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The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

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Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#101

Post by xorcist »

triangleman wrote: post #83
canjobear wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not clear that the rotation of the moon has much significance in modern life any more, so maybe the problem can be simplified. What was the significance of cycles of the moon in the past, anyway? The main thing I can think of is astrology. Can tides be predicted accurately using phases of the moon?

Month = "Moonth" Aside from the female menstrual cycle, the gestational cycle is also in line with the moon: A baby is brought to term in 10 moons or 280 days (9 months or so). You would also have an easy way for disparate peoples to mark time, since in the past there was no such thing as telegraphs or even pony express.

That's only because we have a weird method for calculating pregnancies, for historical reasons.

A human pregnancy is around 266 days +- 16. The reason for 280 days or 9 months is because that measures the time span since the last menstruation, not since conception.

(I was personally a bit surprised by this when expecting our first child. It's one of those things you apparently know about but still use "9 months" as a bit of a fixed expression.)

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#102

Post by [deleted] »

MichaelBurge wrote: post #85
vorg wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Starting the week on Monday seems more common than Sunday for most countries, I believe France does. And China and Japan name their days literally "Day 1" for Monday, ... "Day 6" for Saturday, and "Day Sun" for Sunday.

This is wrong. Saturday in Japanese is 土曜日, which is like "Earth day". There's also "Sun day"(Sunday), "Moon day"(Monday), "Fire day"(Tuesday), "Water day"(Wednesday), "Tree day"(Thursday), "Gold day"(Friday), "Earth day"(Saturday). So your claim is wrong in Japanese for every day except Sunday. If you see something written like 四日("4 day"), this refers to the day of the month not the day of the week(for Japanese).

[deleted]

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#103

Post by daurnimator »

Swizec wrote: post #72
tjradcliffe wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it sucks the personality out of marking time like metric sucks the personality out of measuring space. I like personality in my dog and my friends, not in my systems of measurement. Dates are almost impossible to reason about, and yet people are so used to our current broken system they aren't even aware of how badly they manage it. It is routine for date-time packages to produce bizarre results like "a month b…

My favourite example of this is "tomorrow" because obviously , tomorrow is when you and I wake up the next day, NOT a minute past midnight. Annoys me to no end that most calendar systems still don't understand that.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not.

If I said "the servers are down for maintenance at 2am tomorrow" when would you think they will be unavailable?

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#104

Post by xamolxix »

zhte415 wrote: post #86
32bitkid wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One has to admit that it complicates even trivial communications about days and times. Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Or "Is Nov 12th on the weekend?" I feel these are practical things that _most_ people would _like_ to easily reason about, but can't. It imperial units for days; or like trying to do math in a numerical system where each significant digit has a di…

> It imperial units for days Imperial made quite a lot of sense when numbers were small and calculations done without the aid of instruments: Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick.

> Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick.

Easier than base 10?

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#105

Post by wtbob »

juliangregorian wrote: post #96
wtbob wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know, given that we have computers to perform the calculations, my own mad dream is to return to solar hours: twelve hours from sunrise to sunset, and twelve from sunset to sunrise. Thus summer hours would be longer and winter days would be shorter. Ditto minutes and seconds. Science would of course need to have a standardised second almost always different from the current second, but that's no different from ha…

What on earth do you see the benefit of this as?

My theory is that living according to the sun is more natural and consequently more pleasant than living according to a metronome.

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#106

Post by Swizec »

daurnimator wrote: post #103
Swizec wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favourite example of this is "tomorrow" because obviously , tomorrow is when you and I wake up the next day, NOT a minute past midnight. Annoys me to no end that most calendar systems still don't understand that.

Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. If I said "the servers are down for maintenance at 2am tomorrow" when would you think they will be unavailable?

I wasn't being sarcastic at all.

If you said "2am tomorrow" I would assume two hours after next midnight. Perhaps this is a result of my usually late schedule because I normally go to bed around 2am, so everything up to then and including midnight is "tonight".

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#107

Post by jccooper »

xamolxix wrote: post #104
zhte415 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It imperial units for days Imperial made quite a lot of sense when numbers were small and calculations done without the aid of instruments: Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick.

> Using bases divisible by both 3 and 4 makes mental calculation quite quick. Easier than base 10?

Half a foot, six inches. Third of a foot, four inches. Quarter of a foot, three inches. Sixth, eighth, and twelfth also go into whole inches.

For bigger projects, yards are fairly easy to decompose too, into whole feet and inches.

It's a good system for projects of human or slightly super-human scale using low resolution instruments and mental math. It's rotten for high precision computerized tasks of widely varying scales.

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#108

Post by jccooper »

aetherson wrote: post #45
ijk wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that the year is based on the solar orbit, which has some quite obvious effects via the axial tilt causing seasons. The month is based on the lunar orbits, which are a bit more arbitrary now and less important with an urban rather than agricultural economy, but still not completely arbitrary. Weeks are a bit arbitrary, as far as we can tell, but very widespread and we seem to be stuck with them.

I'm always blown away by people who don't understand weeks. A lunar month is 28 days. There are few divisors of 28. 2, 4, 7, and 14 are the only ones. 28 days is too long for convenience if it's your shortest grouping of days. 2 days is too short. So, 4x7 or 7x4. Having 7 4 day weeks every month is probably a bit less convenient than 4 7 day weeks. Hence, 7 day weeks. (Or two 14 day weeks, which I think you essential…

Weeks mostly have to do with the market cycle, which has been anywhere from 4 to ten days depending on the local economy. The Chinese in particular used 5 or 10 day weeks for quite some time. That works better for lunation than 7.

The seven day standard seems to have worked as a reasonable compromise across a wide variety of ancient economies and plan

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#109

Post by jerf »

Tossrock wrote: post #2

"The International Fixed calendar sucked the personality out of marking time, making every week and month as predictable as humanly possible. [...] It's an impossible feat that doesn't need pulling off and, thankfully, no one is trying to anymore." Spoken like someone who's never had to write date handling logic. Having "personality" in your calendar system is a bug, not a feature. I feel confident that we could main…

"I feel confident that we could maintain our overall levels of personality/joie de vivre/je ne sais quoi by spending less time dealing with an incredibly arbitrary calendar system and more time doing things we actually enjoy."

Backing your claim, I'd observe this is already a manifested fact. Consider holidays like Easter, which already are set by rules that have little to do with the calendar itself, and there's a number of such holidays floating about without any special problems of their own (above and beyond the problems of the calendar in general). The "personality" of the year is already independent of how we mark the time.

Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

#110

Post by saraid216 »

vorg wrote: post #95
saraid216 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FYI, 日 is not "seven". It's "sun" or "day". It's almost like someone had a sense of humor when they named that day. My interpretation has always been that 日 is meant to represent "zero", but I never put any thought into why they didn't just call it 星期零.

"星期日" is generally written Chinese, but in speech Chinese say "星期天" where 天 could mean "God" when the 7-day week was copied from "Christian" Europe. I just found http://www.cjvlang.com/Dow/dowchin.html to explain the history of Chinese and Japanese day names in detail. I've noticed while living in China that, whereas Westerners like me virtually always remember what day of week it is but often forget the date in the…

Ah. I grew up in a Cantonese-speaking Christian family in America, so I've never heard 星期天 used in speech at all.

Confusingly, the "seven luminaries" system in that article aren't just referencing the planets: they're also the names of Sun, Moon, Fire, Water, Wood, Metal, and Earth. I did get that sorted out by looking up Western alchemical ordering for the planets, which is in the same order. Wikipedia helpfully provides a table that includes the old names for the planets as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_planet#East_Asia

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