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Deciyear Calendar

deciyear.com

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Re: Deciyear Calendar

#41

Post by dot5xdev »

bradley13 wrote: post #18

Proposals like thus are so unrealistic that it's difficult to take then seriously. This one has lots of problems, but perhaps the worst (and yet, easiest to fix) are the millidays. People do not naturally think in thousands. Put a separator in there. More fundamentally, the "second" is embedded everywhere in culture, science and engineering. Trying to replace the second with microdays is...let's be polite...suboptima…

> People do not naturally think in thousands

A lot of us don't have trouble understanding 1,000 millimeters equals 1 meter.

Same here: 1,000 millidays equals 1 day.

Re: Deciyear Calendar

#42

Post by function_seven »

mugwumprk wrote: post #32

Wrong approach. We should change our numbering system to base-12 instead.

You’re a Dozenalist. There are dozens of us!

What makes it especially appealing to me is that we don’t need to invent new names for the digits A and B (though I’d like to come up with better glyphs than reusing those letters).

Ten and Eleven work just fine, and can be used for larger numbers like “forty-ten” (₁₀58) and “eleventy-four” (₁₀136)

Another bonus is that when we transition to this superior numbering system, I can sneer at the metric world, what with their archaic finger-based measuring system. The Foot will return to a place of honor.

Re: Deciyear Calendar

#43

Post by roarcher »

brvsft wrote: post #19
thsksbd wrote: post #11

All the problems listed aren't real world problems. No one has a problem understanding the calendar and there are no engineering problems with it either unlike the inch. For the few folks in astronomy we have computers. Why would there be a problem? Half the world's population prays according to a base 7 week. Nor is this proposal new. Its been tried (at least) twice before failed spectacularly embittering people. Ba…

This is denial. There are absolutely problematic side-effects with the existing calendar system, and the obvious use-cases that jumped out to me are on the business/financial side. Yes, the changing length of months makes financial planning slightly more difficult. The arbitrary nature of how many non-business days occurs in a month cause issues (some months can have many more 'business' days than other months, skewi…

The calendar proposed by the article has the same problem, see the part about the yearend period and leap years. Yes, the issue occurs less often, but the question "what date is one month from today" still doesn't have a simple answer. Do we want 36 days from today? Today's date next month? What if today is the 2nd of Decilis, are we talking about the 2nd day of yearend or the 2nd day of Primilis?

These questions are a pain in the ass with the Gregorian calendar and they would be a pain in the ass with this one, and basically any conceivable calendar. No calendar can change the fact that there isn't an integer number of days in a year, and that the closest integer (365) doesn't have nice factors for making a calendar out of.

Re: Deciyear Calendar

#45

Post by mcny »

My mind blown moment back in middle school was the example of a ballerina spinning in the back of a flat bed truck going round and round on a race track.

It is obvious to anyone here I guess but to my child mind, this was a revelation. The fact is the speed at which the ballerina spins in her own dance has nothing to do with the speed at which the truck goes around the track means. Similarly, Earth's day of 24 hours and 365 days (I guess 365.25 something) a year are unrelated.

Back to the topic, I think it is useless to try to square the circle of a scientific time measurement goal while trying to guarantee that a day has 24 hours while also trying to guarantee a year has integer number of days.

We can try to say that we have defined a meter as something or a kilogram as something and pretend they are not arbitrary but how can any self-respecting physicist / astronomer pretend that our concept of time is anything but arbitrary?

Re: Deciyear Calendar

#46

Post by waveBidder »

kibwen wrote: post #33

When it comes to the number of months in the year, 10 is an entirely arbitrary number because, unlike the metric system, there's no opportunity to leverage the convenient zero-shifting property of a base-10 numeral system (the concept of "kilomonths" and "megamonths" is incoherent as a unit of measure given that the number of days in a year is not divisible by 10). Might as well just smooth out the current 12 months…

you're right of course, but man I wish we had megamonths, the name is great.

you're describing the French Republican calendar btw. I blame Christianity for the travesty of stopping it's adoption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar?wpr...

Re: Deciyear Calendar

#47

Post by OisinMoran »

mcny wrote: post #45

My mind blown moment back in middle school was the example of a ballerina spinning in the back of a flat bed truck going round and round on a race track. It is obvious to anyone here I guess but to my child mind, this was a revelation. The fact is the speed at which the ballerina spins in her own dance has nothing to do with the speed at which the truck goes around the track means. Similarly, Earth's day of 24 hours…

If we really want to, we could shift the Earth almost exactly 7000 km closer to the Sun to permanently destroy February the 29th.

Re: Deciyear Calendar

#48

Post by zokier »

Calendar reformations are fun perennial thought experiment topic, even if at this point it seems very unlikely that we'd change away from Gregorian. That being said, this seems particularly weak proposal. If we were to accept this "yearend" thing (which I think is unpalatable), then 12 months of 5 weeks with 6 days each (i.e. 30 day months) would be massive improvement over this 10 × 4 × 9 structure. You'd get even quarters (3 months vs 2.5 months), more palatable work-week (4 days vs 6 days), and best of all the yearend could be a full 6 day week which keeps the year and week cycles in sync. You could simply drop the yearend completely roughly every 8th year to keep in sync with tropical year ((7×366 + 360)/8 = 365.25).

Re: Deciyear Calendar

#49

Post by CyberDildonics »

thsksbd wrote: post #16
jowea wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About understanding, we're used to it but you can't trivially know whether 02/05/2026 is a Monday. Even remembering whether July has 30 or 31 days can be a chore. Irregular months also can have some small annoying effects since "in a month" is not always the same amount of days. There's even the 360 day calendar for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-day_calendar Just one more in the long history of https://en.wi…

Actually there are trivially easy ways to calculate DOW off the top of your head. No one bothers because it was never a real problem. People used to carry their calendar books on them to keep track of their engagements. Now we carry a smartphone. Nevertheless, my colleague bothered to do it and he could tell you the DOW without pausing. He is of average intelligence maybe a little more intelligent than I (though I wa…

Actually there are trivially easy ways to calculate DOW off the top of your head.

Then what are they?

Re: Deciyear Calendar

#50

Post by jowea »

robobro wrote: post #27
jowea wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About understanding, we're used to it but you can't trivially know whether 02/05/2026 is a Monday. Even remembering whether July has 30 or 31 days can be a chore. Irregular months also can have some small annoying effects since "in a month" is not always the same amount of days. There's even the 360 day calendar for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-day_calendar Just one more in the long history of https://en.wi…

Year 2, month 5, day 2026?

I guess we could solve the "is it DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY?" problem while we're at it, but ISO8601 already did.
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