8 ms·

The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

80 points by baddash 8y ago

123fakestreet 8y ago
lousy Smarch weather
mixmastamyk 8y ago
I like this idea. The novelty of “what day is holiday X this year” has long worn off. Also found weird the author goes to so much trouble to explain then insults it in the last sentence.
al_chemist 8y ago
Year-day would be the day when all computers stop. Truly an exceptional day!
dzuc 8y ago
A year or two ago I wrote a thing to generate up to date versions of these calendars based on the design of the 1928 Kodak one. https://github.com/dzucconi/a-month-is/blob/master/app/javascripts/index.js https://github.com/dzucconi/a-month-is/blob/master/app/javas... & http://work.damonzucconi.com/a-month-is/?year=2018 http://work.damonzucconi.com/a-month-is/?year=2018 (can change the year with the query parameter)
veganjay 8y ago
Maybe I missed it in the article, do the four seasons start the same time every year? I assume they are adjusted, especially with Sol coming in the middle of Summer.
- azernik 8y ago
  It's a 365-day calendar with the same leap-year rules as the Gregorian calendar, so yes, it should stay synchronized to the seasons.
forinti 8y ago
The transition would be painful, but it would make so much stuff easier that we should just do it. We would end up doing away with calendars. You would just know that the 16th is a monday.
- Reedx 8y ago
  Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff we should do to make things better in the long term. Unfortunately we seem to be stuck with short term thinking and can't even manage to transition away from daylight savings or imperial units or the penny...
a3n 8y ago
> A month is a wholly irrational division of time. It has no relation to anything in astronomy, ... Well, except for its name. And its basis in the phases of the Moon. https://www.etymonline.com/word/Month https://www.etymonline.com/word/Month
geofft 8y ago
This calendar would cause the seven-day week to get out of sync. I was curious about this some time back and couldn't find an exact history, but it certainly seems like the seven-day cycle has been maintained continuously for millennia - probably dating from Babylonian and early Jewish practice, then spreading to Europe via Christianity, without skipping/adjustments. The shift to the Gregorian calendar, for instance, removed days but kept the cycle of weekdays - in continental Europe, 4 October 1582, a Thursday, was followed by 15 October 1582, a Friday. Wouldn't this proposal cause nations that adopt it to shift their weekdays from nations (and religions) that don't, at the rate of one a year?
- Falkon1313 8y ago
  We already have leap years that add a day. The months have different lengths, so the days of the week fall on different dates all the time. More like it's always been out of sync, and this would bring it _into_ sync.
  - geofft 8y ago
    Yes - it would bring a lot of things into sync, but the tradeoff is that you wouldn't be guaranteed that seven days after a Monday is another Monday. That is true and has been true since before the Julian calendar even existed, as far as I can tell.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - jacobolus 8y ago
      Strict 7-day weeks were a Jewish thing from sometime before 500 BC, unrelated to the Roman calendar. Even in other cultures that split time into weeks based on lunar phases, weeks were adjusted to match the moon (a lunar week is ~7.4 days). From what I understand the Romans didn’t adopt a 7-day week as a core part of the calendar until after the emperor had converted to Christianity. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae
  - 8y ago
wallacoloo 8y ago
In grade school I would hold out for about a month after the switch to Daylight Savings Time: anytime somebody asked me for the time, I would provide it with an hour offset to what they were expecting, and when they quoted a time in their system, I was vocal about correcting it to the original time zone. Somehow I was the nuisance for doing this, even though I think it’s quite clear that _they_ were the ones making time-keeping more difficult here - everything was working out just fine until they decided to change the meaning of 2pm for half of the year. If we’ve somehow got an entire society that can play gymnastics with time in this way, and claim to wrap their head around it, I don’t think changing the calendar is really a huge ask. But I think the only way to pull it off is for the government to mandate its use. There's just not enough interest in fighting the currents for this to reach critical mass otherwise. That said, I’m not convinced of the value of this calendar. Months are constructs that don’t have much meaning, but so are weeks - we could ax them both and just quote dates in terms of the numerical day within the year, for example. Or we could keep around weeks, but divide the year into quarters instead of months — that seems the most business friendly thing, and people already tend to think of the year in terms of four seasons outside of business; I wonder if Kodak considered it. Or, we could keep around the idea of weeks but rearrange them to be 10 days long to better fit with our decimal number system (7 days on, 3 days off? I might be amenable to that). I guess months are valuable for businesses which provide long-term services and bill by the month, like ISPs or credit cards. But I’m hesitant to rebuild our time system to suit a business use-case that’s particularly widespread _today_ without some plan on how to easily change it when it no longer is useful. DST was founded in a similar way, and now we’re stuck with it for way longer than it ever made sense to keep it around.
- SSLy 8y ago
  >Or, we could keep around the idea of weeks but rearrange them to be 10 days long to better fit with our decimal number system (7 days on, 3 days off? I might be amenable to that). Of all the things mentioned above this one won't be accepted by the general population, ever. It was tried already in the revolutionary France, and is one of the few things that were rolled back.
- SkyMarshal 8y ago
  >If we’ve somehow got an entire society that can play gymnastics with time in this way, and claim to wrap their head around it, I don’t think changing the calendar is really a huge ask. But I think the only way to pull it off is for the government to mandate its use. There's just not enough interest in fighting the currents for this to reach critical mass otherwise. While we’re at it let’s convert to the Metric System too. Rip all the bandaids off at once.
ken 8y ago
I'm torn between preferring this (13x28+1) or a Coptic/Ethiopian calendar (12*30+5). Having each week start on the same day of the week is nice, but 12 months has advantages, too, and at least the first day of each month is consistent from year to year.
- jacobolus 8y ago
  The Maya had 18 20-day months plus a 5-day intercalendary period.
