9 ms·

Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I alw

Yeah agree completely. And keeping zones is important to understand workdays. I wouldn't mind dropping named time zones completely in favor of UTC+Offset, I always end up looking that up, annoyingly. Or just name the zones based on the offset. So NY would be -5. We could for humans write time with the ecoding, similar to ISO-8601, but it would just be 15:30-5 for 3:30pm EST. While we're at it. Can we make all the months standard lengths too? 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day (for a fun party) and every four years a bonus New Year's Day! For an especially big party :) Edit: as stated below I screwed up my (basic) math. 13 months 28 days is better. What should we call the 13th month?

ISL 10y ago
12*30+1 = 361. One solar year: 365.24219 x (86400s days).
perilunar 10y ago
> 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day And the other 4 days?
zeta0134 10y ago
Your math doesn't work out there though. If we had 30 day months, we would end up with 360 days spread among 12 months, and an extra 5 days leftover. 28 day months make far more sense, would align nicely with your proposed single New Year's day, and have the added bonus of aligning with our 7-day week system quite nicely. This ends up with 13 months altogether, and hey, it turns out that 28 days is closer to a lunar cycle, so the full moon would end up happening at roughly the same time every month. Not perfectly of course, but with the chaos that is our solar system, I'll take what I can get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  Ah. I screwed up my math. 28 sounds perfect. I rely on unit tests for this stuff these days ;)
- jhbadger 10y ago
  That first example (12 30 day months with 5 or 6 days outside months) was actually used in practice in post-revolutionary France (and again during the Paris Commune). I'm not sure keeping 7-day weeks is really a plus -- the French Revolutionary calendar used 10-day "decades" which align with the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
  - wernercd 10y ago
    Metric? Yeah... us Americans would never go for that garbage... :)
    - bluejekyll 10y ago
      I think you mean "we Americans..." And yeah. I mean 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 where 12 is much more flexible in giving us 2, 3, 4, and 6. At least that was my grandfather's argument. I annoying need to keep Metric and Standard wrenches and such for working on various things. Eventually it won't matter as the US will mostly source parts built over-seas where it will only make sense to adopt metric. And then the Standard system will only be left on road signs and temeratures, oh that's pretty much already happened.
      - wernercd 10y ago
        > 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 where 12 is much more flexible in giving us 2, 3, 4, and 6. Now that is some good ole American ingenuity :)
        serge2k 10y ago
        Americans do come up with the best dumb arguments why their busted idiotic system is better. My "favorite" is "Well farenheit just makes more sense for humans".
    - vidarh 10y ago
      But you do.. Sort of. One of the original signatories of the treaty of the metre, and all of your silly units for length and mass at least are defined in terms of SI units as of 1959 [1] [2]. So when you give someone an inch, you're specifically giving 25.4mm ;) [1] https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/si-units-length https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/si-units-lengt... [2] https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/metric/frn-59-5442-1959.pdf https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/m...
- restalis 10y ago
  Why having (7-days) "weeks" at all? Divide 28 into 7 groups of 4 days each and use these. Three days of work followed by one off, how does it sound?
  - placeybordeaux 10y ago
    Like something that is not going to happen. Religious days are the reason we have weekends where they are. They are not going to change because "why not have 4 day weeks".
    - restalis 10y ago
      Religious groups may stay with their own calendar if they wish, it wouldn't be the first nor the last thing kept conservative out of religious reasons. The secular society, however, may look for whatever works best.
irascible 10y ago
I vote a 256 day year, of 8 , 16 day months. Each month is 4, 4 day weeks, with odd weeks being mandatory global time off. New years is a one bMonth long global celebration, also time off. This has a beneficial side effect of making date handling easier for 8 bit microcontrollers, so when the singularity happens, the superAI will take pity on us because we showed mercy to its ancestors.
- bbcbasic 10y ago
  That's a hell of a lot of Earth angular momentum you need to destroy!
edoceo 10y ago
Smarch. From the Simpsons
eutropia 10y ago
http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.
- flukus 10y ago
  Aldrin gets a day but Gargarin doesn't?
- bluejekyll 10y ago
