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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

#61

Post by chongli »

32bitkid wrote: post #27
tempestn wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A very small percentage of the population ever has to write date handling logic. For the rest, things "just work", thanks to those few. Besides, even as a member of that small group, I like the variety of the current calendar, inefficient as it is.

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…

Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered.

Fortunately we don't have a very pressing need to answer these sorts of questions; we have tools galore to handle them for us: smartphones, calendars, messaging apps, meetup etc. Topics like these often remind me of one of Einstein's more famous quotes:

[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think.

We used to spend an enormous amount of time teaching our children mathematical tricks which have now all been made completely obsolete by the scientific calculator. Only the most rudimentary of arithmetical strategies have survived, if only for the fact that it's still a little inconvenient to reach into your pocket when scanning and counting objects with your eyes.

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

#62

Post by someear »

johnnyo wrote: post #44
tehaugmenter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also for the superstitious there would always be Friday the 13th

Easy fix, just start the month on a Monday instead of a Sunday

but then there would never be a Friday the 13th, which is also a problem. When would Hollywood release all its horror movies?

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

#63

Post by tjradcliffe »

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…

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 before a month from now" not being "today" in all cases because no one has any idea what anyone else means by "month", although everyone who has never thought about these problems is certain that everyone else means exactly what they mean in all ambiguous cases.

Anyone who has worked on date-time problems (not even libraries, just trying to correct for the special cases, cultural differences or just plain weirdness that the library of your choice doesn't deal with) will recognize the horrible truth of the joke, "I used to be in favour of space-travel, then I realized what effect it will have on date-time libraries."

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

#64

Post by hasenj »

drostie wrote: post #51
hasenj wrote: post #4

Why do we even have a 7-day week? 7 and 28 are just as arbitrary as 12. Why do we even have a solar year? If the year was 100 days, we could have a whole year of summer.

You're not going to convince either the Christians or the Jews to do a week that isn't 7 days long. That number is more or less fixed by the sizeable minority who need it for the rest of their habits. The solar year is convenient so that one can speak of "the average historical weather for this month" and such... but it's true that many others have done lunar calendars etc.

Muslims use the lunar calendar for religious occasions (Ramada, Hajj, Eid) but use the Christian, solar calendar (like the rest of the world) for everyday life.

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

#65

Post by tjradcliffe »

dredmorbius wrote: post #57

Eviatar Zerubavel's Seven Day Circle is a detailed and complex history of time telling. It really helps to understand that in a calendar we're trying to measure three distinct (and variable) cycles, none of which fits precisely into the others, and each of which imposes its own rhythms on human life. Attempts to break each from the current 7/12/365 basis have virtually all failed. The first is the Earth's rotation ab…

In New England (and likely elsewhere) you can see gravestones from the sixteen and seventeen hundreds that have two death dates on them, as different parts of the world converted to the Gregorian calendar at different times, and both Gregorian and Julian dates were in use in the area for a while (parts of Europe converted as early as the late 1500's).

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

#66

Post by tjradcliffe »

gohrt wrote: post #55
frogpelt wrote: post #35

In addition to the 13 month calendar, I wish the year started in March or April. The beginning of Spring* makes more sense for a new year than the middle of winter. *I realize this is only true in the northern hemisphere, but 90% of the world's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere. The other 10% can start their year in the Fall.

This is how the calendar originally worked (DECemeber is 10th month), until politics intervened in ancient Rome.

The Julian calendar typically started the year on the 25th of March (Lady Day) at noon (prior to clocks it was much easier to reckon mid-day than mid-night... navies kept this practice at least into the 1800's). This was true into the 1600's in parts of Europe and North America.

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

#67

Post by seccess »

Okay, but can we come up with a calendar system where the months September, October, November, and December don't have the wrong names? It has always bothered me that the prefix sept- means seven, but it is the ninth month, oct- is for the tenth month, etc...

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

#68

Post by vorg »

johnnyo wrote: post #44
tehaugmenter wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also for the superstitious there would always be Friday the 13th

Easy fix, just start the month on a Monday instead of a Sunday

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.

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

#69

Post by vorg »

seccess wrote: post #67

Okay, but can we come up with a calendar system where the months September, October, November, and December don't have the wrong names? It has always bothered me that the prefix sept- means seven, but it is the ninth month, oct- is for the tenth month, etc...

Have a 14-month year, then start the following year in March.

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

#70

Post by vorg »

drostie wrote: post #51
hasenj wrote: post #4

Why do we even have a 7-day week? 7 and 28 are just as arbitrary as 12. Why do we even have a solar year? If the year was 100 days, we could have a whole year of summer.

You're not going to convince either the Christians or the Jews to do a week that isn't 7 days long. That number is more or less fixed by the sizeable minority who need it for the rest of their habits. The solar year is convenient so that one can speak of "the average historical weather for this month" and such... but it's true that many others have done lunar calendars etc.

The day and year are settled astronomically. As for the week, it's been in use for at least 2500 years continuously without ever skipping a day and now virtually every country uses it. The month, however, has variable length, has been redefined every thousand years or so, and has competing systems from Islam, Hindu, Jewish, Japanese and other cultures. The month can change, but the week never can.
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