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The root cause is that the Gregorian calendar is illogical and unsuited to today's needs. I wish the International Fixed Calendar [0] had gained traction. [0]:
by pards 4y ago
The root cause is that the Gregorian calendar is illogical and unsuited to today's needs. I wish the International Fixed Calendar [0] had gained traction.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- saalweachter 4y agoEh, if you're going to break with previous calendars, you can do much better. 1. Round off the year to 360 days. 2. This lets us get an even 12 months of 30 days. 3. Drop the week from 7 days to 6, for a 4-day workweek and 5 weeks per month.
- frosted-flakes 4y agoWhat do you do with the extra 5 or 6 days? Create a 13th mini-month?
- saalweachter 4y agoWhy do anything with them?
- frosted-flakes 4y agoYou can't just disappear them into the void. The length of a year is not something we can control.
- saalweachter 4y agoWe've changed the length of a year several times in history, what's one more?
- frosted-flakes 4y agoThe length of a year is determined by the earth's orbit around the sun. Sure, you can make a calendar that isn't actually a year long, and then correct the errors that accumulate every once in a while, either by inserting a few months every few hundred years, or by adding a leap day every 4 years, but why would you intentionally make a calendar that isn't a year long? Leap days are unavoidable, but seasons drifting out-of-sync are not.
- otikik 4y agoWe can define a year however we want, but then planet Earth will answer "Ok, then my new orbit is 0.95434 years".
- NoGravitas 4y agoBecause if you don't, the seasons and the months will drift out of sync with each other. And you don't even get the benefits of a lunar calendar as a tradeoff, because your weeks are shorter than 1/4 of a lunar month, and your months are two days longer than a lunar month.
- saalweachter 4y ago> Because if you don't, the seasons and the months will drift out of sync with each other. And? > And you don't even get the benefits of a lunar calendar as a tradeoff What are the benefits of a lunar calendar? And it's not like our 7-day week actually stays in sync with the moon, it's just approximately the same length.
- happyopossum 4y ago> And? People like predictability for planning things like travel, holidays, school, etc.
- Saint_Genet 4y agoThe french republican calendar made them holidays https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sansculottides https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sansculottides
- bombcar 4y agoSo did the Hobbit calendar: http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Shire_Calendar http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Shire_Calendar Basically make "Mid-summer" or "New Years" days that are outside of months (we could have something similar if Feb 29 wasn't part of Feb or March) - Tolkien's version had the extra days also not be part of the week, so you'd have Monday - Yule - Tuesday for example so that a given day of the month would be the same weekday each year. Downside - if your birthday fell on a weekday, it would always fall on a weekday, forever.
- jxf 4y agoIt wouldn't take long before this calendar was inconsistent. The Earth rotates about 365 times before it returns to its previous spot in its orbit around the sun. If you adopted a 360 day calendar (assuming you by "day" in this calendar system you mean "a 24-hour period"), then after just a decade of this calendar, summer would happen 50 days earlier than it does today.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoActually <pedant> it rotates 366 times, because each noon-to-noon it rotates 361 degrees. Just returning one face to the sun adds about one degree because of the earth's motion around the sun, and so adds exactly one rotation each year (each complete revolution around the sun) </pedant> <edited degrees>
- nsilvestri 4y agoClose, but I think you confused the 360 degrees of a circle with the ~365 days in a year. The extra nearly-one degree of rotation in a solar day brings us to a hair under 361 degrees ;)
- saalweachter 4y agoAnd? Mars has 687 days in its time around the sun.
- jxf 4y agoA calendar designed to convey Earth's seasons doesn't have anything to do with Mars. Moreover, no one lives on Mars.
- 8organicbits 4y agoLocking the calendar to the seasons is really valuable if you work on a farm or do other seasonal work. However, anyone who doesn't need to track the seasons may prefer the 6/5/30/12 simplified model. There would be some adjustment, like "winter" holidays occurring in the summer. Although anyone who lives in different climates or moves between the northern and southern hemispheres will already experience something similar. A good question may be how often would you need to calculate or look up something that the other calendar would make obvious. The better calendar (for you) is the one that reduces those occurrences.
- happyopossum 4y agoI'd go for that as long as we can throw in an annual 5-day 'bonus' week - preferably make it the Christmas/Winter solstice/New Year holiday.
- yellowapple 4y agoI would've taken that bonus week to be a given; it's rather odd to me that other commenters seemingly ain't doing so and are instead discussing this as if the year actually would get disconnected from Earth's rotation.
- avgcorrection 4y agoI did find one illogical point, though: > The calendar is inconsistent with ISO 8601 regarding the first weekday of the week (Sunday vs. Monday), ;-)