.
| throwaway892238 wrote:
| > How many more dumb decisions of the past will we have to
| continue enduring just for the sake of, well, keeping things
| the same?
|
| I dunno. When do you predict all national, ethnic and religious
| identities will go away? I'm going with 100,000 years.
| huytersd wrote:
| With easily accessible gene replacement therapy? Probably 50.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Only through bioengineering warfare.
| gpvos wrote:
| No, that won't change anything.
| msla wrote:
| Genes are, at best, a correlate to culture and ethnicity,
| and sometimes a weak one. For example, the "one-drop rule"
| ensured that people with very little African ancestry would
| be Black (or other, ruder terms) for the purposes of
| American racial discourse and, therefore, culture.
| kyleyeats wrote:
| The months named after 7, 8, 9 and 10 are the 9th, 10th, 11th
| and 12th months.
| satvikpendem wrote:
| You can thank a few Roman imperators for that.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Julius and Augustus
| WesolyKubeczek wrote:
| The people who named those months had years started in March,
| so it checks out like that legacy variable in that legacy
| code whose name, type, description in the comment, and actual
| purpose all have grown to contradict each other.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| Odds are that bothered people in the past more than it
| bothers people now, making it a somewhat strange example of
| being forced to live with the stupid decisions of the past.
| msla wrote:
| The guy responsible for that ought to be stabbed.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Daylight savings time is dumb. But, I think time zones are not.
| It's very useful to have some measure of the hours that is
| roughly the same around the world
|
| Maybe some time zone borders are dumb, but mostly they follow
| the necessary complexities of political boundaries, geography,
| history, etc.
| 77pt77 wrote:
| Anyone that finds timezones dumb should have a look at China.
|
| Only on timezone.
|
| From the eastern border with Russia, to the border with
| Afghanistan.
| ks2048 wrote:
| Yeah, China is pretty bad. There is a cool map that shows
| the "errors" between local time and "ideal": https://en.wik
| ipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone#/media/File:Solar_ti...
| kccqzy wrote:
| And then you talk to anyone from western parts of China and
| they tell you the single-timezone policy is blatant
| geographical discrimination by the central government.
| matricaria wrote:
| > It's very useful to have some measure of the hours that is
| roughly the same around the world
|
| You could just have the same time everywhere. The only thing
| that changes is that 12 o'clock isn't midday anymore, which
| doesn't match with the current system almost anywhere.
| ks2048 wrote:
| So in a story someone says, "I woke up at 5:00 every day"
| it would be meaningless without also knowing roughly what
| longitude they were at (With time zones it's approximate,
| but we know it means they woke up early). If we had a
| "universal time" - like all our clocks are on UTC - I think
| people would naturally invent local times and we'd be back
| to time zones.
| msla wrote:
| Time zones acknowledge that everyone synchronizes with the
| people around them, possibly with some added information about
| people who are theoretically too far away to be in the same
| time zone together but still want to synchronize with each
| other. (This gets really absurd in the Pacific, but every time
| zone has odd jogs.) Removing time zones won't make that
| synchronization stop happening, it'll just make it more
| difficult to predict which clock distant people are _really_
| keeping in terms of when they 're up and active and doing
| business.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > A one-day "world holiday" between the final Saturday of the
| year and Sunday, Jan. 1, would bring the total number of days to
| 365.
|
| I was thinking to myself I liked this idea until I saw this. So
| there are days that now do not belong to a week. I cannot imagine
| how much special casing this would require.
|
| > "A 'month' does not mean anything," they wrote. "A day means
| something. A year means something. But a month?"
|
| Then by the same logic the week needs to be abolished. Then the
| problem above wouldn't exist. Now tell that to the religions.
| phire wrote:
| On the plus side, every day of the month would always be the
| same day.
|
| The 1st would always be a Sunday, the 25th would always be a
| Thursday, etc.
| yardstick wrote:
| People would hate having their birthdays always on the same
| day, imagine if it was always a Tuesday. Never a weekend.
|
| Sure, celebrations can still be held on weekends, but it's
| just not the same. And Fri 13th would die away.
| lostlogin wrote:
| I want to know what the bonus day gets called.
| kbenson wrote:
| Just call it the bonus day. I'm sure the equivalent of
| all the leap year babies that get to call themselves
| bonus babies will thank us.
| speed_spread wrote:
| "Great leaders day" because those born that day are
| destined to rule.
| fragmede wrote:
| Caturday?
| BossingAround wrote:
| Nah, the opposite is true for me. If I know for sure it's
| always a Tue, I can plan around it. I can schedule PTO for
| Mon and Tue, and have a nice long weekend, for example.
|
| What's so frustrating to me is when I realize that, for
| example, public holiday falls on the weekend (I know this
| is solved by some countries by moving the holiday to Monday
| or Friday). Last year, 24th of Dec was a Saturday, pretty
| much the worst time for Christmas.
| NullPrefix wrote:
| Always friday the 13th
| yardstick wrote:
| Which would be boring compared to it only happening once in
| a proverbial blue moon.
