Doesn't Zellers' Congruence do the same task? Zellers' has been around since 1883, and has been very widely implemented.
Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
61–68 of 68 posts
Re: Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
Instead of just dumping the first thought that comes through your head on us, could you explain why you think it wouldn't work? What issues do you see arising? It seems to me we go through life with little exceptional circumstances all the time, and go right back to normal pretty easily. Is it that hard to imagine having a holiday not disrupting the weekly rhythm of your life? For example, there's a group I go to eve…
Because that's all I've got and I haven't really given it much more thought than my initial gut reaction. It just seems infinitely bizarre not to have a weekday, and writing about it now seems like it would make synchronizing and automation hell with a day like that.
There's more to life than synchronizing and automation.
Re: Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because that's all I've got and I haven't really given it much more thought than my initial gut reaction. It just seems infinitely bizarre not to have a weekday, and writing about it now seems like it would make synchronizing and automation hell with a day like that.
There's more to life than synchronizing and automation.
That's the least warranted, holier than though sentence I've ever read here on HN. I don't even know where to begin to pick this apart. It's not about enabling automation in the factory making sense, it's about keeping order in our minds and in our software...and having an "oopsie" blank day with no way to logically derive will do more to fuck with your intuition about time and calendars than having everything else around it neatly fit. Even something as simple as counting days on your hands will become wholly unintuitive because you now have to consider something worse than an edge-case.
But go ahead, make this about how narrow-minded my view on life is. Arguments like this are why wishy-washy calendar ideas like the one being proposed got blown to bits and relegated to a single page wikipedia article barely worth the occasional mention.
Re: Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean, “tricked”? The method is original to me and I don’t think it has spread very far. Is there a Gregorian calendar year for which the GP algorithm gives the wrong result?
The two methods are exactly - exactly - the same. Just different ways of phrasing. Don't fool yourself.
It's algebraically equivalent, but it's not the same procedure. The insight in Bumbledraven's Algorithm is that by factoring out an unconditionally-performed mod-4 step, the problem can be reduced to two cases.
Re: Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's more to life than synchronizing and automation.
That's the least warranted, holier than though sentence I've ever read here on HN. I don't even know where to begin to pick this apart. It's not about enabling automation in the factory making sense, it's about keeping order in our minds and in our software...and having an "oopsie" blank day with no way to logically derive will do more to fuck with your intuition about time and calendars than having everything else a…
Come on, I don't disagree with you. But when I was a kid and I first found out about calendar proposals with blank days it all seemed magical to me and it just seems weird to me (with regard to this topic) to think about practicalities.
Re: Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's more to life than synchronizing and automation.
That's the least warranted, holier than though sentence I've ever read here on HN. I don't even know where to begin to pick this apart. It's not about enabling automation in the factory making sense, it's about keeping order in our minds and in our software...and having an "oopsie" blank day with no way to logically derive will do more to fuck with your intuition about time and calendars than having everything else a…
How on earth is it impossible to logically derive a Leap Day every four years in a consistent spot, especially compared to any other calendaring we already do?
Re: Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. As soon as the algo asserts "the last day of February is Thursday the 28th," and didn't explain how it knew 2019 wasn't a leap year or that the 28th was indeed a Thursday, I stopped reading.
I think the idea behind this algorithm is that you have to remember one anchor date in the current year, and then you can find all other days in the same year.
It later goes to explain a method to derive annual doomsdays based on a century-doomsday
Re: Calculate the day of the week for any date in your head
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
If not for people, we could have had a World Calendar? A majority of the earth’s population are religious, so you can pretty easily substitute people for religious groups.
The point is that specific religious groups opposed it because it would break the seven day cycle of worship, leaving room for the Devil (insert evil laugh here). Reasonable people pointed out that it would leave people with the choice to worship on an extra holiday, but religion and personal choice don’t get along so in the end religious zealots won out.
A majority of the earth’s population say they are religious, for cultural/social/safety reasons.
The point is that specific religious leaders would oppose it because it would stop them from controlling the population. I doubt there are religious zealots in this age and era.