71–80 of 114 posts
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.
"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 b…
Annoys me to no end that most calendar systems still don't understand that.
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.
This. I have been thinking about this for a long time. Basically, 364 days are exactly the same, and what is currently December 31st would become the Year Day where everyone has it off. If it's a leap year, there'd be two Year Days. Simple, efficient, and easy to understand. Birthdays being on the same day of the week is a poor objection: your birthday already falls on a weekday much more often then not, and chances…
There's also the ill-fated Soviet Revolutionary Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar
Mars Inc. uses 13-period calendar for everything.
We had a single mainframe subprogram that managed the whole thing. It was written in assembler and the few times it broke, the entire company stopped. Financials, ordering, invoicing, everything. Eventually they rewrote it in a more modern language, COBOL. This was in 2010.
So yeah, this looks like a nice change, but it's not going to be completely static from year to year in every culture.
Besides, I don't think it will completely eliminate the difficulty of figuring out what date "next Thursday" is. We at HN tend to be mathematically competent, so we can easily calculate multiples of 7 in our heads and subtract a few without breaking a sweat. Most ordinary people, on the other hand, have difficulty figuring out what date next Monday is even when it's Friday and you just need to add 3. They'll just look it up in a paper calendar or their mobile device.
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…
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?
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.