| valianteffort wrote:
| Changing the calendar in general seems stupid. The gregorian
| calendar is already well established simple to understand. What
| benefit does changing it actually bring?
|
| More importantly the US should switch to the metric system.
| sophacles wrote:
| There's a really high poe factor here....
|
| Like your arguments against changing the calendar to
| something more rational are the same arguments a lot of US
| folks use to justify not switching to the metric system.
|
| Well played.
| sneak wrote:
| The US already switched to the metric system in 1988.
|
| https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/metrication-law
|
| 15 USC SS 205b
|
| https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/205b
| lostlogin wrote:
| > I cannot imagine how much special casing this would require.
|
| Someone who administered a scheduling system for flight crew
| was telling me how hard it is. Multiple time zones, contracts,
| unions, jurisdictions, companies and staff roles (which require
| frequent recertification) etc.
|
| Imagine handling a bonus day in this context. It does not sound
| good.
| phs318u wrote:
| I have tried explaining some of this complexity to people
| when discussing Y2K (usually them rolling their eyes at the
| naked cash grab by overpaid consultants and me arguing that
| while there clearly was a gold-rush there were also real
| problems that got fixed which was why the stuff wasn't
| breaking left, right and centre).
| snapplebobapple wrote:
| I know right? Lets skip all this stupid special casing nonsense
| and just make each new second in this calendar equal to
| ~1.002747253 current seconds. Extra day solved! If we start
| this on the day equivalent to January 1 in the current calendar
| my plan has the added benefit of drastically reducing skin
| cancer by making 8 am on July 1 of the new calendar roughly
| equivalent to 8 pm in the current calendar. Can't get sun
| induced skin cancer if you aren't awake enough to be in the sun
| all summer!
| chrchr wrote:
| It's really not that difficult compared to what we have now. In
| our current system, there's one hour a year that happens twice
| and one that gets skipped. It's a weird special case, but we
| manage.
| theK wrote:
| Badly, we manage badly. I have wasted hundreds of hours
| debugging. Other people's code and writing involved
| workarounds because the team couldn't resist using "standard"
| ISO timestamps instead of the much more "arrow of time" like
| numeric offset (like Unix time)...
| gpvos wrote:
| Calendar items that I added a month ago have now shifted by
| an hour. It's all rather exasperating. Not to mention the
| three weeks of headache each spring after the change.
| water-data-dude wrote:
| Would it be better or worse than saving up seven of them until
| you can have a NULLWEEK?
| gpvos wrote:
| A useful suggestion, definitely worth considering. But having
| a year that is seven days longer would complicate business
| and taxes, which was the main reason for the regular
| calendar. Also, dates might get too much out of sync with
| things like the equinox for some religious tastes.
| eep_social wrote:
| Except it's really 1.24 extra per year which is what all that
| leap year stuff is about.
| masklinn wrote:
| > Now tell that to the religions.
|
| Most religions deal by having their own religious calendar.
| That the civil calendar is the Christian one is not a
| requirement.
| stvltvs wrote:
| But if your sabbath falls on on a Tuesday this year, Monday
| next year, etc. it's going to cause lots of trouble with
| store hours, work weeks, school schedules, and so on.
| masklinn wrote:
| How is that any more the general society's problem than
| dealing with other religious events, especially "moving"
| ones like Holi or Ramadan?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| For much of the world, one or more religious groups with
| a fixed weekly holy day _constitute the bulk of_ general
| society.
| fragmede wrote:
| Ah, yes, the "programming it's too hard, let's go shopping!"
| school of thought.
|
| Visionaries at companies like Google and Apple are known for
| their "ugh, special _cases_!? " approach to not finishing Jira
| tickets, which is why they are where they are today.
| kccqzy wrote:
| I did not suggest special cases in programming. Consider
| special cases in business, logistics. Mundane things like
| quarterly reports.
| tempestn wrote:
| Only slightly related, but I sometimes wonder how much more
| advanced we might be if we'd lucked into adopting a base-8 number
| system (8 fingers, ignoring the thumbs!) instead of base-10.
| Obvious comp-sci benefits aside, imagine the utility of a metric
| system based on (no pun intended) base-8.
|
| (I know some people say base-12 would be better, as it has lots
| of integer divisors, but I think the ease of repeated doubling
| and halving, along with that of binary conversion, makes base-8 a
| clear win.)
| montefischer wrote:
| I'm not sure we would be any more advanced. Anyone to whom
| binary conversion is relevant has sufficient intelligence to
| not need the convenience of base 8. For practical needs,
| convenient representation of repeated doubling and halving are
| of limited use. Much more relevant to the daily needs of actual
| people for most of history was the ability to reckon
| measurements using common objects such as the human body, hence
| the bewildering diversity of different measurement systems
| across different peoples, see e.g.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_weights_and_measures.
| The base of the number system was a non-factor.
