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Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

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Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#71
post #53

Some people, groups, or governments could change over on a case-by-case basis to a week-based system, without a sudden change to the worldwide date system. Just label the weeks with numbers, e.g. 1-Wednesday, 27-Monday, or 52-Sunday for Christmas this year. It seems Chinese people generally don't remember the time of week so much as the Month and date. Whenever someone in China tells me "this is happening on the 28 N…

I don't know how popular this is at other companies, but Intel (or at least my group) does use a week-based system for all dates. Today (December 28) would be "WW53.3". WW53 is the work week and .3 means Wednesday. Weeks start on Monday as ".1", whereas Sunday is ".0" and Saturday is ".6".

While this system should in theory make it easy to calculate the days need to complete a task, I still find myself converting to Month-Day every time. On the other hand, I don't have a clue what day of the week March 2nd is going to be, but if it's called WW9.5, then I immediately know that it's on a Friday 9 weeks from now.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#72
post #67

I've been using an independent calendar for my own records for over a decade now - it's the day-of-year, written base 7. It fits in with weeks; if we reset weeks every year (why not? we do worse things already with leap days and seconds) then dates become equivalent with weekdays. One number expresses the day-of-year, day-of-week, week-of-year, and month-of-year, using a 49-day month. http://tylerneylon.com/b/archive…

If everything is a 0-based index (e.g. first day being 0), why aren't the years?

The 7date doesn't say much about how we count years. It's all about how you count days and other sub-year units. You could combine it with any method of counting years that you like. I defaulted to using the year system I'm used to because it's convenient.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#73
Have they come up with any estimate of the global cost of the switch, and compared that to the benefit of the new calendar? It seems to change a bunch of stuff, and add a complicated new "leap week", for no particularly good reason. Yeah, it might reduce the cost of printing calendars slightly, though a lot of people use new calendars yearly so they can write on them, and a lot more just use their computer.

The cost of the transition would not be insignificant. In the Western world, we've had two major calendar changes in the past 2200 years or so. The most recent one, the transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar, lasted for about 400 years, as different countries transitioned at different times, with, I'm sure, plenty of friction caused by the lack of synchronization. Is it really necessary to go through all of that again?

Also, while this proposal would make holidays based on the solar calendar fall on the same day every year, it would do nothing for the holidays based on the lunar calendar. They would still drift around.

Reading their proposal on cato.org linked to from the article, it seems that a large part of their motivation is the synchronization of calendars for various financial instruments. But that doesn't require changing everyone's calendar; you can fix just the financial instruments, which already don't follow the ordinary calendar, without wreaking havoc on every other use of the calendar.

And I'm not sure how this extra week in December ever few years is supposed to help solve the problems with financial instruments. Under the current system, you need to deal with the fact that months may differ in length by up to 3 days, and that needs to be dealt with every month; in the new system, months would regularly vary by 1 day, but suddenly vary by another 7 days once every 5 years or so.

I think one of the reasons we've gotten ourselves into this mess is that we keep on trying to fit together different cycles of arbitrary length such that they match up exactly, which is impossible, so we add hacks on top of hacks to try to fix the problem. We try to make the cycle of days match the cycles of years, we try to make the cycle of months match the cycle of days (and years), and this proposal tries to shoehorn the cycle of weeks into that too, with a hack that adds an extra week every 5 or 6 years seemingly at random (while there is a regular rule for it, it's not as easily remembered as the Gregorian "leap year every 4 years, except for years divisible by 100, but an exception to that exception for years divisible by 400").

Instead of trying to do hacks to get all of these cycles to line up, why not move in the other direction and take the approach of having regular cycles at different frequencies that do not line up? You can have a financial calendar of 30 solar days (or whatever period is most convenient for you), a lunar calendar of one lunar month, the 7 solar day week, the tropical year that aligns with the seasons, the sidereal year that aligns with the orbit of the earth around the sun (which differs from the tropical year due to precession of the earth's axis). We have computers that can keep track of how all of these things line up when we care these days; instead of trying to simplify everything to fit together discretely with hacks added to fix it up, just let the computers deal with the precise details and allow each cycle to be simple and independent.

Now, moving to a single worldwide time standard (just use UTC for everyone for everyday use) seems to make a little more sense. While I understand the desire to make the hours line up with the solar day in a reasonably uniform way around the world, timezones (and daylight savings time) are an ugly hack that add a lot of cost and give you only a very rough approximation of what you are trying to achieve.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#74
post #73

Have they come up with any estimate of the global cost of the switch, and compared that to the benefit of the new calendar? It seems to change a bunch of stuff, and add a complicated new "leap week", for no particularly good reason. Yeah, it might reduce the cost of printing calendars slightly, though a lot of people use new calendars yearly so they can write on them, and a lot more just use their computer. The cost…

>Instead of trying to do hacks to get all of these cycles to line up, why not move in the other direction and take the approach of having regular cycles at different frequencies that do not line up?

With that system, how do you refer to a particular date? YYYY-MM-DD doesn't make much sense anymore, since a month can span multiple years, and a day can span multiple months and/or years.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#76

A more simple solution is to have 13 months of exactly 28 days, plus one day for new years day. That's even better because every month is exactly the same number of days which means semi-monthly and bi-weekly billing systems are the same thing. And because there's the same number of days anything billed per month can be easily prorated per day, and any billing cycle will match up with every other billing cycle... so…

This breaks quarterly cycles.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#77

From another point of view, a given date gradually occurring on every day of the week is a feature, not a bug. I see that the proposed calendar puts my birthday on a weekend, every year year after year, but I kind of like my birthday (and my wedding anniversary, and other important dates) occurring on a new day of the week each year, for variety. I note too that the calendar would not "make it easy to plan annual act…

Indeed, it is a corporate-friendly calendar.

They say their calendar would make it easy to plan annual activities, from holidays to academic schedules to financial calculations.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#78

A more simple solution is to have 13 months of exactly 28 days, plus one day for new years day. That's even better because every month is exactly the same number of days which means semi-monthly and bi-weekly billing systems are the same thing. And because there's the same number of days anything billed per month can be easily prorated per day, and any billing cycle will match up with every other billing cycle... so…

[deleted]

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#79

A more simple solution is to have 13 months of exactly 28 days, plus one day for new years day. That's even better because every month is exactly the same number of days which means semi-monthly and bi-weekly billing systems are the same thing. And because there's the same number of days anything billed per month can be easily prorated per day, and any billing cycle will match up with every other billing cycle... so…

As noted in the article the friction from religious groups wanting to hold the sabbath would be too great, in my estimation. I would love a logical organized calendar like the one you propose though!

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#80
post #75

I am still typing on a QWERTY keyboard, and that standard only a hundred years old. The modern calendar is two thousand years old. We will see the singularity before we see a new calendar.

The modern calendar is nearly 430 years old, but I agree with your broader point.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar

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