7 ms·

Pax Calendar

48 points by rfreytag 3y ago

jmclnx 3y ago
Will make things rather hard for financial businesses that expect 3 months per quarter and 4 quarters per year.
- rmah 3y ago
  finance is even weirder. for example the US/360 bond calendar assumes 12 months of 30 days each. to make various calculations easier, I guess.
bombcar 3y ago
Shire Calendar beats it.
halosghost 3y ago
At this point, I doubt there will ever be any proposal as easy to adopt and as radically-improved as Symmetry454 [1]. One day, I hope to live in a world where I get to use this calendar and the average response isn't for people to look at me funny… For anyone looking for a tl;dr, Symmetry454… - is perpetual; one printed calendar will work, more or less, indefinitely - preserves the 7-day sabbatical week cycle (no intercalary days like IFC) - simplifies the leap rule to a formula which should work for a very long time (at least a few millenia from now) - preserves 3 months in a quarter, and 4 equal quarters making up a year - results in every week, month, quarter, year, etc. beginning on a Monday and ending on a Sunday; this also means knowing just the day number tells you exactly what day-of-week it is - ensures all months now consist of a predictable, whole-number of weeks … it's just… so much better… All the best, [1]: http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/symmetry.htm http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/symmetry.htm
- digging 3y ago
  I'm not a fan of having some months be 25% longer than most, but it is predictable. One thing to consider in calendar reform is monthly payments. They could easily be transferred to weekly payments in this system, or increased 25% for extended months.
- tobr 3y ago
  What about this idea for a calendar: every year is 1 month, every month is 1 week, and every week is 1 day? - Every year and month starts on a Monday - No leap days needed at all - You can use the same calendar every year (better yet, you might already have a blank piece of paper you can use) - Every day is your birthday
  - halosghost 3y ago
    You might be responding tongue-in-cheek, but you have essentially described an underspecified variant of FDN Rata Die [1]. FDN R.D. does have a place in calendrical calculations; namely, it serves as the narrow waist for converting between calendars. All the best, [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rata_Die https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rata_Die
- mojomark 3y ago
  This certainly isn't a great reason to avoid perennial calendars, but I honestly very much like that anniversaries fall on different days of the week each year. As a child a 'weekend' birthday gave me something to look forward to for multiple years to be able to party like Elton John or the Bay City Rollers. With a perennial calendar, if I were born on a dull workday, I'd be stuck celebrating in the middle of the school or work week for life! "No, cindy, I don't want to celebrate with the rest of the staff in the kitchenette with any more of your muffins."
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    My coworkers don't know my birthday lol. Also due to infectious disease, celebrated my birthday with my family 3 months late recently.
dhosek 3y ago
I recently ended up in a wikipedia rathole looking at various alternative calendar systems, at least in part to be able to give a true but unintelligible answer to the question of when my birthday is. Among the oddballs were the Discordian calendar which divides the year into five seasons of 73 days each with 5-day weeks and the Pataphysical calendar which has 13 months each of 29 days, but for most months, the 29th day is imaginary.
digging 3y ago
Pretty unpleasant to have an extra week once in a while, IMO. Seems this calendar would lead to confusing seasonal drift in more stable (pre-industrial) climate, but I guess there's no seasonal predictability going forward . As a fun thought experiment, I once devised my own Equal Terrestrial Calendar, intended to be both predictable and actually secular. - Weeks are 5 days long. - Months are 6 weeks long (exactly). - Thus, a month is 30 days, and as close as possible to an average lunar month. - Every week/month/year begins on the same day of the week - Work weeks are 3 days long. - 3 intercalary holidays at the winter solstice, and 2 intercalary holidays at the summer solstice (make it 3 every leap year) - 30 days/month * 12 months + 5.25 days (intercalary) = 365.25, but in a fairly even spread Not possible for a calendar to be perfect, but I'd really enjoy living in this world.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