| albert_e wrote:
| > I know some people say base-12 would be better, as it has
| lots of integer divisors
|
| IF people with an extra digit on their hand were more common
| and they were somehow elevated to a priestly / godly class at
| some point by a dominant tribe ... we would pronbably have had
| base-12 number system
| frankgrimesjr wrote:
| You can count to 12 on one hand pretty easily without any
| extra digits: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pUZwv9oFbI8
| _Qeomash_ wrote:
| Let's return to the Baylonians' base-60 system.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_cuneiform_numerals
| dempedempe wrote:
| Or we could adopt a number system that has actual, proven
| arithmetic benefits. See the Kaktovik numerals
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaktovik_numerals). As a bonus
| the numerals are all one single stroke, so it's super fast to
| write!
|
| Though, the benefits to calculation come from the fact that the
| numerals are iconic, not due to it being base-20.
| NewJazz wrote:
| That would look really nice to render hex digits. E.g. in v6
| addresses.
| jhoechtl wrote:
| We have 10 fingers. the thumb is a finger too. Better stay with
| base 10
| havercosine wrote:
| It is an interesting thought experiment to wonder if certain
| things were discovered earlier or later owing to a particular
| type of maths that we practiced.
|
| I was amused to learn that there are societies dedicated to the
| cause of dozenal system who write papers and books urging
| everyone to switch. On the other hand, I don't know if it is
| exaggerated but French revolutionist had grand ideas of
| creating decimal based systems even for time. But better sense
| prevailed in the long run!
|
| It is interesting to think how can changes of the form "if we
| can align everyone to change and adopt this new way" can be
| brought about at any scale beyond a few thousand folks. I think
| large mass adopted switches (horses to cars, smart phones) have
| been about incentives and convenience demonstrated by some
| early adopters. But for basic arithmetic this seems impossible
| to pull off!
| eclipticplane wrote:
| _Nearly_ is doing a lot of work in that headline.
| dmarinus wrote:
| I'd prefer 10 months, alternating 35 and 36 days. But I guess
| there had to be more Emperors than 10. (the months are called
| after Emperors)
| arp242 wrote:
| There were no emperors when the Julian calendar was created,
| during the Roman Republic (even though Caesar was de-facto
| proto-emperor at this point), and it was based on the Egyptian
| calendar which had 12 months. The Roman calendar was crap and
| had to be manually tweaked every year by the Pontifex Maximus
| (Caesar), and he had been inspired by the Egyptian calendar
| during his time there with Cleopatra.
|
| The only months named after emperors are July and August.
|
| I'm not entirely sure about Roman times specifically, but the
| number 12 was used a lot more in the past (hence words like
| "dozen") because it's easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, and
| doesn't have nonsense like 10/3 (well, 12/9, but who does
| that?)
|
| The old Roman calendar had 10 months, which is why "December"
| comes from Roman "deci" for 10. Herp derp. IIRC they could add
| an extra "leap month" decided manually, or something. I'd have
| to look it up how it worked exactly. It was pretty complex and
| irregular, which is why it was replaced with what we have now.
| Aside from one minor bugfix it's worked pretty well for about
| 2,100 years.
| toast0 wrote:
| The new roman calendar makes more sense if you start in
| March. Then the leap day is intercalary, and the numbered
| months match their positon. Oh well, people want their new
| years festival in January.
| barry-cotter wrote:
| Janus is a god, not an emperor. February is named after a
| purification ritual, not an emperor. March is named for Mars, a
| god, not an emperor. April's etymology is unknown but we can be
| confident it wasn't named after an emperor. July is named after
| Caesar, August after the man once known as Octavian.
| c0pium wrote:
| February.
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I think Solar Hijri calendar is better, but with Scientific Anno
| Mundi (instead of Hijrah), and then the local time zone to be
| based on mean solar time (with solar noon at 12:00 and midnight
| at 00:00) (using UTC for nonlocal timekeeping).
| lostlogin wrote:
| > The Jewish day of rest -- the Sabbath -- falls on every seventh
| day. With an added blank day inserted each December, the Jewish
| seven-day cycle (believed to be dictated by God) would no longer
| align with the days of the week. The Sabbath -- a day on which
| work is prohibited for Jews -- would land on a different day of
| the week (and not necessarily on a weekend) each year.
|
| So did mankind keep the universal 7 day week (as god intended it)
| and in doing so, inadvertently prove it to be a man-made
| construct?
| willsoon wrote:
| Well, you know these things, and like the ban on eating pork
| (pork doesn't walk in the sand, so you have to buy it from
| somewhere) and morals in general, are a bit opportunistic.
| There are 28 days in a lunar month, easy to divide by 2,
| impossible to divide by 3, so 4 is a convenient number.
| Nevertheless, God makes the sun and the stars and the moon,
| which go round every 28 days - the light before the stars,
| which could be well aligned with Einstein. When it's time to
| harvest, look at the moon, don't worry about the sun. And
| perhaps Jehovah of the Seven Armies was El in the beginning. A
| local deity who was certainly a harvest deity. The problem is
| difficult. The year doesn't agree with the months and the
| months don't agree with the days, hence the calendar.