ericzawo 8y ago
If this is what it will take to impose a 4-day work week then sign me up. :)
avip 8y ago
I’m all for ditching the superficial Gregorian calendar, but do we really need inventing new one from scratch? There’s plenty of calendars out there, just pick one.
- SllX 8y ago
  Not actually in favor of ditching the Gregorian calendar, but if you’re going to do it, this isn’t the worst proposal I’ve ever seen and at least one (formerly) major US corporation was able to make it work for them internally for just over 60 years. It wouldn’t make a difference if the calendar was from 1902 AD or 1902 BC as long as it could work for society. They’re all pretty much made up. You draw some lines in the sand till you have a calendar, denominate a few standard units of time labeling some of them with the names of the gods or Kings or Emperors or whoever and count upwards from there. My only problem with making the switch to any different calendar is no matter how uniform or predictable, you’re breaking something that works pretty decently well to replace it with something that might be different, but probably isn’t actually better. A calendar is a calendar is a calendar. We’ve gotten pretty good as a society, as a civilization, marking time on the Gregorian calendar, ticking off holidays and making plans around our availability. A change like this would benefit a small number of people at a large up front cost to society, and the supposed benefits for the masses at large ring more as superficial justifications to get this imposed by the government than any kind of genuine benefit.
crazygringo 8y ago
I love the logic behind it... although I guess quarterly planning would get a little annoying, since 13 isn't divisible by 4 or any number. You have Jan 1 - Apr 7, Apr 8 - Sol 14, Sol 15 - Sep 21, and Sep 22 - Dec 28 (+ year day). Not the end of the world... but not exactly elegant either.
- fizx 8y ago
  Just give everyone a month off. I see no problem with this :)
- bluejekyll 8y ago
  Planned month for paying down technical debt.
ubiyubix 8y ago
Explanation in the style of cpggrey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57G1Q8BW6Mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57G1Q8BW6Mw
Mountain_Skies 8y ago
A bit of a thought experiment: Do we really need years? In the past a calendar based on how long it took to make an orbit around the sun was useful for agricultural and other planning. Now we could have a 500 day cycle if we wanted to for some reason. Or maybe a hundred day cycle. Our ability to plant crops wouldn't be effected. There are many more variables involved now in determining when to plant or harvest than the Earth sitting at roughly the same spot as the last planting or harvest time. The Islamic calendar has long be out of sync with the solar calendar but still holds importance in Islamic culture. I'm sure there are others that likewise don't strictly abide by the solar year. Instead of having a celebration on the day that the Earth is roughly in the same place in its orbit around the sun as it was when you were born, why not celebrate in increments of thousands of days you've been alive? Maybe broken down into once every hundred day celebrations before hitting the 5000 day celebration so children will experience them more often? I understand that some countries have a "Name Day" for the different common names in their culture, which is a celebration on par as one's birthday. We are very use to anchoring things to the orbital position on the Earth relative to the sun but we no longer live in a time where such things are of primary importance. And don't even get me started on the possibilities of alternates to the primary school system being divided up into thirteen grades. Could each six week grading period (or a grading period of some other length) be its own grade? Do we really need to have so much of our culture and society tied so closely to the agricultural needs of the past?
- chrismcb 8y ago
  Actually I think we do need years. It is kind of nice to know that the snowy season is typically dec-feb. That the warm summer months are July and August. And so on. Without having to do some mental arithmetic
  - ada1981 8y ago
    Yes I think this is true. I’m curious how future humans will relate. You could imagine an intergalactic mission in which the calendar was kept as a keepsake from earth. And if a new planet is colonized, would we work to stay in sync with earth in some way? Keep the same basic names but morph them? What happens when two different civilizations meet with different calendars (we have some historical data on that).
yitchelle 8y ago
In my office, we run out projects based on calendar weeks. I keep thinking why can't we take this idea to the general public. It would make life a little bit simpler without having to bother about months and its irregular amount of days.
Entangled 8y ago
I wonder why we haven't thought of a decimal calendar synced with the seasons like: W1 W2 W3 W4 W5 W6 W7 W8 W9 SPR 1 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 SUM 1 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 AUT 1 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 WIN 1 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 1 [1] So we only have four months (seasons) and each has nine weeks of ten days each. Each season starts with a neutral day (equinox and solstice) then follow the weeks with ten days each. At the end of the year there is a universal holiday and an extra holiday for leap year. We could also name all days of the week after the eight planets and the sun as initially intended (including moonday). We could have seven working days and three days off or three working days then two off then three more working days then two off per week. Whatever, just wanted to leave a stinky brainfart in this room for posterity.
- wingspar 8y ago
  We’d all ending up working 8 days a week... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Days_a_Week https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Days_a_Week
- tzs 8y ago
  A season-based calendar, The World Season Calendar, was proposed by Isaac Asimov. It consisted of four seasons, named A, B, C, and D, corresponding to Winter/Spring/Summer/Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and Summer/Autumn/Winter/Spring in the Southern Hemisphere. Each season looked like this: Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 ... 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 That gives 91 x 4 = 364 days. An extra day, called Year Day, occurs between D 91 and A 01 of the next year, and is not part of the 7 day week cycle. In leap years another extra day, also outside the week cycle, called Leap Day is added between B 91 and C 01.
nkkollaw 8y ago
I love the idea, but in all honesty it would be a real problem making the week start on Sunday. In all countries I've been but the States the week starts on Monday, not Sunday.

