Flaws:
- fails to address leap years
- fails to address 365th day
- moon cycle will still slowly deviate
- retains clunky 7-day week that doesn’t interact will with decimal counting system
I like it, but I got an even better proposal. Weeks should have ten day weeks, and each month should have 3 weeks. summer/winter solstice and the spring/autumn equinox as well as new years day are special holidays that fall between months and interrupt the week cycle. In leap years, new years is two days.
The 1st, 11th and 21st of each month are now Mondays, so you can tell the weekday of any date. Months are the same length just like in Jesse’s proposal, but an even 30 instead of a clunky 28.
I’ve thought about this a lot
Congratulations, you’ve successfully reinvented the Egyptian civil calendar, complete with the intercalary holidays and all. Literally the only change is to add weeks. And yes, it did work really well, especially since the feast could add or lose a day to adjust to a known reference (the rise and fall of the Nile in their case). I second this proposal to go back.
Our corporate overlords will want 8-day work-weeks. LOL
Yeah I’m only in if we get 3 days off per week.
No dammit, we want 3 days off in the current 7 day week cycle. 5 days off a 10 day week works for me. We ask for that, get negotiated down to 4 day weekends and it works.
Fair enough, make it happen!
I dunno man, if hump day meant I still had the rest of the day plus 3 more days until the weekend, I think I’d snap.
Yeah you’d definitely need one day in the middle. Or Id say even better, a 3 day and 2x2 day work weeks with days off in between.
Five days off at least.
Don’t touch my weekends
5 day weekend
5 Day Weekends!!!
We could fit three break day in a a 10 day week (3/10 is slightly bigger than 2/7). We could put the third day in the middle of the week to not have 7 work days in a row. In the fourth day mabey?
I vote we work on days 2,3,4 and 7,8,9 of the week.
It actually does account for keep years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
Leap years and keep years
Sounds a lot like the French Revolutionary Calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Months
There are a number of different propositions. All with some benefits and downsides.
What’s the work schedule
3-1-4-2 would work and give 70% work to 30% off - currently we have 71.4% work in a 7 day week so it’s pretty similar with less friday burnout
Less.
Weeks should have ten day weeks, and each month should have 3 weeks.
Here’s why I’m going to say no. It’s because businesses would just rip us off by turning the working week into 8 days and just retaining the 2 day weekend.
No, and double no.
Businesses don’t have the power to do that if we collectively tell them no. But that being said, how DO you split up a 10-day week keeping the same basic ratio of “weekend” days?
Three weekdays, followed by a single “weekend” day or mid-week break, then four weekdays followed by a two-day weekend?
I like the 10 days week, but people, please rush to create a new religion to cover multiple free days or im out
The extra days of the week is called Lazyday, Chillsday, and Beersday.
It is forbidden to work on these days, the Lord commands it.
every other day is labour day, and thus a holiday.
My religion has a holy day called I’m taking today off or I’ll cut you
Just don’t propose a unified earth/solar time even though it’s going to be necessary once we start spacefaring more lol.
Funnily enough this issue is being brought up a lot on Lemmy recently. I’ve been at the IFC and Fixed Time haters for a bit in a different thread lol.
https://www.worldtimeserver.com/learn/the-proposal-to-abolish-time-zones/
Weeks should have ten day weeks
And instead of calling them “weeks”, we could call them by the much more self-explanatory term “tendays”.
summer/winter solstice and the spring/autumn equinox as well as new years day are special holidays that fall between months and interrupt the week cycle
You can simplify it a little bit by putting the intercalary days between months, rather than using them for the solstices. We can put Midwinter between January 30 and February 1 and Midsummer between July 30 and August 1, in the northern hemisphere.
For the sake of putting it in a more user-friendly location, our leap day should be in the summer for the northern hemisphere (where most of the population is). So put it the day after Midsummer.
The only thing I would do differently from the Calendar of Harptos is that, like you, I would use New Year’s Day as the 5th annual intercalary day.