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| I think the best backwards-compatible calendar that we should
| adopt is the ISO week date calendar, commonly used in finance:
| forget months, every day is a week number + a day. So today is
| 44.7, which means week 44, day 7. This also gets you a nice
| almost even 13 weeks/quarter, and easy calculations (that report
| is due w48.5, aka Friday in 4 weeks). We used a worse version of
| this calendar in Intel and it was great (we callled them work
| weeks instead and iirc it was not iso8601 aligned).
|
| This way, people can play with legacy dates for their birthdays,
| religious observances, etc but use a sane system at all other
| times. This already happens with Chinese/Islamic calendars
| anyways, Chinese new year is a date I have to look up every year,
| and that's OK because the calendar is used for literally nothing
| else outside traditional festivals. Optimise for the common case,
| after all. Christmas is w52.1 this year, w52.3 the next, etc,
| just as CNY is 22-jan and 10-feb this and next year (but 1/1 on
| the Chinese calendar).
|
| The only trouble is that some years have 52 weeks and some 53,
| but such is the price to pay for backwards compatibility.
| rottencupcakes wrote:
| Just change to 73 5-day weeks and we're golden.
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| Not sure if you're serious, but the 7-day week as so
| entrenched that no system that breaks it will see any
| adoption. Maintaining the 7-day week and the 365 day year is
| non negotiable for any kind of calendar reform.
| andersa wrote:
| While we obviously can't change the length of the year in
| days, is there any actual reason to have a 7 day week
| beyond "that's what we've always done"?
| hanche wrote:
| That's really a strong reason, is it not? I have no idea
| for how long humanity has tracked the seven day week, but
| suspect it's been well over 2000 years.
|
| That's a lot of tradition to discard.
| adzm wrote:
| Goes all the way back to the Babylonians, 4000 years ago,
| at least
| marcthe12 wrote:
| Alot of religions kinda use the week for weekly prayer
| (all Abrahamic religions) so you kinda stuck with it
| since you need to take that into account
| mongol wrote:
| Yeah, momentum. I can't think of what authority would be
| able to change it and make it be globally followed. A
| tradition of thousand years, with roots in religious
| texts. I don't think it is within anyone's power to
| change it.
| njarboe wrote:
| 7 days for the moon to go in half a cycle. Full to half.
| New moon to half moon. A pretty good demarkation of a
| period of time between one day and a month (full lunar
| cycle).
| clort wrote:
| The moon cycle is approx 28 days, which is 7x4.
|
| The height of tides are rooted in this but have 7 day
| periods of increasing, decreasing, increasing,
| decreasing.
|
| I don't know if thats reason enough to continue with it,
| but possibly part of the history
| stvltvs wrote:
| This is a pretty common approximation, but the average
| lunation is closer to 29.5 days.
| fragmede wrote:
| But those 365 days _don 't_ have to all fit into weeks.
| Take 36 _4_ days, divide those evenly into 7-day weeks, and
| then have the one (two if leap) new days be not part of the
| weeks. Call it Caturday or something. Hold a contest.
| spc476 wrote:
| The fine article talks about that---there was Jewish
| resistance to the idea because they felt that the Sabbath
| was always the 7th day and that would get out of sync.
| RupertEisenhart wrote:
| I always figured the funnest thing would just be not to
| give it a name, and then when people ask be like, well
| yesterday was Sunday and tomorrow is Monday.
|
| But the more reasonable proposal I heard was just to call
| it New Years Day/Weekend, depending?
| nemo8551 wrote:
| Day'ymcdayface. That's how that will go down.
|
| Referring to "boaty mcboatface"
| kvdveer wrote:
| Or 365.25 one-day months.
| e63f67dd-065b wrote:
| Just plain day number as the calendar is worse than weeks
| imo. We want to optimise for the common case, and wanting
| to know the day of week and number of weeks from today is
| much more common than day of year.
|
| For example, "our next meeting is w48.3" is much more
| understandable than "day 339".
| alphablended wrote:
| It's indeed harder to compute the time difference, but
| maybe it's also an indication that mental calculation
| should be practiced more.
| Brian_K_White wrote:
| I don't see how. You are making assumptions and claims
| for others with no support. To me that week.day number
| looks more complicated and less meaningful than plain
| days.
|
| Perhaps weeks seems to make sense since we sometimes use
| them for offsets and ranges, like "this project will take
| 6 weeks" and figuring out how many days that is is
| inconvenient. But if we were using days then we simply
| wouldn't use groups of 30 or 7 for things like that, we
| would use groups and multiples of 10 or 5. We'd probably
| end up using kilodays and millidays too instead of years
| or minutes, and years would be arbitrary, but
| 51.9something weeks is already arbitrary anyways.
|
| And as that # of weeks example just showed, .day is
| ambiguous with decimal fractions of a unit.
|
| All in all I see no special obvious rightness here. It's
| kinda crap actually.
| asdfasvea wrote:
| Mr. I-Can't-Recognize-A-Joke here to explain in painful
| detail why your proposal won't work...