80 points by baddash 8y ago

lousy Smarch weather

I like this idea. The novelty of “what day is holiday X this year” has long worn off. Also found weird the author goes to so much trouble to explain then insults it in the last sentence.

al_chemist 8y ago

Year-day would be the day when all computers stop. Truly an exceptional day!

dzuc 8y ago

A year or two ago I wrote a thing to generate up to date versions of these calendars based on the design of the 1928 Kodak one. https://github.com/dzucconi/a-month-is/blob/master/app/javascripts/index.js https://github.com/dzucconi/a-month-is/blob/master/app/javas... & http://work.damonzucconi.com/a-month-is/?year=2018 http://work.damonzucconi.com/a-month-is/?year=2018 (can change the year with the query parameter)

veganjay 8y ago

Maybe I missed it in the article, do the four seasons start the same time every year? I assume they are adjusted, especially with Sol coming in the middle of Summer.

azernik 8y ago
It's a 365-day calendar with the same leap-year rules as the Gregorian calendar, so yes, it should stay synchronized to the seasons.

forinti 8y ago

The transition would be painful, but it would make so much stuff easier that we should just do it. We would end up doing away with calendars. You would just know that the 16th is a monday.

Reedx 8y ago
Yeah, there's a bunch of stuff we should do to make things better in the long term. Unfortunately we seem to be stuck with short term thinking and can't even manage to transition away from daylight savings or imperial units or the penny...

a3n 8y ago

> A month is a wholly irrational division of time. It has no relation to anything in astronomy, ... Well, except for its name. And its basis in the phases of the Moon. https://www.etymonline.com/word/Month https://www.etymonline.com/word/Month

geofft 8y ago

This calendar would cause the seven-day week to get out of sync. I was curious about this some time back and couldn't find an exact history, but it certainly seems like the seven-day cycle has been maintained continuously for millennia - probably dating from Babylonian and early Jewish practice, then spreading to Europe via Christianity, without skipping/adjustments. The shift to the Gregorian calendar, for instance, removed days but kept the cycle of weekdays - in continental Europe, 4 October 1582, a Thursday, was followed by 15 October 1582, a Friday. Wouldn't this proposal cause nations that adopt it to shift their weekdays from nations (and religions) that don't, at the rate of one a year?