  What if instead we were to go with non-24-hour days? We could fix even more problems with such a system, like: * Days starting at the same hour:minute all the time * The current impossibility of a decimal clock. We're constantly told how using base-10 makes math so much easier, who wouldn't want a day being 10 hours long and a week 10 days long? If the answer is 168, you've screwed up somewhere * The conceit that ancient deities like Apollo and Ra are so important that even after we've abandoned those religions, we must continue to allow our calendars revolve around their golden chariots. I say "no more!", we will spurn the astronomical bodies as well * The relegation of agriculture to the primitive past, where it belongs. I only eat Hot Pockets anyway. The chicken milkers and tomato tree people can go live in yurts or something if they believe caveman calendars are important * The ability to insert special 5-minute days into the calendar in emergencies, like when I have a new game on pre-order that is scheduled to come out in 60 days' time. We could easily reduce that to an effective 3 hours or so
  - digging 3y ago
    Sounds fun. But the day is evenly divided already, so there's less pressure to change it.
- Jedd 3y ago
adamtheclayman 3y ago
Like other simplifying calendar proposals, Pax Calendar is faced with an almost impossible technical integration challenge if human beings have to achieve the transition, recoding all existing systems to conform to the new calendar requirements rather than the Julian/Gregorian calendar support we've built up over hundreds of years. But now, with AI emerging, it might be possible to foresee a day, a half-century from now, when the transition to Pax or Synchrony or another such calendar is much less laborious and far more feasible, with a transition and switching cost that is actually palatable, given that AI and advanced robotics may largely be able to reprogram itself, and other systems AI can be given access to, rather than consuming a bajillion hours of human engineering and maintenance time. Maybe in 75 or 100 years a transition will become more crystal clear as an achievement we can complete with the help of ubiquitous, universal, super-efficient, sudo-trusted ML. But anyone hoping for a transition in the next 25 or 30 years is probably suffering from delusion.
smitty1110 3y ago
Or we could go with a real classic from Ye Olde Days: The Babylonian calendar[1]. A visual explanation is here [2]. I rather like that they use the physical properties of a pendulum to link length and time. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar 2: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Sumerian_Calendar_ISO_B0.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Sumerian...
nayuki 3y ago
I don't think this reformed calendar goes far enough. Many of our services are billed monthly - Internet, phone, electricity, property tax, etc. I don't know if the pax week would be considered its own super-short month or fused into another month, but it massively complicates financial calculations and issues of fairness. Other people have pointed out issues like with 13 months, you can't divide the year into quarters.
082349872349872 3y ago
cf https://qntm.org/calendar https://qntm.org/calendar
chinaman425 3y ago
[dead]
aranchelk 3y ago
I don’t like leap weeks. I’d much rather have 1-2 leap days. Let them exist outside the months: year starts with 0 and every 4th year 00 then 0. For anyone thinking that will be a pain to code, side benefit, it’ll hasten the adoption of sum types.
helmsb 3y ago
I’ve always been fascinated by alternative calendars (also alternative timekeeping). However, barring an apocalyptic event, I don’t for see any alternative calendars taking off. For most of human history, we didn’t need a standardized calendar, you just needed to agree with people that you interacted with. Religion pushed most of the standardization and later reinforced during the Industrial Revolution—helped along by colonialism. Now that we are a globalized society, it would require parties from every nation and every industry to agree to the change and coordinate a simultaneous migration. Given we can’t get close to that level of cooperation when faced with potentially existential crises, it’s doubtful we could do it because it’s a “better” system than the current one. I’d love to be proven wrong though!
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Just imagine the state of the world in 1582, and the amount of cooperation, agreement, and coordination that it took to implement the Gregorian Calendar, which was an incremental iteration of the Julian one. Take the chaos and confusion created by that (and rippling into present times) and multiply it by ten or so, and then you may perhaps approach what it'd be like to change calendars today.
cryptonector 3y ago
Why not have the 13th month be a 29 day month and every four years have a leap day?
FrontierPsych 3y ago
[flagged]