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Or 365.25 one-day months._
|
| or 365.2425 one day months and no squabbles every 400
| years. (we will however be squabbling the entire rest of
| the time)
| Gibbon1 wrote:
| If you put Christmas in month 0.24 I'm sold.
| zuppy wrote:
| so... are we going to talk about which day is day 1? because
| even here we can't agree. this also translates to not having
| the same week number in certain years.
| swagempire wrote:
| I have no idea how this is better than just adding one month
| (say ("Festover") so we just continue as normal.
|
| Aside from Halloween and NYE it will be very easy for people to
| get used to a 28 day month.
| exclipy wrote:
| Because there's no confusion about whether you're talking
| about the new February or the old February. Is Feb 1 the 32nd
| day of the year or the 29th day?
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| This sounds nice -- but is it really necessary to treat our
| good friend, the decimal point, so badly?
|
| Calling today 44.7 means that we're effectively using base 7
| after the decimal point (but it's 1 through 7 instead of the
| usual 0 through 6, for extra fun), while using base 10 before
| it.
|
| Why not just something nice and easy-to-parse _without_ all the
| mathematical confusion, like "44d7"?
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _Why not just something nice and easy-to-parse without all
| the mathematical confusion, like "44d7"?_
|
| how about 5Nov44d7, much easier to parse. go with 5Nov43d6
| and I'm on board even quicker because I prefer 0 indexing.
| KineticLensman wrote:
| Which century is that?
| mongol wrote:
| If you prefer zeo indexing, you would want 4Nov43d6
| em500 wrote:
| As sibling mentioned, ISO already defines a standard
| notation (2023-W44-7), precisely so that different people
| don't have to go invent their own.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date
| kmarc wrote:
| Fun fact: it's a dot, not a "decimal point".
|
| That dot has many interpretations; in dates, sometimes it
| separates the month from year, or the day from a month. In
| version numbers, it separates major from minor, etc.
|
| It's so much not a "decimal point", that in some languages
| (Hungarian and German, for instance) it is a thousands
| separator, whereas for decimal fractions a comma is used
| (10,000.00 in English is 10.000,00 in Hungarian, making Excel
| flip)
|
| It is really just a dot. Our interpretation is what makes it
| a certain kind of separator. Or not a separator at all, like
| at the end of this sentence.
| koonsolo wrote:
| I don't agree. I'm from Belgium and I also use a comma, but
| that doesn't mean I would put hours and minutes as 8.35 or
| 8,35. No, it's 8:35.
|
| Numbers with a dot or comma means it's decimal. Your date
| reference makes no sence because either / or - is used in
| those cases, not dots or comma's.
|
| Basically, having a dot or comma adds to the confusion when
| working with non decimal numbers.
| taway1237 wrote:
| >Your date reference makes no sence because either / or -
| is used in those cases, not dots or comma's.
|
| In my (european) country a dot is used - for example
| 5.11.2023.
| burnerburnito wrote:
| Good point, the system would work just as well if it was
| something like:
|
| w36:2
|
| But it wouldn't cause nearly as much confusion or decimal
| place issues relating to improper automation.
| kmarc wrote:
| > Numbers with a dot or comma means it's decimal.
|
| But... It doesn't in IP addresses, version numbers,
| dates, with different locales, and possibly many other
| uses.
|
| These examples clearly show that "numbers with a dot"
| doesn't always mean decimal.
|
| A dot is a dot. Mainly with the _role_ of a separator.
| When you interpret it, it might mean a _decimal_
| separator for you, but as well might mean a thousand-
| separator for MS excel with the German locale.
| ncruces wrote:
| The ISO formatting for today is 2023-W44-7.
| WithinReason wrote:
| 44d7 would be confusing for DnD users
| ndsipa_pomu wrote:
| It's just a ruse by Big Dice to get us to buy more d7s
| which traditionally has had very poor sales
| Someone wrote:
| > but is it really necessary to treat our good friend, the
| decimal point, so badly?
|
| You're not playing cricket, I guess. There, an over is six
| throws, and 4.3 overs is four and an half over.
| retube wrote:
| > commonly used in finance
|
| Having worked in banking and hedge funds for many years for US,
| UK and European firms i have never once encountered this ISO
| calendar. I also part trained as an auditor when i started out,
| similarly never saw this. In fact this is the first time I've
| ever heard of it.
| potatopatch wrote:
| The day is pretty irrelevant in finance as it is too
| granular, but the problem of converting from US week numbers
| comes up.
| mtreis86 wrote:
| Its also used in manufacturing, tire date codes for instance
| are week.year or year.week
| Svip wrote:
| Why even have years? Like Unix epoch, pick a start date, and
| just have the number of weeks increment indefinitely. If you
| really wish to do some separation, just say "last 50 weeks" or
| something.
| ncruces wrote:
| This should be pretty obvious. We have years because seasons
| matter a lot, to a lot of people.
