It's brilliant, I love it! That said, I'd be happy just to see the Daylight Saving time-switch left on the dustbin of history.
The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
81–90 of 114 posts
Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#82Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#83Eviatar 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…
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.
Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#84Earlier 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…
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 bo…
I disagree, many times people are trying to coordinate and one person says the 8th thinking it's a friday, but it's actually thursday. So some people think they were talking about the 8th, others talk about it like it were the 9th, and there's confusion all about.
Casual calendar coordination is really easy to mess up in the current state.
Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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).
Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#86Earlier 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…
> 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.
Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#87Earlier 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.
> Aside from the female menstrual cycle
Birth control pills have a big effect on this now.
> A baby is brought to term in 10 moons or 280 days (9 months or so).
If you can't tell how far along a pregnancy is without reference to the Moon, there's no help for you.
Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#88"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…
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.
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 having a standardised temperature and pressure almost always different from the current temperature and pressure.
Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#89"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…
> 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."
...I think you just killed a piece of my soul... I understood that perfectly. :(
Re: The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar
#90Earlier 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).
Chinese uses the numbers for days of the week, so 星期一,星期二,星期三,星期四,星期五,星期六,星期日 for Monday to Sunday. They can use 周 or 礼拜 instead of 星期.
I remembered Japanese copied the Chinese at something there, but, whoops, it was the names of the planets that were copied. So the Chinese names of Mars(火星), Mercury(水星), Jupiter(木星), Venus(金星), and Saturn(土星) are copied onto the same days as planets that Romance languages name their days after.