Pax Calendar

48 points by rfreytag 3y ago

jmclnx 3y ago

Will make things rather hard for financial businesses that expect 3 months per quarter and 4 quarters per year.

rmah 3y ago
finance is even weirder. for example the US/360 bond calendar assumes 12 months of 30 days each. to make various calculations easier, I guess.

bombcar 3y ago

Shire Calendar beats it.

halosghost 3y ago

At this point, I doubt there will ever be any proposal as easy to adopt and as radically-improved as Symmetry454 [1]. One day, I hope to live in a world where I get to use this calendar and the average response isn't for people to look at me funny… For anyone looking for a tl;dr, Symmetry454… - is perpetual; one printed calendar will work, more or less, indefinitely - preserves the 7-day sabbatical week cycle (no intercalary days like IFC) - simplifies the leap rule to a formula which should work for a very long time (at least a few millenia from now) - preserves 3 months in a quarter, and 4 equal quarters making up a year - results in every week, month, quarter, year, etc. beginning on a Monday and ending on a Sunday; this also means knowing just the day number tells you exactly what day-of-week it is - ensures all months now consist of a predictable, whole-number of weeks … it's just… so much better… All the best, [1]: http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/symmetry.htm http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/symmetry.htm

digging 3y ago
I'm not a fan of having some months be 25% longer than most, but it is predictable. One thing to consider in calendar reform is monthly payments. They could easily be transferred to weekly payments in this system, or increased 25% for extended months.
tobr 3y ago
What about this idea for a calendar: every year is 1 month, every month is 1 week, and every week is 1 day? - Every year and month starts on a Monday - No leap days needed at all - You can use the same calendar every year (better yet, you might already have a blank piece of paper you can use) - Every day is your birthday
- halosghost 3y ago
  You might be responding tongue-in-cheek, but you have essentially described an underspecified variant of FDN Rata Die [1]. FDN R.D. does have a place in calendrical calculations; namely, it serves as the narrow waist for converting between calendars. All the best, [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rata_Die https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rata_Die
mojomark 3y ago
This certainly isn't a great reason to avoid perennial calendars, but I honestly very much like that anniversaries fall on different days of the week each year. As a child a 'weekend' birthday gave me something to look forward to for multiple years to be able to party like Elton John or the Bay City Rollers. With a perennial calendar, if I were born on a dull workday, I'd be stuck celebrating in the middle of the school or work week for life! "No, cindy, I don't want to celebrate with the rest of the staff in the kitchenette with any more of your muffins."
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  My coworkers don't know my birthday lol. Also due to infectious disease, celebrated my birthday with my family 3 months late recently.

dhosek 3y ago

I recently ended up in a wikipedia rathole looking at various alternative calendar systems, at least in part to be able to give a true but unintelligible answer to the question of when my birthday is. Among the oddballs were the Discordian calendar which divides the year into five seasons of 73 days each with 5-day weeks and the Pataphysical calendar which has 13 months each of 29 days, but for most months, the 29th day is imaginary.

digging 3y ago

Pretty unpleasant to have an extra week once in a while, IMO. Seems this calendar would lead to confusing seasonal drift in more stable (pre-industrial) climate, but I guess there's no seasonal predictability going forward . As a fun thought experiment, I once devised my own Equal Terrestrial Calendar, intended to be both predictable and actually secular. - Weeks are 5 days long. - Months are 6 weeks long (exactly). - Thus, a month is 30 days, and as close as possible to an average lunar month. - Every week/month/year begins on the same day of the week - Work weeks are 3 days long. - 3 intercalary holidays at the winter solstice, and 2 intercalary holidays at the summer solstice (make it 3 every leap year) - 30 days/month * 12 months + 5.25 days (intercalary) = 365.25, but in a fairly even spread Not possible for a calendar to be perfect, but I'd really enjoy living in this world.