| zeristor wrote:
| Like Julian days used in Astronomy?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_day
| Aardwolf wrote:
| If making such a change, why not make it even simpler: use year
| + day number in year. e.g. today is 2023 day 309 (or day 308 if
| more sensible 0-based indexing would be used)
|
| And keep the named 7-day week cycle as-is independently of
| that, this one has been going for millenia and we need some
| weekends after all
| stvltvs wrote:
| The 7-day cycle is so important to our lives that it's better
| to have a date notation for human consumption that includes
| it.
| LandStander wrote:
| I know not to hope for it to ever catch on, but my dream
| date-time format would be:
|
| year/day/hectosecond.second(.millisecond and so on to the
| desired precision)
|
| The current date-time, to the second, would be
| 2023/308/342.65
|
| The days, like the years and second-based units, are
| 0-indexed.
|
| There are 100 seconds in a hectosecond, and normally 864
| hectoseconds in a day.
|
| And to go with it, I'd advocate either a "3-on, 2-off", or
| "6-on, 4-off" work cycle, depending on the nature of the
| work, or even just personal preference. This way,
| today(308) would obviously be on a "weekend" either way.
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Ideally the beginning of the 2-day and 4-day weekends
| would be aligned, so both groups can party on a same
| evening
| taway1237 wrote:
| I imagine hectoseconds would be "fun" when dealing with
| timezones.
| CobaltFire wrote:
| This is called the Julian (or Ordinal; I don't think there is
| a difference) calendar and is in wide use in (at least) parts
| of the US military for tracking things.
|
| Actually, looking it up now it looks like the usage of the
| name "Julian" is due to the way the old tracking systems were
| programmed and used "JDATE" or similar. Nowadays it's just
| burned in habit that it's called the Julian Date.
| throwaway2990 wrote:
| It is not commonly used in finance.
| Someone wrote:
| > I think the best backwards-compatible calendar that we should
| adopt is the ISO week date calendar
|
| The one where there are years without a new year's day, and
| years with two?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Week_dates
|
| _"As a consequence, if 1 January is on a Monday, Tuesday,
| Wednesday or Thursday, it is in week 01. If 1 January is on a
| Friday, Saturday or Sunday, it is in week 52 or 53 of the
| previous year (there is no week 00). 28 December is always in
| the last week of its year."_
| thinkindie wrote:
| Something that is not mentioned in the article but the wikipedia
| page explains well is how the IFC was handling leap years, which
| is basically by adding another day that is not part of the week.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| All I am saying is, if we change the earth's rotation and period
| of revolution, we can fix it all on something _sane_ for once.
|
| May as well correct that eccentricity while we're fiddling about.
|
| We slow the rotation, give us twenty-five hours in a day. We
| could all use a little extra. Then we go for four hundred days
| per year, with the extra near-thirty-five days as a kind of
| bonus. This gives us a nice hundred thousand hours per year. We
| just tighten up the second a tad, so we have a hundred thousand
| of those per day.
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| Except the day is defined as having 24 hours...
|
| We could just decide to define it as 25 hours. But we won't,
| because the reason 24 was picked was because it was easy to
| divide.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| I like to fantasize about what life would be like if we had
| different length weeks. What if we ended up with three or 5 day
| weeks? Or perhaps 10 days?
|
| 7 days feels like it aligns well with the way we think and
| communicate about time. But maybe that is because it's the only
| week length I've ever known.
| q7xvh97o2pDhNrh wrote:
| The phases of the moon cycle every ~29.5 days [1], so you could
| use those to make an argument that a ~7-day week is pretty
| "natural."
|
| One could imagine early humans being much more aware of the
| phase of the moon (whereas I haven't even seen that thing in
| months), and the 29.5 day cycle naturally splits into two
| pieces, since it's (new moon) -> (full moon) -> (new moon).
|
| And one could also imagine people were pretty aware of when
| they were halfway between a new moon and a full moon -- so now
| we've naturally arrived at a rough time interval of 29.5/4 = ~7
| days.
|
| [1]: https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/moon-phases/en/
| HPsquared wrote:
| Doesn't that mean a 10-day week (3 weeks per month) is a
| better fit?
|
| Only 0.5 days out instead of 1.5.
|
| Edit: though with the sinusiodal variation in the moon, I
| guess it makes sense to divide it into 4. 3 weeks doesn't
| make sense for that.
| em500 wrote:
| We even have words for the halfway phases between new moon
| and full moon: first quarter and last quarter. The 7 day week
| is not directly derived from natural cycles (unlike the month
| and year lengths), but the moon phases are convenient
| synchronization points for (approximately) 7 day cycles.
| andreyv wrote:
| The Soviet Union briefly tried 5 and 6 day weeks in the 1930s:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar
| maratc wrote:
| > Or perhaps 10 days?
|
| The French tried it for several years:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
| tornato7 wrote:
| I think it would be interesting to try a 14-day workweek,
| working 9 days on and 5 days off.
|
| The advantage being that you can do a lot more on your weekends
| (international travel on a weekend is now possible), and during
| the week you'd have a lot of uninterrupted time to work. I
| imagine the productivity would be similar to a five-day week
| but it would feel like a lot more time off.