  Yes. Perfect. I've never seen that before. Thanks for sharing. It will never sell in the US though, the mere inclusion of Darwin will make it a political nightmare as people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god.
  - reflexive 10y ago
    > people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god When the reality is much less exciting... replacing the old gods with a deified version of Science.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Asooka 10y ago
    Or, we use Latin names of numbers. So, Unusber, Duober, Tresber, Quattorber, Quinber, Sexber [rename as necessary for America], September, October, November, December, Undecimber, Duodecimber, Tredecimber.
    - fao_ 10y ago
      Unusber It might not be correct, but I would prefer "Unober"
    - talideon 10y ago
      These would be better names from a purely phonological point of view: Unusper, Tresper, Quattober, Sexper. That way you don't have awkward clusters of both voiced and unvoiced consonants. The -ber affix having originally come from mensris (-mens-ris > *-membris > -ber), devoicing the initial 'b' to 'p' in those circumstances is reasonable enough. 'Quattober' is a simplification that makes it fit the pattern better. Alternatively, you would rely on the ordinals, dropping the -us ending and replacing it with -ilis as in Sextilis and Quintilis.
cheiVia0 10y ago
Workdays are not worth keeping either. With the gig economy, you can't know if someone works at night or during the day, or morning or Sundays or whatever.
Houshalter 10y ago
28 is perfect because it's divisible by 7. So every day lands on the same day of every month and every year. Every 1rst is a Sunday. But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all? Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten, and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. The 9 is the hour, the 76 is the minute, etc. And then if we are talking about radical standards reform, let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12. It carries more precision in less space, is much more divisible, and has more patterns in the multiplication tables. I love thinking about how more optimal the world could be if not for coordination problems and other issues.
- reflexive 10y ago
  > let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12 Why not hexadecimal, to help accelerate the singularity?
  - fsiefken 10y ago
    12 is the most optimal and usable base for humans - James Grime explains it at Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc
- wan23 10y ago
  Your radical time standard reform undoes your first change - it's already based on the number 12, remember? 24 is two 12-hour periods - A.M. and P.M. and 60 minutes/seconds is 12 five-minute/second periods (the numbers on a clock).
  - Houshalter 10y ago
    It's based on 24, which is divisible by 12. But that's not quite the same as having a clock that is based on the base you use. A base 12 clock would work just like a decimal clock, just with 2 extra symbols. It would not look like the base 24 clock with base 60 minutes and base 60 seconds.
nfixx 10y ago
Actually, in ETHIOPIA, it already is 13 MONTHS always! https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+months https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+mont... I was shocked, being a visitor here, when sometime about a month ago, we celebrated new year (after the 13th month), while the rest of the world was in the middle of the Gregorian calendar!
mahyarm 10y ago
You can do 19 months with 19 days with a 4 or 5 day holiday time in between. That way the number of months are equal to the number of days.
- hollander 10y ago
  The only problem is that nobody would agree on the holidays.
  - restalis 10y ago
    The only problem I thought of was the month/moon period disconnection.
bench_soup 10y ago
You can start using the 'calendrier pataphysique' :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_cale...
logfromblammo 10y ago
I believe this "new calendar" idea has already been tried several times. Religion and agriculture always seem to be the sticking points. Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better? Have 4 quarters of 13 * 7-day weeks each. Designate the vernal equinox as day 0 of the calendar, follow it with the 4 91-day quarters, and tack on leap days after the 4th quarter according to the Gregorian calendar rules. So you end up with dates like the 41st of Spring, or the 82nd of Summer. New Year's Day would be the 0th (nilth) of Spring, and Leap Day the 92nd of Winter.
- restalis 10y ago
  "Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better?" Months are, more or less, related to the moon periods, just like the year is to earth period. And most of the world has year quarters, called seasons. Seasons are there (in front of our eyes) to stay, regardless of how we'll choose to distribute the days of the year.
ywain 10y ago
> What should we call the 13th month? Undecimber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber
xom 10y ago
While we're at it, how about defining the offsets the other way around, so we can write 15:30+5 == 15:30 EST == 20:30 UTC?

