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> 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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
Would it be better or worse than saving up seven of them until you can have a NULLWEEK?
The French Republican calendar (used by the Revolutionary government in France in the 1790s and early 1800s before Napoleon abolished it as he did most revolutionary innovations) had a similar system of 5 or 6 holidays outside any "week" (technically "decades", as they used 10 day blocs as part of the same base 10 obsession that led to the metric system) or month called the "Sansculottides". It apparently worked fine. The main drawback was the 10-day week as workers only got off on one day in 10 rather than 1 in 7 (weekends weren't a thing then and people normally only got off on Sundays).
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.
> 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?
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.
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.)
The problem would be solved if you could just change the orbit of the Earth around the sun so that it took exactly 364 days to orbit instead of 365 and some change. Right?
That would mean moving the Earth slightly closer to the sun. I wonder what side effects that would create (assuming of course, you could actually find a way to do it - not exactly in the realm of possibility).
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.
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
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.
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.
> By 1928, Eastman had already implemented the IFC internally at Kodak and was spending his own money to persuade the rest of the world to follow suit. Soon 140 American companies joined him, maintaining a 13-month calendar for their businesses and wagering that calendar reform would continue to gain traction.
I've seen this repeated before, but never with any details or attribution. Did Kodak really use this 13 month calendar? What about the 140 other companies? If it was really so popular, I would have expected it to leave more of a mark.
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.
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.
Apart from a better calendar and one universal time zone, time should be stated in swatch internet time / French revolutionary time.
One day has 1000 beats each 85.4s long. Perfect!
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.
I vote for the world to abandon calendars and just live one day at a time.
Personally, I always thought 19 months, 19 days each, for 361 days and take the last four or five off (we do anyway) made the most sense. Then I learned the Baha’i calendar uses this system.
One variation I would support is a 19 day week, with 14 days on then 5 days off. That’s 266 working days per year, about the same as our present 260.
Alternatively, 10 days on 9 days off is 190 working days, basically instituting 2 months of vacation, which our friends in Europe already enjoy.
Personally, I like the calendar with twelve 30-day months and 6-day weeks, with an additional "new year" holiday 5-6 day quasi-month. You get equal quarters, sane numbering inside "working" months, and leap days stay inside holiday quasi-month.
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.
Lousy Smarch weather!
Star Trek resolved this decades ago.
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).
For the sabbath issue, I'd say make the "extra" day an additional day of rest. That way you never go more than 6 days without one. It matches the spirit of the issue, no?
But you would certainly never convince everyone. :-)
Knuckle mnemonic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knuckle_mnemonic
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.
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.
When I read the title my first thought was that it was saying the Chinese calendar is almost adapted by the world.
But on second thought it can’t be right as 28 is wrong here.
For year-over-year comparisons, why not just use week numbers?
Or even lump week numbers into ranges. First 4 weeks, second 4 weeks, etc.
You don't have to invent an entirely new calendar.
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…
Perhaps history keeps repeating itself because we keep using cyclical tracking methods for time.
My dream, we will get there
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.
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.
_Nearly_ is doing a lot of work in that headline.
In Vietnam, they pay people for 13 months.
Jan 1st could be the purge day.
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.
Lousy Smarch weather....