21–30 of 77 posts
It's an interesting concept; similar to the Time-slip in Red Mars. Wanting a Martian day to equal that of an Earth day, colonists define the time between 00:00 and 00:01 as being 39 minutes 40 seconds in length.
I guess most peoples' minds go immediately to, "do I have to work it?". Mine did.
Basically, you're consolidating the unevenness between years/months/days of the week to one special 1 or 2 day period. Ok, that's alright, but it still requires a bit of extra help. You still have to think through calendars understanding "Oh! I have to add a day for the epagomenal. Oh, it's a leap year, so it will be 2 actually."
That might be preferable to having to think through 31 or 30 or 28 or 29 days, but not by that much. Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good thing? I suppose it's easier to determine what day Thanksgiving is every year, but otherwise, it seems like a minute benefit. On the other hand, I wonder if there are some benefits of that not happening. The only one that comes to mind is it would suck for your Birthday to be on a Monday every year, but I suspect there might be other reasons where enforcing a day to occur on the same place in the week could be harmful.
I've been a proponent of this reform for a while. Strangely on my way into work this morning I was trying to figure out why a week is 7 days and not some other division. I thought maybe it was religious, but I now think it has more to do with lunar cycles being close to 28 days and that predating any religious foundation. 12 months has the benefit of dividing the seasons into 3 month quarters. However having an uneve…
It seems like that would complicate the business practice of dividing your fiscal year into quarters. I guess each quarter would be 3 months + 1 week but then you don't have quarters starting/ending evenly with months.
It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I wish we could have a wrapper or something…
Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).
> the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.
The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough.
Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days. That is another hack that would probably end up doing more harm than good. How would you model that extra day (or two)? You wouldn't have (13) 4 week months. You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right? If the 28th of Bichat is 2014-13-28 and the 1st of Moses is 2015-01-01 , how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be 2014-13-29 (and 2014-13-30 on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?
And making dates 0 indexed will make all the C-weenies happy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).
> the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.
Fri Sep 7535 20:02:59 EDT 1993