ISL 10y ago

12*30+1 = 361. One solar year: 365.24219 x (86400s days).

perilunar 10y ago

> 30 day months, with 1 New Year's Day And the other 4 days?

zeta0134 10y ago

Your math doesn't work out there though. If we had 30 day months, we would end up with 360 days spread among 12 months, and an extra 5 days leftover. 28 day months make far more sense, would align nicely with your proposed single New Year's day, and have the added bonus of aligning with our 7-day week system quite nicely. This ends up with 13 months altogether, and hey, it turns out that 28 days is closer to a lunar cycle, so the full moon would end up happening at roughly the same time every month. Not perfectly of course, but with the chaos that is our solar system, I'll take what I can get. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

bluejekyll 10y ago
Ah. I screwed up my math. 28 sounds perfect. I rely on unit tests for this stuff these days ;)
jhbadger 10y ago
That first example (12 30 day months with 5 or 6 days outside months) was actually used in practice in post-revolutionary France (and again during the Paris Commune). I'm not sure keeping 7-day weeks is really a plus -- the French Revolutionary calendar used 10-day "decades" which align with the metric system. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
- wernercd 10y ago
  Metric? Yeah... us Americans would never go for that garbage... :)
  - bluejekyll 10y ago
    I think you mean "we Americans..." And yeah. I mean 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 where 12 is much more flexible in giving us 2, 3, 4, and 6. At least that was my grandfather's argument. I annoying need to keep Metric and Standard wrenches and such for working on various things. Eventually it won't matter as the US will mostly source parts built over-seas where it will only make sense to adopt metric. And then the Standard system will only be left on road signs and temeratures, oh that's pretty much already happened.
    - wernercd 10y ago
      > 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5 where 12 is much more flexible in giving us 2, 3, 4, and 6. Now that is some good ole American ingenuity :)
      - serge2k 10y ago
        Americans do come up with the best dumb arguments why their busted idiotic system is better. My "favorite" is "Well farenheit just makes more sense for humans".
  - vidarh 10y ago
    But you do.. Sort of. One of the original signatories of the treaty of the metre, and all of your silly units for length and mass at least are defined in terms of SI units as of 1959 [1] [2]. So when you give someone an inch, you're specifically giving 25.4mm ;) [1] https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/si-units-length https://www.nist.gov/pml/weights-and-measures/si-units-lengt... [2] https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/metric/frn-59-5442-1959.pdf https://www.nist.gov/sites/default/files/documents/pml/wmd/m...
restalis 10y ago
Why having (7-days) "weeks" at all? Divide 28 into 7 groups of 4 days each and use these. Three days of work followed by one off, how does it sound?
- placeybordeaux 10y ago
  Like something that is not going to happen. Religious days are the reason we have weekends where they are. They are not going to change because "why not have 4 day weeks".
  - restalis 10y ago
    Religious groups may stay with their own calendar if they wish, it wouldn't be the first nor the last thing kept conservative out of religious reasons. The secular society, however, may look for whatever works best.

irascible 10y ago

I vote a 256 day year, of 8 , 16 day months. Each month is 4, 4 day weeks, with odd weeks being mandatory global time off. New years is a one bMonth long global celebration, also time off. This has a beneficial side effect of making date handling easier for 8 bit microcontrollers, so when the singularity happens, the superAI will take pity on us because we showed mercy to its ancestors.

bbcbasic 10y ago
That's a hell of a lot of Earth angular momentum you need to destroy!

edoceo 10y ago

Smarch. From the Simpsons

eutropia 10y ago

http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html http://www.mithrandir.com/Tranquility/tranquility.html I think you're proposing this, 13 months named for scientists, one day outside the year.