NoMoreNicksLeft 3y ago
What if instead we were to go with non-24-hour days? We could fix even more problems with such a system, like: * Days starting at the same hour:minute all the time * The current impossibility of a decimal clock. We're constantly told how using base-10 makes math so much easier, who wouldn't want a day being 10 hours long and a week 10 days long? If the answer is 168, you've screwed up somewhere * The conceit that ancient deities like Apollo and Ra are so important that even after we've abandoned those religions, we must continue to allow our calendars revolve around their golden chariots. I say "no more!", we will spurn the astronomical bodies as well * The relegation of agriculture to the primitive past, where it belongs. I only eat Hot Pockets anyway. The chicken milkers and tomato tree people can go live in yurts or something if they believe caveman calendars are important * The ability to insert special 5-minute days into the calendar in emergencies, like when I have a new game on pre-order that is scheduled to come out in 60 days' time. We could easily reduce that to an effective 3 hours or so
- digging 3y ago
  Sounds fun. But the day is evenly divided already, so there's less pressure to change it.
Jedd 3y ago

adamtheclayman 3y ago

Like other simplifying calendar proposals, Pax Calendar is faced with an almost impossible technical integration challenge if human beings have to achieve the transition, recoding all existing systems to conform to the new calendar requirements rather than the Julian/Gregorian calendar support we've built up over hundreds of years. But now, with AI emerging, it might be possible to foresee a day, a half-century from now, when the transition to Pax or Synchrony or another such calendar is much less laborious and far more feasible, with a transition and switching cost that is actually palatable, given that AI and advanced robotics may largely be able to reprogram itself, and other systems AI can be given access to, rather than consuming a bajillion hours of human engineering and maintenance time. Maybe in 75 or 100 years a transition will become more crystal clear as an achievement we can complete with the help of ubiquitous, universal, super-efficient, sudo-trusted ML. But anyone hoping for a transition in the next 25 or 30 years is probably suffering from delusion.

smitty1110 3y ago

Or we could go with a real classic from Ye Olde Days: The Babylonian calendar[1]. A visual explanation is here [2]. I rather like that they use the physical properties of a pendulum to link length and time. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar 2: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Sumerian_Calendar_ISO_B0.svg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Sumerian...

nayuki 3y ago

I don't think this reformed calendar goes far enough. Many of our services are billed monthly - Internet, phone, electricity, property tax, etc. I don't know if the pax week would be considered its own super-short month or fused into another month, but it massively complicates financial calculations and issues of fairness. Other people have pointed out issues like with 13 months, you can't divide the year into quarters.

082349872349872 3y ago

cf https://qntm.org/calendar https://qntm.org/calendar

chinaman425 3y ago

[dead]

aranchelk 3y ago

I don’t like leap weeks. I’d much rather have 1-2 leap days. Let them exist outside the months: year starts with 0 and every 4th year 00 then 0. For anyone thinking that will be a pain to code, side benefit, it’ll hasten the adoption of sum types.

helmsb 3y ago

I’ve always been fascinated by alternative calendars (also alternative timekeeping). However, barring an apocalyptic event, I don’t for see any alternative calendars taking off. For most of human history, we didn’t need a standardized calendar, you just needed to agree with people that you interacted with. Religion pushed most of the standardization and later reinforced during the Industrial Revolution—helped along by colonialism. Now that we are a globalized society, it would require parties from every nation and every industry to agree to the change and coordinate a simultaneous migration. Given we can’t get close to that level of cooperation when faced with potentially existential crises, it’s doubtful we could do it because it’s a “better” system than the current one. I’d love to be proven wrong though!

NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
Just imagine the state of the world in 1582, and the amount of cooperation, agreement, and coordination that it took to implement the Gregorian Calendar, which was an incremental iteration of the Julian one. Take the chaos and confusion created by that (and rippling into present times) and multiply it by ten or so, and then you may perhaps approach what it'd be like to change calendars today.

cryptonector 3y ago

Why not have the 13th month be a 29 day month and every four years have a leap day?

FrontierPsych 3y ago

[flagged]