What is the problem for which calendar reform is a solution?
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You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
131–140 of 164 posts
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#132I recently learned that the rate of rotation of the earth depends on how much water vapor is in the atmosphere. I suggest we use this information to turn the earth into a precision time keeping instrument. Instead of regularly adding/removing leap seconds every so often, we geoengineer the atmosphere to increase/decrease the rate of rotation of the earth, so that it on average rotates exactly 86400 SI-Seconds per day.
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#133My favorite calendar disaster was the Swedish calendar[1] between 1700 and 1753. They had a somewhat (?) reasonable plan: In November 1699, the Government of Sweden decided that, rather than adopt the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian…
> Good luck writing billing software for that.
How often do you need to bill someone for events that took place 300 years ago?
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, technically every day is the start of a decade.
No that's what it informally means. Technically, decades start on the first day of a ...0 year, so not all days are the start of a decade.
What technique is this? I am unaware of any Office of Decades charged with deciding precisely what constitutes the sole definition of "decade".
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
But not in Helsinki, Finland if the planet is tilted :-)
Wouldn’t it become tidally locked eventually and thus “hell”?
If we had the ability to make orbital adjustments, I feel like we would have the ability to make rotational adjustments as well to counteract tidal locking.
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, technically every day is the start of a decade.
No that's what it informally means. Technically, decades start on the first day of a ...0 year, so not all days are the start of a decade.
A decade is just 10 years. There’s no specific start or end.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade
> A decade is a period of 10 years.
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
A year is 31.54 megaseconds, who needs months :)
Months are fine. Leap years are fine. It’s leap seconds that annoy me.
> Leap years are fine. It’s leap seconds that annoy me.
The implementation of leap seconds is obviously worse than the implementation of leap years, though. (This might make more sense if leap seconds had come first...)
In a leap year, February 28 is followed by February 29, a day that doesn't ordinarily exist. It has the same weight as any other day. If you had a dentist appointment on the 29th, then on March 3rd people will all happily admit that the 29th happened and you might have had a dentist appointment on that day.
In a leap second, 23:59:59 is followed by 23:59:59 2, 23:59:59 Harder. Then, a few seconds later, everyone agrees to just pretend the whole thing never happened. The POSIX standard specifies that there are 86400 seconds in a day, and God forbid we deviate from the standard just because some days might -- but only in reality! -- have 86401 seconds.
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#138Too bad we never seriously adopted the French Republican calendar
There's a twitter account that posts wonderful artwork along with the republican day of the week.
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#139Earlier quoted context omitted.
No that's what it informally means. Technically, decades start on the first day of a ...0 year, so not all days are the start of a decade.
What technique is this? I am unaware of any Office of Decades charged with deciding precisely what constitutes the sole definition of "decade".
> I am unaware of any Office of Decades charged with deciding precisely what constitutes the sole definition of "decade"
ISO 8601 defines what a 'decade' is.
I mean you're free to ignore it of course, like you're free to say March has 34 days if you want... but you may have trouble communicating with people and integrating with existing systems.
Re: You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
No that's what it informally means. Technically, decades start on the first day of a ...0 year, so not all days are the start of a decade.
A decade is just 10 years. There’s no specific start or end. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade > A decade is a period of 10 years.
That's for informal use in speech, not what anyone building a formal system (the context of this thread) means.