Intercalary is one of those words I never expect to hear outside of the https://app.fantasy-calendar.com userbase
Ok, I’ve never heard of that site before, but I am definitely in its target market. Thanks for sharing!
the equinoxes and solstices are roughly 90 days apart anyway so we can do both :)
Calendar of Harptos actually influenced my post hehe
The 365th day is new years day… duh.
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What names shall we give the new weekdays? Because I was thinking maybe we should rename a few existing ones, so no weekdays start with the same letters. Then they can be abbreviated to their respective first letters.
Someday, Funday, and Oneday.
“Hey, when are you going to do that thing I asked you to do?”
“Ohhhh, Someday… Shit.”
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Current workforce is schedule around a 7day centric week. It’s far easier to reorganize where the weeks fall in the year than changing the structure of a week. Suddenly the workforce would have segment of work overlapping between weeks, it’s an organizational nightmare.
The international fixed calendar did propose a solution for the 365 days and leap year but it’s basically out-of-the-week holidays.
Or just have days that are just not a part of the week - like Leap years - are their own day.
I do five day holiday for end of the year to account for the extra days like the Mayans did but I really like your idea of spreading four of them out to the solstices and equinoxes!
Dec can be the month with 29 days and a 4 year leap day. That way all the nonsense is in one place.
Moon cycle doesn’t matter.
7 day system is not clunky it is human.
Any solution that has some form of “oh those days? Nah, we don’t count those” is disqualified immediately in my book.
laughs in Egyptian…
They had 5 or 6 intercalary holidays to celebrate the new year and adjust to the rise of the Nile (and we’d adjust it to astronomical time with leap years). It actually worked really well, and kept the people happy with a 5-day rest and celebration each year (something this world could definitely use).
They didn’t have software though and you don’t know if it either worked well (since the ppl who kept this system going were the same people who wrote about it) nor of it kept ppl happy. Besides: you can do that without the “not counting those” part, couldn’t you?
I think of it like the appendices of a book. The main story is counted with numbers, page 10, but the appendix is counted with Roman numerals, page X. While adding to the appendix increases the number of pages in the book, it does not change the length of the story.
As a software developer, I would rather give up the 1.25 days off a year just to not have to work around some weird monthless and weekless date every year.
This is what I want! Fuck, this has it all! Its beautiful!
I don’t see why 7 day weeks are bad in regard to the number system. We rarely need to divide the days of the week into equal portions. Remembering 1, 8, 15 and 22 as mondays would be trivial after a while.
You also claim that failure to address the 365th day and leap years is an issue, but your proposal also includes several cycle-breaking days. So the same issue would persist.
Moon deviation isn’t something I really worry about, but having a period which almost align with the cycle seems useful. It would be easy to just examine the initial phase within the month to chart out the rest of the month.
However, I think the biggest flaw is that the calendar would be divided into 13 equal parts, which sucks to divide into typical use cases, i.e. into 2 parts. You could split the 7th month, but it’s not really elegant. Dividing the year into 3 or 4 parts would be a mess.
Weeks should have a prime number of days. It’s not wise to be dividing weeks up.
This meme brought to you by your local landlord
I mean it also benefits salaried employees, 13 months means 26 pay periods
But you typically get paid an amount per year, divided between pay periods. You work the same amount, get paid the same amount overall, and get more pay periods at the expense of less pay per period
There’s the same amount of weeks though. It’s just spread over 13 months instead of 12 so it would be the same total bi-weekly pay periods.
Not necessarily, some companies do half way and end of the month instead of strict every two weeks so they can claim a consistent monthly wage
It really annoys the hell out of me that we don’t use a better calendar. I think about this once a week at least. I feel like being stuck with the Gregorian calendar is a good example of why so many inefficient structures exist in society - some assholes centuries ago decided on a thing, and out of habit and laziness we’ve stuck with it since.
just think of everything in terms of seconds from 1970 and itll all fall out
Until 2038
64 bit computers exist
Until 292000002023ish
A compromise for the time keeping purists:
Set the current time to exactly 13.77 billion years (in seconds) then add the current Unix time in seconds from January 1, 1970 to maintain continuity. Just conveniently forget about the 40 million year uncertainty, it will cloud your mind.
This way we have an absolute clock that is closer to reality than from some religiously based calendar.