| TheCleric wrote:
| That sounds miserable.
| kristopolous wrote:
| There's a book recently published that goes over the history
|
| https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300271157/the-week/
|
| tldr: here's an interview he did on a 50 minute radio show
| about It (starts about 8.5 minutes in. I don't know why they
| distribute it this way either)
|
| https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-30-20...
| Xorakios wrote:
| Star Trek resolved this decades ago.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| I'd love the positist calendar. That said, even just having 7
| months with 30 days and 5 with 31 and either grouping all the
| months with the same length together would be nice. E.g. jan-May
| have 31 days, all others 30.
|
| Also might be nice if we can fix names so that months match their
| names again (September being the seventh, October the eighth and
| so on.). It's insane we lost this because two emperors named some
| months after themselves 2000 years ago and we are still stuck
| with it.
| Jolter wrote:
| Having the leap day after new years' day made a lot more sense,
| too.
| Skeime wrote:
| The emperors are not at fault. They renamed months and didn't
| insert new ones. It's just that the beginning of the year
| changed from March to January at some point. (Hence the leap
| day at the end of February as well.)
| timbit42 wrote:
| I'd like to know more about why it was changed from March to
| January.
| latchkey wrote:
| In Vietnam, they pay people for 13 months.
| cutler wrote:
| The word "month" descends from the Indo-European "mehns" which
| also translates as Moon so if we are to be true to the meaning of
| the word a month of 28 days makes no sense given that the Moon's
| sidereal period is 27.3 days and its synodic period is 29.5 days.
| The synodic period makes much more sense as a basis for a
| calendar as there are 12.3 lunations in a solar year. Man's
| earliest observations, looking at the night sky, would have been
| the 12 lunations in the year. We forget this when discussion
| veers off down the inevitable blind alley of pure numerical
| reasoning. Nature is showing us the way if we can see it.
| mikelward wrote:
| Are you proposing 29.5 day months? How would that work?
| BlueTemplar wrote:
| The year used to start with spring, then counting the moons
| from then - except in winter, at which point nobody really
| seemed to care about precision.
| eyelidlessness wrote:
| Lousy Smarch weather!
| guigar wrote:
| Jan 1st could be the purge day.
| jl6 wrote:
| Impossible solely due to the intensity of argumentation over
| whether the first day of the week should be designated Sunday or
| Monday.
|
| I'll be sticking with good ol' Gregorian until those heathen
| Sundayists pipe down.
| somedude895 wrote:
| That confuses me so much. Is it an American thing? Do they
| consider the weekend to be just Saturday? Or Friday and
| Saturday?
| jl6 wrote:
| Treating Sunday as the first day of the week is a religious
| tradition going back thousands of years.
|
| However, I know only one god, and his name is ISO 8601.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Weeks have two ends. The front end, Sunday, and the back
| end, Saturday.
| drexlspivey wrote:
| In some languages Monday literally means second day,
| Tuesday third day etc
| willsoon wrote:
| Almost adopted, or almost back to it. I remember reading in
| Toynbee that the solar calendar was an effect of the hard
| transition from a matriarchal society to a patriarchal one. I
| also remember reading Works and Days and how the Boreas
| impregnated the mares. So yes, sure it was a hard revolution, I
| think the most important one. 13 was the unlucky number, the
| Satan number and so on. But 28 days is easy and convenient, and
| even in the High Middle Ages --- as I said yesterday --- people
| count months as 28 days.
| firefoxd wrote:
| For fun I created a calendar where a year is 1000 days. A month,
| 100 days, a week is 10 days.
|
| As an aside, i have created the same thing for a clock where a
| day is 100 hours.
|
| I threw it all here https://idiallo.com/blog/100
| p1mrx wrote:
| "We lose the tracking of seasons, but that's fine we can always
| look out the window."
| KronisLV wrote:
| This is really cool! I can't imagine that many of the people
| who are alive now being able to adjust to something like this
| easily (having to completely change their understanding of what
| a second, minute, hour etc. is), but I do wonder how well
| someone learning this system from scratch would fare.
| seb1204 wrote:
| I also think that a 10 based system should be used somehow but
| this clock with 0-100 is way too fast and busy. Makes time flow
| through my fingers.
| firefoxd wrote:
| We can count in tens or in tenets:
|
| > When rendering a clock that ticks with this new time, I
| realize that a second is too fast for a human to count. In
| fact, it's a little over 10 times faster (11.574x). So I
| invented a new term: Tenet. A tenet is 10 seconds. It's a
| human friendly time counter. Not affiliated with Christopher
| Nolan.
| Gare wrote:
| France already did have decimal time:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
| tasuki wrote:
| Why not use your own words for these new things you're
| creating? They're definitely not years, months, weeks, hours!
| hackeraccount wrote:
| There was a Saturday Night live skit about the metric day that
| did this. If I remember a minute was 100 seconds. An hour was
| 100 minutes and a day was 100 hours.
|
| How will you stay up for a 40 hour work day? There will be an
| adjustment period that will be helped by G.A.S. Government
| Amphetamine Supplement.
