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by jader201·12y ago·view on hn ↗
To me, the most mathematically logical way to split up the calendar would have just been something like:

  01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12
  31 30 31 30 31 30 30 31 30 31 30 30 -- common year
  31 30 31 30 31 30 30 31 30 31 30 31 -- leap year
- All months 30 or 31.

- Leap month alternates between 30 and 31.

- Never have more than two consecutive months with the same day.

- Only time two consecutive months have the same number of days are Jun/Jul (30) and (Jan/Dec (31) or Nov/Dec (30)).

- Puts leap month at the end to avoid offsetting only part of the year.

- Any given 3-month span consists of either 91 or 92 days.

- Any given 6-month span consists of either 182 or 183 days, except for spans involving leap month and January, which have 184.

- First half (Jan-Jun) always consists of 183. Second half consists of 183 (leap) or 182 (common).

3 comments
This is close to what was done, February is the last month of the year in the Julian calendar. Only two consecutive months have the same amount of days (July/June) and the last month varies by leap year (adding an extra day at the end of the year)

It's only weird that the last month got 28 due to doubling of the 31 day months instead of 30 day months

I have always felt that the 31-30-31-30-31 pattern from March through July, Repeating August through December, and then starting again in January was significant. I once wrote an extremely short assembly language routine (PDP-11 I think) for calculating the ordinal date from the calendar date that used simple integer arithmetic (multiply by 153 and divide by 5, I think) to calculate the days in the whole months starting in March.

30.6 rounds to 31

61.2 rounds to 61

91.8 rounds to 92

122.4 rounds to 122

153.0 rounds to 153 etc.

See http://www.cs.utsa.edu/~cs1063/projects/Spring2011/Project1/...

Even easier. 13 months of 28 days with one or two "leap day" per year make up 365-366.
Which is like to a Lunar Calendar with 1 or 2 holidays at the end. So, you have 13 months, each month is 28 days. At the end of the year you get 1 or 2 days off free!
That is a bad idea because number 13 is unlucky. Still, we could fix that by skipping the 13th month and saying the last month is 14.
Surely it would also make more sense to start with 30 and alternate, rather than having months 6 and 7 both be 30? Then it almost fits an alternating pattern, with only one weird month to worry about.
Problem is you would end up w/ three months of 30 days during common years.