5 ms·
What do you do with the extra 5 or 6 days? Create a 13th mini-month?
by frosted-flakes 4y ago
What 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.