| fragmede wrote:
| While we're changing systems, could we all just agree to move to
| military time? In today's global economy, 7 o'clock for an
| international meeting isn't obviously am or pm. And it's easier
| to know how close you are to the 24th hour of the day when you're
| at 2200 vs 10pm.
| adzm wrote:
| Let's just use all daytime as an offset of high noon!
| willi59549879 wrote:
| I haven't seen am/pm outside of the USA. In Europe most people
| use 24 hour system, at least in text form
| euroderf wrote:
| Americans resist the 24 hour clock for the same reason they
| resist metrification and any other sane sensible scientific
| simplification of anything under the sun.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| Weeks? Months? These are conventional constructs, not givens
| (unless lunar).
|
| Days 1 - 365.whatever.
|
| Non-prime number days are "business".
|
| Prime number days are "le weekend".
|
| Done.
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| Seriously. Our current mess of a calendar has ~104 weekend
| days, plus several fixed and floating holidays.
|
| Replace all that with: - the 72 prime number
| days - add the days that end in 0, that's 108, perfect,
| and gives several 2-day "weekends" - make the 00 days
| 4-day holidays
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| OK, not liked. But why?
| Aardwolf wrote:
| Maybe due to not enough weekend days?
|
| Perhaps fill the gaps between twin primes, otherwise there
| are almost no multiple-consecutive-day weekends
| Kaibeezy wrote:
| Tweaks definitely needed. Perhaps I leaned toward what
| would be fine for my familiar non-location/time dependent
| work, already very flexy. Not true for most people, of
| course, but things change.
|
| How's this? 72 primes plus 50 fillers:
|
| (1), 2, 3, 5, 7, (10), 11, 13, 17, 19, (20), 23, 29, (30),
| 31, 37, (40), 41, 43, 47, (50), 53, 59, (60), 61, 67, (70),
| 71, 73, 79, (80), 83, 89, (90), 97, (100), 101, (102), 103,
| 107, 109, (110), 113, (120), 127, (130), 131, 137, (138),
| 139, (140), 149, (150), 151, 157, (160), 163, 167, (170),
| 173, 179, (180), 181, (190), 191, 193, 197, 199, (200),
| (201), (202), (210), 211, (220), 223, 227, 229, (230), 233,
| 239, (240), 241, (250), 251, 257, (260), 263, 269, (270),
| 271, 277, (280), 281, 283, (290), 293, (300), (301), (302),
| (303), 307, (310), 311, 313, 317, (320), (330), 331, (332),
| (333), 337, (340), 347, 349, (350), (351), (352), 353, 359,
| (360), (361), (364), (365)
|
| UK has 252 working days in 2023. Above is 243. The 41
| single "off" days could be treated specially to give people
| more chance to set appointments or do certain kinds of
| business, like a more business-y Saturday.
| krmbzds wrote:
| https://archive.is/6uDbH
| dudeinjapan wrote:
| I vote for the world to abandon calendars and just live one day
| at a time.
| stvltvs wrote:
| It's not hyperbole to say that having a shared calendar is a
| pillar of civilization. Things would quickly fall apart without
| one.
| Simon_ORourke wrote:
| I use a personal system, more for filenames than anything else,
| calling files blah_yyyymmdd, so that I can easily sort them with
| ls and even grep on the filenames if I'm looking for a particular
| year or month.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| Zzzz. ISO 8601. Let me know when you've switched to TAI64 and
| solved the leapseconds and now leapminutes problem of DUT1.
| 1letterunixname wrote:
| And the US almost achieved official metrication in the 80's, but
| the head of NPR (and Kissinger bagman) with another bagman
| convinced Reagan to stop it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Metric_Board
| ChiMan wrote:
| Sounds like yet another manifestation of the fake rationality
| that was so popular in the late nineteenth and early twentieth
| centuries. We already have a calendar that is universally
| understood and works perfectly well for any day-tracking problem
| we throw at it.
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| I recently rented a portable toilet.
|
| Upon [intentional?] billing confusion, it was sneakily explained
| that the rental company uses 28-day "billing periods" for its
| "monthly rental promotion."
|
| Sneaky. What I did (since we had an agreement for "toilet rental,
| six months") was not pay for the ficticious/additional "month."
| They can literally eat a turd.
| pcwelder wrote:
| primary cause of the calendar issues seem to me the entanglement
| of solar cycle and day cycle. Why do we have to make years divide
| neatly with days?
|
| Have separate counters for days and years. There could be
| separate revolution years and rotation years. Moon years could be
| a thing.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Isn't this how the Maya did it?
| climatekid wrote:
| So one of the top reasons not to change was so 0.2% of the world
| population could follow a rule in a 2000 year old fiction book...
| piloto_ciego wrote:
| Ok, hear me out. What if for business stuff and basically
| everything we need to do with scheduling etc. why don't we use
| Unix time, and why don't we let everyone else have whatever
| religious calendar they want?
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(page generated 2023-11-05 23:00 UTC)