Falkon1313 8y ago
We already have leap years that add a day. The months have different lengths, so the days of the week fall on different dates all the time. More like it's always been out of sync, and this would bring it _into_ sync.
- geofft 8y ago
  Yes - it would bring a lot of things into sync, but the tradeoff is that you wouldn't be guaranteed that seven days after a Monday is another Monday. That is true and has been true since before the Julian calendar even existed, as far as I can tell.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - jacobolus 8y ago
    Strict 7-day weeks were a Jewish thing from sometime before 500 BC, unrelated to the Roman calendar. Even in other cultures that split time into weeks based on lunar phases, weeks were adjusted to match the moon (a lunar week is ~7.4 days). From what I understand the Romans didn’t adopt a 7-day week as a core part of the calendar until after the emperor had converted to Christianity. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae
- 8y ago

wallacoloo 8y ago

In grade school I would hold out for about a month after the switch to Daylight Savings Time: anytime somebody asked me for the time, I would provide it with an hour offset to what they were expecting, and when they quoted a time in their system, I was vocal about correcting it to the original time zone. Somehow I was the nuisance for doing this, even though I think it’s quite clear that _they_ were the ones making time-keeping more difficult here - everything was working out just fine until they decided to change the meaning of 2pm for half of the year. If we’ve somehow got an entire society that can play gymnastics with time in this way, and claim to wrap their head around it, I don’t think changing the calendar is really a huge ask. But I think the only way to pull it off is for the government to mandate its use. There's just not enough interest in fighting the currents for this to reach critical mass otherwise. That said, I’m not convinced of the value of this calendar. Months are constructs that don’t have much meaning, but so are weeks - we could ax them both and just quote dates in terms of the numerical day within the year, for example. Or we could keep around weeks, but divide the year into quarters instead of months — that seems the most business friendly thing, and people already tend to think of the year in terms of four seasons outside of business; I wonder if Kodak considered it. Or, we could keep around the idea of weeks but rearrange them to be 10 days long to better fit with our decimal number system (7 days on, 3 days off? I might be amenable to that). I guess months are valuable for businesses which provide long-term services and bill by the month, like ISPs or credit cards. But I’m hesitant to rebuild our time system to suit a business use-case that’s particularly widespread _today_ without some plan on how to easily change it when it no longer is useful. DST was founded in a similar way, and now we’re stuck with it for way longer than it ever made sense to keep it around.

SSLy 8y ago
>Or, we could keep around the idea of weeks but rearrange them to be 10 days long to better fit with our decimal number system (7 days on, 3 days off? I might be amenable to that). Of all the things mentioned above this one won't be accepted by the general population, ever. It was tried already in the revolutionary France, and is one of the few things that were rolled back.
SkyMarshal 8y ago
>If we’ve somehow got an entire society that can play gymnastics with time in this way, and claim to wrap their head around it, I don’t think changing the calendar is really a huge ask. But I think the only way to pull it off is for the government to mandate its use. There's just not enough interest in fighting the currents for this to reach critical mass otherwise. While we’re at it let’s convert to the Metric System too. Rip all the bandaids off at once.

ken 8y ago

I'm torn between preferring this (13x28+1) or a Coptic/Ethiopian calendar (12*30+5). Having each week start on the same day of the week is nice, but 12 months has advantages, too, and at least the first day of each month is consistent from year to year.

jacobolus 8y ago
The Maya had 18 20-day months plus a 5-day intercalendary period.

ericzawo 8y ago

If this is what it will take to impose a 4-day work week then sign me up. :)

avip 8y ago

I’m all for ditching the superficial Gregorian calendar, but do we really need inventing new one from scratch? There’s plenty of calendars out there, just pick one.

SllX 8y ago
Not actually in favor of ditching the Gregorian calendar, but if you’re going to do it, this isn’t the worst proposal I’ve ever seen and at least one (formerly) major US corporation was able to make it work for them internally for just over 60 years. It wouldn’t make a difference if the calendar was from 1902 AD or 1902 BC as long as it could work for society. They’re all pretty much made up. You draw some lines in the sand till you have a calendar, denominate a few standard units of time labeling some of them with the names of the gods or Kings or Emperors or whoever and count upwards from there. My only problem with making the switch to any different calendar is no matter how uniform or predictable, you’re breaking something that works pretty decently well to replace it with something that might be different, but probably isn’t actually better. A calendar is a calendar is a calendar. We’ve gotten pretty good as a society, as a civilization, marking time on the Gregorian calendar, ticking off holidays and making plans around our availability. A change like this would benefit a small number of people at a large up front cost to society, and the supposed benefits for the masses at large ring more as superficial justifications to get this imposed by the government than any kind of genuine benefit.