Relativity would like a word.
Until someone adds a leap second
Better idea: instead of Epoch time move it back a few months to the moon landing.
They programming community calls this technical debt.
Right? Imagine using the sun and the moon to track time. So fucking dumb.
Can we give the UN all the power it can and have them implement this new calendar?
No.
Unfortunately, you’re right.
Persian calendar exists, a lot of people use it.
I would like to believe in calendar reform as a goal. At the same time, I think calendars are one of the only pretty decent somewhat universal standards we have going for us, and if we changed it at all, you KNOW we would just be using two competing standards, not everyone would want to switch because people are stupid, so unless you forced it from the top down through technology, like a really advanced, shitty version of y2k, which would make people super pissed, I dunno if any of it would work.
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Counterpoint: 1st shift, 2nd shift and 3rd shift work. Some people are better off using different systems that exist alongside but separate from the norm.
… And vice versa, workplaces and life offer us systems that dont work well for us but we need to use them because we need money to live. So not only would 3rd shift be a bad fit for most people, I’d argue most people do worse with the current calendar than they could with a new one.
Fair point actually, I suppose, then, that my point, retrospectively, is that nobody should ever expect that, were we to adopt any new calendar or time measurement system, we’d somehow do less math. We will only ever do more math.
There is only math.
The prime factors of 365 is 5 and 73, hence a month should either be 73 days and there should be 5 of them, or there should be 73 months with 5 days each.
Mathematical perfection!
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Ok, thats fine, we’ll just… The factors of 365.25 are: 487¹×3¹×2⁻²
Wait…
The problem here is that 0.25 is actually an overestimate by about 3 in every 400 years. That’s why we don’t have leap years on every hundredth year, but we do have them again every 400. (And, of course, you can get even more precise than that.)
Yeah yeah Georgian reform. Problem it it breaks in 6500
Your mom has leap years
Yes also 364 days from 13x28 would not align with years around the sun. We’d still need a leap year with 5x73 but that’s easier than correcting from 364.
12x30, 5 or 6-day intercalary (government-mandated) days off for rest and celebration of Yule + New Year’s (just make them all December 31-35/6).
But that’s only 364 days. Which month gets the extra day, throwing the while thing off?
can we put the extra 30 hours on the end of each year as a formless blob of ‘time off’?
On new years eve at midnight we stop the clocks for 1.24 days, then start them again.
You could have one day outside of all months. It could be a holiday or something.
Only let the new “last month” have one extra day would fix this. That would break the Weekdays, but perhaps that’s not so bad as recurring events like birthdays and holidays are then not always destined per se to be on the same weekday.
February. Just because it’s always been shorter.
At a certain point in each year, probably at the end, we get one extra monthless day, a holiday.
Every 4 years we do two monthless days.
Also, what the fuck is wrong with Jesse? We start each month on Sunday, so that the month is divided into 4 weeks. Not one almost-week, three full weeks, and a spare hanging chad of a Sunday.
He’s thinking Mexican. They start weeks on Monday
Week starts on Monday. I’ll fight about it.
He’s also thinking European.
I just wish the Earth turned a little slower so a year has 360 days and each day gives you a clean one degree of angular movement (or we defined a full revolution around an axis as 365 degrees since 360 is arbitrary too as far as math is concerned. Actually, anyone know why we didn’t do that?)
360 isn’t as arbitrary as you think and was chosen specifically for its divisibilty. 365 doesn’t divide well by much of anything.
I’d always heard that it was because the ancient sumarrians thought there were 360 days in a year combined with the fact that their holy number was 60 so it divided cleanly.
It takes only about 19 years for a 360 day calendar to be off by a whole season. Every ~38 years, winter and summer would swap entirely. Grandparents would have told their grandchildren about how much easier the summers were and how much harder the winters were.
Ah. Fair enough then.
I just wish the Earth turned a little slower
Good news, all you have to do is wait…several billion years!
What level civilization do we need to be to fix this ourselves
Futurama managed it in that one episode. By cats no less.
Fun fact: this calendar exists and was in use by Eastman Kodak for most of its existence:
It’s the calendar business use to divide up quarters/periods for the year. Except one quarter has an extra month.
