The Terran Computational Calendar (http://terrancalendar.com/) is an interesting read - "13 identical 28-day months, followed by a 'minimonth' that is generally composed of leap days and leap seconds."
Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
51–60 of 77 posts
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#52I love the idea, but this has no chance of happening in my lifetime. I'm still holding out hope that the US will switch to the metric system however.
Believe it or not, world elites were once on the brink of adopting the International Fixed Calendar, which was basically the same as Comte's. Then judaist religious backlash kicked in, and here we are.
Our current calendar has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism, it is the calendar of Rome with some very minor tweaks.
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#53With all this talk about universal basic incomes and automation taking away jobs, etc etc, there really might be something to the idea of switching to 73 5-day weeks. I wouldn't be in support of taking away Saturday and Sunday ;) but a 3-day workweek of W-F followed by a weekend of Saturday and Sunday could have real possibilities!
I'm not sure what the statement "religious backlash" in other comments on this page are in reference to, but modifying the week length would certainly be the most disruptive to the vast majority of the world's religious people. Less so if you kept "Saturday" and "Sunday" as weekend days-off, but probably still enough to encounter significant resistance.
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#54We 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?
2015-00-00 2015-00-01 And making dates 0 indexed will make all the C-weenies happy.
Are you saying you'd put the extra days at the start of the first month of the year? Wouldn't that put you back to where the days are not consistently ordered based off their position in the month?
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#55Inserting a day between the regular weekdays once a year sounds pretty dangerous to me. I bet there are a lot of things that need to happen weekly that would quickly go out of whack if they are delayed a day.
Why? What things need to happen every exact 7 days? Isn't it rather the case that we do some things weekly because that is a conventional unit of time?
And if you are designing something so that some process needs to be performed on it every week, you should be building some tolerance into that time-period. Which the eight day span, once every year, would test.
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#56I'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…
> I was trying to figure out why a week is 7 days and not some other division.
The first chapter of Daniel Boorstin's The Discovers has an interesting history of calendars and time-keeping. For the question of Why a seven-day week, start on page 13:
http://books.google.com/books?id=aEr07wJ21NYC&lpg=PA13&vq=7%...
tl;dr The week varied among cultures, and the seven-day week was in use by the Romans by the third century. Each day of the week honored one of the seven "planets" (in the ancient use of the word, a wanderer in the sky): Sun Moon Mars Venus Mars Mercury Jupiter Venus and Saturn. Derivations of those words are still in use today.
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
How often do you really need to know what day of the week a specific date in 40 years will fall on? 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…
>The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough. Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad. >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. I think we'd all be relieved to have a separate classification space for leap days (29 Februar…
We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and religious celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or something.
I can't tell if that's a serious suggestion, but if it is, I don't think that'd be very helpful. I'm trying to imagine which religion is standing around waiting for some benevolent calendar dictator to free up a couple new days in the year so they can implement a new tradition. :-D
Religions will stick their holy days on the calendar quite apart from your classification of them as holy. Provided you're not removing any capability for them to continue celebrating their current holidays, I don't think they're looking for any special consideration on the calendar front.
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's actually unclear to me why we particularly care about how long it takes to orbit the Sun. Axial rotation, sure, the length of a day is important. But outside of that... why do we need particular units like weeks, months, and years at all?
Religion and seasonality. 7-days as a unit of measurement is written into unamendable documents hold as holy by all Judaist monotheisms (Jewish, Christian and Islamic). The ciclical experience of seasonal-weather and daylight-lenght changes are also too powerful to deny.
Unrelated, why do you call Islam "judaist"?
AFAIK, Islam traces its roots back to Abraham, who was Judah's great-grandfather. So it would seem more appropriate to call it an Abrahamic religion, no?
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#59It'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…
You know, the French tried to make a reform with the French Revolutionary Calendar. Having managed to kill off the monarchy and completely reshape the face of Western civilization, not even the French revolutionaries could change the calendar. (And if you want to talk about an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the era that we refer to today as "The Enlightenment" is a much better candidate than this sorry era!)
Re: Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Believe it or not, world elites were once on the brink of adopting the International Fixed Calendar, which was basically the same as Comte's. Then judaist religious backlash kicked in, and here we are.
Our current calendar has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism, it is the calendar of Rome with some very minor tweaks. http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm
"The origin of the seven-day week is the religious significance that was placed on the seventh day by ancient cultures, including the Babylonian and Jewish civilisations."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week
"Some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic groups have been historically opposed to the calendar because their tradition of worshiping every seventh day would result in either the day of the week of worship changing from year to year or eight days passing when Year Day or Leap Day occurs.[11] Others have contended that Year Day and Leap Day could be counted as additional days of worship."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
"Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal."