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Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

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Re: Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

#31

Post by saidajigumi »

freehunter wrote: post #22
untog wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is the existing system really that broken, though? It's a pain, but it works. People know it. The pain of moving to a new calendar system would be considerably bigger than the pain of dealing with the current system.

Every Intro to CS class could take a week out of their syllabus as suddenly the assignment "create a calendar application that takes input as dd/mm/yyyy and prints the day of the week" disappears from textbook. Although it would be quickly replaced with "create a calendar app to translate between Gregorian and Modern calendars."

Which would be a terrible idea. Delivering actual software is all about understanding the real-world problem domain, with all of the complexities inherent to it. Doing a "nerd normalization" of the calendar instead of teaching students how to model and deal with the existing one is pretty much exactly the wrong pedagogical approach.

Re: Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

#33

Post by JoshTriplett »

freehunter wrote: post #23
dragonwriter wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days And sometimes another extra day in order to complete 366 days.

I wonder what would be more difficult: convincing the world to switch their calendar, or convincing the Earth to speed up slightly then maintain a steady speed forever. I'll bet we could get the Earth to give us 365 days much more easily than getting its population to give us 13 months.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/ examines that exact question.

Re: Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

#34

Post by freehunter »

JoshTriplett wrote: post #33
freehunter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder what would be more difficult: convincing the world to switch their calendar, or convincing the Earth to speed up slightly then maintain a steady speed forever. I'll bet we could get the Earth to give us 365 days much more easily than getting its population to give us 13 months.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/ examines that exact question.

That still seems easier than convincing the world to use a new calendar (we still can't convince the world to use the same calendar everywhere).

Re: Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

#35

Post by abecedarius »

dragonwriter wrote: post #12
forinti wrote: post #7

If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days, but we could make it a special case (the first day of the year, for instance) not belonging to any month or week. Then all months would be alike, every 1st, 8th, 15th, etc, would be a Sunday, and so on. We would never need a calendar again.

> If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days And sometimes another extra day in order to complete 366 days.

While we're at it, change the leap-year scheme: every 4th year except every 128th year. It's both simpler and much more accurate than the Gregorian calendar, with bonus binary-number geekiness.

Re: Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

#38

Post by Roedou »

k-mcgrady wrote: post #14
rlt3 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really know why, but I like the imperfectness of our calendar system now. Stupid stuff like February having only 29 days is pretty funny and those 7 days of December 25th to January 1st is perfect because its an exact week. It would be too boring if every month was the same. Could we have fun stuff like `April Showers Bring may Flowers' if every month was just the same 28 days? I'm sure we could, but everythi…

February has 28 days - 29 in a leap year.

Thirty days has September, April, June, and November;

All the rest have thirty-one except February alone which has twenty-eight;

Except on every fourth year, when it has 29;

Except on years divisible by 100, when it has 28 again;

Unless the year is also divisible by 1000, when it's back to 29.

Re: Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

#39

Post by snowfox »

It is cool. But is it useful? The only information it gives is day of week, assuming you already know where to position your slider. It doesn't have holidays and number of days in a month. So if you don't already have a calendar with all the information, you can't use this calendar.

Re: Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

#40

Post by siglesias »

Cool! 2 thoughts:

1) Would be cool if it were a dry erase surface, both for writing the month on it and circling important dates, etc. 2) Many have mentioned the 31 days problem, but that's solved with a magnet of some kind to cover the 31 on months where that day doesn't exist.

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