Do other businesses besides Kodak use this calendar? Kodak is the only one named in that linked Wikipedia article
Is this true??? If so WHY THE F… ARE WR STILL USING THE CURRENT CALENDAR.
Honestly I would be all for a new calendar if this is true
The main hickup is the system is off by a day. Some people “fix” this by saying the extra day should be “new years day” or something similar that exists outside the main calendar and doesn’t have an actual date or day assigned to it. Personally I think that’s kind of silly but it does work.
The second problem which to me is a much bigger problem, is he argues every month starting on Monday is a feature, I think it’s a bug. The result of this is every date is the same day, every year. If you are born on a Wednesday, your birthday will always be on a Wednesday. I like it mixing up and getting to have your birthday on different days.
Also almost everyone will have a new birthday they have to learn and too many people would simply be unwilling to go along with that.
And all that is ignoring the monumental task of changing every computer system in the world.
Edit: also 13 is just kind of a rubbish number to work with and doesn’t divide into anything nicely.
Excellent discussion actually.
Same day every year is definitely a feature. Make holidays on Fridays or Mondays. Celebrate your birthday on Saturday if you want.
I will concede that it would make some things easier, like if someone says are you busy on the 5th, you can instantly know the 5th is a Friday or whatever. But I still don’t like it. And without researching in detail, I’m betting there are holidays, particularly religious ones, that wouldn’t be okay with moving the date to match the weekend closest to it for reasons.
Most religious holidays have already been moved people in three generations won’t care. Most will appreciate the weekend adjacent scheduling. Things like the Fourth of July can just be Independence Day like it already is.
The issue is that 13 is not divisible by anything, so we can’t split the year by halves or quarters like we do now.
I like 10 months each with 6 weeks of 6 days each for a total of 360 days and a 5 day holiday at the end of every year (6 days during a leap year)
But Jesse really has opened my eyes to the possibility of a lunisolar calendar.
10 months used to be the standard, until some Caesers ended up getting a couple of months named after them.
September (7th month) October (8th month) November (9th month) December (10th month)
Those months would also be named appropriately again if we dropped July and August…. But then I’d lose my birthday.
I used to think this too, but it turns out that it’s not the case.
July and August weren’t new months added in. They were renamings of the existing months Quintilis and Sextilis. The disconnect between the months’ numbers and the names their numbers represent actually comes from a later shifting of the start of the year from March back to January.
The Chinese clanander is lunisolar. It has alternating 29 and 30 day months and a leap month once in a while to catch up with the seasons and such.
I just thought of something that could be better,
Scrap months altogether, just divide the year into quarters of 13 weeks each, name them for the seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, there isn’t really a reason why we need months specifically, if it’s to shorten date numbers then count by week number and day number
Day/Week/Quarter/Year
Today’s 7/8/4/23
Preferably year/quarter/week/day but good idea
nah hold on it has to be
day/quarter/week/year
/s
An eagle hatched as soon as you posted that comment.
Seasons vary by hemisphere, and it’s counterintuitive to force half of the glove to accept summer as winter or winter as summer.
Nothing stopping the other half from just flipping it to match their seasons, that’s what they do already, and the number for date stays the same anyways
I work and converse with people globally, as much as I love the idea of being able to use seasons as a marker of time like that, it’s just not possible.
Now let’s work on names for this 13th month…
I have yet to hear anything better than Smarch
How tf do I pay my rent though?! $4k each quarter-- ouch
I mean it’s the same amount you were paying before so just save for it like you had before
In keeping with tradition though we can only do this if we add the new month after August and name it Tiber.
For The Emperor!
I’m ok with this.
Lousy Smarch weather
The only authority I’ve seen that pushes 13 months is WMATA in DC, so they can charge you 13 times per year for a metro pass instead of 12. I always felt like that was some BS.
I came up with this independently years ago. It’ll never catch on for the idiotic reason that you can’t subdivide 13 like you can 12. 13 is a prime number, while 12 can be divided easily by 2, 3, 4, and 6. 12 is like the whore of simple math.
Lousy Smarch