crazygringo 8y ago

I love the logic behind it... although I guess quarterly planning would get a little annoying, since 13 isn't divisible by 4 or any number. You have Jan 1 - Apr 7, Apr 8 - Sol 14, Sol 15 - Sep 21, and Sep 22 - Dec 28 (+ year day). Not the end of the world... but not exactly elegant either.

fizx 8y ago
Just give everyone a month off. I see no problem with this :)
bluejekyll 8y ago
Planned month for paying down technical debt.

ubiyubix 8y ago

Explanation in the style of cpggrey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57G1Q8BW6Mw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=57G1Q8BW6Mw

Mountain_Skies 8y ago

A bit of a thought experiment: Do we really need years? In the past a calendar based on how long it took to make an orbit around the sun was useful for agricultural and other planning. Now we could have a 500 day cycle if we wanted to for some reason. Or maybe a hundred day cycle. Our ability to plant crops wouldn't be effected. There are many more variables involved now in determining when to plant or harvest than the Earth sitting at roughly the same spot as the last planting or harvest time. The Islamic calendar has long be out of sync with the solar calendar but still holds importance in Islamic culture. I'm sure there are others that likewise don't strictly abide by the solar year. Instead of having a celebration on the day that the Earth is roughly in the same place in its orbit around the sun as it was when you were born, why not celebrate in increments of thousands of days you've been alive? Maybe broken down into once every hundred day celebrations before hitting the 5000 day celebration so children will experience them more often? I understand that some countries have a "Name Day" for the different common names in their culture, which is a celebration on par as one's birthday. We are very use to anchoring things to the orbital position on the Earth relative to the sun but we no longer live in a time where such things are of primary importance. And don't even get me started on the possibilities of alternates to the primary school system being divided up into thirteen grades. Could each six week grading period (or a grading period of some other length) be its own grade? Do we really need to have so much of our culture and society tied so closely to the agricultural needs of the past?

chrismcb 8y ago
Actually I think we do need years. It is kind of nice to know that the snowy season is typically dec-feb. That the warm summer months are July and August. And so on. Without having to do some mental arithmetic
- ada1981 8y ago
  Yes I think this is true. I’m curious how future humans will relate. You could imagine an intergalactic mission in which the calendar was kept as a keepsake from earth. And if a new planet is colonized, would we work to stay in sync with earth in some way? Keep the same basic names but morph them? What happens when two different civilizations meet with different calendars (we have some historical data on that).

yitchelle 8y ago

In my office, we run out projects based on calendar weeks. I keep thinking why can't we take this idea to the general public. It would make life a little bit simpler without having to bother about months and its irregular amount of days.

Entangled 8y ago

I wonder why we haven't thought of a decimal calendar synced with the seasons like: W1 W2 W3 W4 W5 W6 W7 W8 W9 SPR 1 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 SUM 1 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 AUT 1 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 WIN 1 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 1 [1] So we only have four months (seasons) and each has nine weeks of ten days each. Each season starts with a neutral day (equinox and solstice) then follow the weeks with ten days each. At the end of the year there is a universal holiday and an extra holiday for leap year. We could also name all days of the week after the eight planets and the sun as initially intended (including moonday). We could have seven working days and three days off or three working days then two off then three more working days then two off per week. Whatever, just wanted to leave a stinky brainfart in this room for posterity.

wingspar 8y ago
We’d all ending up working 8 days a week... https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Days_a_Week https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_Days_a_Week
tzs 8y ago
A season-based calendar, The World Season Calendar, was proposed by Isaac Asimov. It consisted of four seasons, named A, B, C, and D, corresponding to Winter/Spring/Summer/Autumn in the Northern Hemisphere and Summer/Autumn/Winter/Spring in the Southern Hemisphere. Each season looked like this: Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 ... 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 That gives 91 x 4 = 364 days. An extra day, called Year Day, occurs between D 91 and A 01 of the next year, and is not part of the 7 day week cycle. In leap years another extra day, also outside the week cycle, called Leap Day is added between B 91 and C 01.

nkkollaw 8y ago

I love the idea, but in all honesty it would be a real problem making the week start on Sunday. In all countries I've been but the States the week starts on Monday, not Sunday.