flukus 10y ago
Aldrin gets a day but Gargarin doesn't?
bluejekyll 10y ago
Yes. Perfect. I've never seen that before. Thanks for sharing. It will never sell in the US though, the mere inclusion of Darwin will make it a political nightmare as people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god.
- reflexive 10y ago
  > people would be convinced we're atheists trying to kill their god When the reality is much less exciting... replacing the old gods with a deified version of Science.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Asooka 10y ago
  Or, we use Latin names of numbers. So, Unusber, Duober, Tresber, Quattorber, Quinber, Sexber [rename as necessary for America], September, October, November, December, Undecimber, Duodecimber, Tredecimber.
  - fao_ 10y ago
    Unusber It might not be correct, but I would prefer "Unober"
  - talideon 10y ago
    These would be better names from a purely phonological point of view: Unusper, Tresper, Quattober, Sexper. That way you don't have awkward clusters of both voiced and unvoiced consonants. The -ber affix having originally come from mensris (-mens-ris > *-membris > -ber), devoicing the initial 'b' to 'p' in those circumstances is reasonable enough. 'Quattober' is a simplification that makes it fit the pattern better. Alternatively, you would rely on the ordinals, dropping the -us ending and replacing it with -ilis as in Sextilis and Quintilis.

cheiVia0 10y ago

Workdays are not worth keeping either. With the gig economy, you can't know if someone works at night or during the day, or morning or Sundays or whatever.

Houshalter 10y ago

28 is perfect because it's divisible by 7. So every day lands on the same day of every month and every year. Every 1rst is a Sunday. But really, while we are on the topic of reform, is there any particular reason the week should be 7 days? Or that there should be a week at all? Time keeping is also weird. Base 24 and 60 is so arbitrary. Make it base ten, and you can express date and time easily. Right now is 6.976. The 9 is the hour, the 76 is the minute, etc. And then if we are talking about radical standards reform, let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12. It carries more precision in less space, is much more divisible, and has more patterns in the multiplication tables. I love thinking about how more optimal the world could be if not for coordination problems and other issues.

reflexive 10y ago
> let's do away with base 10 entirely and go to 12 Why not hexadecimal, to help accelerate the singularity?
- fsiefken 10y ago
  12 is the most optimal and usable base for humans - James Grime explains it at Numberphile: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U6xJfP7-HCc
wan23 10y ago
Your radical time standard reform undoes your first change - it's already based on the number 12, remember? 24 is two 12-hour periods - A.M. and P.M. and 60 minutes/seconds is 12 five-minute/second periods (the numbers on a clock).
- Houshalter 10y ago
  It's based on 24, which is divisible by 12. But that's not quite the same as having a clock that is based on the base you use. A base 12 clock would work just like a decimal clock, just with 2 extra symbols. It would not look like the base 24 clock with base 60 minutes and base 60 seconds.

nfixx 10y ago

Actually, in ETHIOPIA, it already is 13 MONTHS always! https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+months https://encrypted.google.com/#newwindow=1&q=ethiopia+13+mont... I was shocked, being a visitor here, when sometime about a month ago, we celebrated new year (after the 13th month), while the rest of the world was in the middle of the Gregorian calendar!

mahyarm 10y ago

You can do 19 months with 19 days with a 4 or 5 day holiday time in between. That way the number of months are equal to the number of days.

hollander 10y ago
The only problem is that nobody would agree on the holidays.
- restalis 10y ago
  The only problem I thought of was the month/moon period disconnection.

bench_soup 10y ago

You can start using the 'calendrier pataphysique' :) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/'Pataphysics#Pataphysical_cale...

logfromblammo 10y ago

I believe this "new calendar" idea has already been tried several times. Religion and agriculture always seem to be the sticking points. Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better? Have 4 quarters of 13 * 7-day weeks each. Designate the vernal equinox as day 0 of the calendar, follow it with the 4 91-day quarters, and tack on leap days after the 4th quarter according to the Gregorian calendar rules. So you end up with dates like the 41st of Spring, or the 82nd of Summer. New Year's Day would be the 0th (nilth) of Spring, and Leap Day the 92nd of Winter.

restalis 10y ago
"Months are hardly necessary, anyway. Wouldn't quarters be better?" Months are, more or less, related to the moon periods, just like the year is to earth period. And most of the world has year quarters, called seasons. Seasons are there (in front of our eyes) to stay, regardless of how we'll choose to distribute the days of the year.

ywain 10y ago

> What should we call the 13th month? Undecimber: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undecimber

xom 10y ago

While we're at it, how about defining the offsets the other way around, so we can write 15:30+5 == 15:30 EST == 20:30 UTC?