Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

edition.cnn.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 174 posts

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#61

Post by tylerneylon »

jimrandomh wrote: post #17

I like this idea. Unfortunately, it can't coexist with the Gregorian calendar in its current form; if a small fraction of the world switched to it, they'd always have to wonder which calendar someone writing "Jan 1" was referring to. When a date is written down, it needs to be immediately obvious which calendar it's referring to. It needs a special notation that doesn't overlap with any of the currently-used notation…

This problem has been seen before, when countries adopted the Gregorian calendar at different times:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#62

Post by shimon_e »

Figs wrote: post #30
vineel wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the suggestion is that the working day everywhere should start at X:00. The idea is that 4:00 in California is 4:00 in Britain and 4:00 in China. When the day starts would vary from place to place; perhaps 1:00 somewhere and 12:00 somewhere else. The point is to eliminate the confusion caused by timezones, especially those like Nepal's which are 15 minutes off other time zones for no good reason.

That's just substituting one sort of confusion for another, I think.

Instead of DST, we will be starting work and school one hour later for half of the year. We have universal time. It's GMT.

There are many people who don't care what time it is in another country (domestic jobs and the unemployed). There is no real incentive to have everyone relearn what time they get up and go to sleep.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#63

Post by divtxt »

wavephorm wrote: post #58

A more simple solution is to have 13 months of exactly 28 days, plus one day for new years day. That's even better because every month is exactly the same number of days which means semi-monthly and bi-weekly billing systems are the same thing. And because there's the same number of days anything billed per month can be easily prorated per day, and any billing cycle will match up with every other billing cycle... so…

Pretty nice! Too bad a non-trivial segment of the population won't be happy with 13. You might as well call the new month Deviluary. :D

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#66

Post by shimon_e »

vorg wrote: post #53

Some people, groups, or governments could change over on a case-by-case basis to a week-based system, without a sudden change to the worldwide date system. Just label the weeks with numbers, e.g. 1-Wednesday, 27-Monday, or 52-Sunday for Christmas this year. It seems Chinese people generally don't remember the time of week so much as the Month and date. Whenever someone in China tells me "this is happening on the 28 N…

That is because most the Chinese are hard working and do not work on a 7 day work week. Most Chinese get X days off per month or X days per 10 days if more than 3 days off per month. Not X days per week.

I believe most Ayis get 1 day off per month. Factory workers 1 day off per 10 days. Office workers 1 day off per week.

Actually, with the bigger factories their workers are getting 1 day off per week (e.g. established textile factories, foxconn, etc.).

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#67

Post by graywh »

tylerneylon wrote: post #51

I've been using an independent calendar for my own records for over a decade now - it's the day-of-year, written base 7. It fits in with weeks; if we reset weeks every year (why not? we do worse things already with leap days and seconds) then dates become equivalent with weekdays. One number expresses the day-of-year, day-of-week, week-of-year, and month-of-year, using a 49-day month. http://tylerneylon.com/b/archive…

If everything is a 0-based index (e.g. first day being 0), why aren't the years?

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#68

Post by forensic »

jimrandomh wrote: post #17

I like this idea. Unfortunately, it can't coexist with the Gregorian calendar in its current form; if a small fraction of the world switched to it, they'd always have to wonder which calendar someone writing "Jan 1" was referring to. When a date is written down, it needs to be immediately obvious which calendar it's referring to. It needs a special notation that doesn't overlap with any of the currently-used notation…

One of the points of the calendar though is to keep the months and days of the week the same.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#69

Post by bhrgunatha »

divtxt wrote: post #63
wavephorm wrote: post #58

A more simple solution is to have 13 months of exactly 28 days, plus one day for new years day. That's even better because every month is exactly the same number of days which means semi-monthly and bi-weekly billing systems are the same thing. And because there's the same number of days anything billed per month can be easily prorated per day, and any billing cycle will match up with every other billing cycle... so…

Pretty nice! Too bad a non-trivial segment of the population won't be happy with 13. You might as well call the new month Deviluary. :D

Satanber?

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#70

Post by forensic »

biturd wrote: post #41
yaix wrote: post #18

The scientific part is simple, its just a little maths. The difficult part is to get 8 billion people to agree to pull in the same direction. And my guess is, that it will never happen, unfortunately.

I would tend to agree, but then we have things like DST shifting around all the time. The government just states they are making a change, and everyone does. Every software that isn't based on a network time server breaks, and is fixed, and we move on. The same could happen with this new calendar, the government simply mandates that by a certain year it has to be in place. The largest burden will be on legacy softwar…

The gov adapted to Y2K, so they know exactly what they need to fix.

The difference between adapting to Y2K and adapting to the HH calendar is minor. If the gov survived Y2K they would survive the HH-adoption.

Post reply on HN