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I think the best backwards-compatible calendar that we should adopt is the ISO week date calendar, commonly used in finance: forget months, every day is a week
by e63f67dd-065b 3y ago
I think the best backwards-compatible calendar that we should adopt is the ISO week date calendar, commonly used in finance: forget months, every day is a week number + a day. So today is 44.7, which means week 44, day 7. This also gets you a nice almost even 13 weeks/quarter, and easy calculations (that report is due w48.5, aka Friday in 4 weeks). We used a worse version of this calendar in Intel and it was great (we callled them work weeks instead and iirc it was not iso8601 aligned).
This way, people can play with legacy dates for their birthdays, religious observances, etc but use a sane system at all other times. This already happens with Chinese/Islamic calendars anyways, Chinese new year is a date I have to look up every year, and that’s OK because the calendar is used for literally nothing else outside traditional festivals. Optimise for the common case, after all. Christmas is w52.1 this year, w52.3 the next, etc, just as CNY is 22-jan and 10-feb this and next year (but 1/1 on the Chinese calendar).
The only trouble is that some years have 52 weeks and some 53, but such is the price to pay for backwards compatibility.
- rottencupcakes 3y agoJust change to 73 5-day weeks and we’re golden.
- e63f67dd-065b 3y agoNot sure if you’re serious, but the 7-day week as so entrenched that no system that breaks it will see any adoption. Maintaining the 7-day week and the 365 day year is non negotiable for any kind of calendar reform.
- andersa 3y agoWhile we obviously can't change the length of the year in days, is there any actual reason to have a 7 day week beyond "that's what we've always done"?
- hanche 3y agoThat’s really a strong reason, is it not? I have no idea for how long humanity has tracked the seven day week, but suspect it’s been well over 2000 years. That’s a lot of tradition to discard.
- adzm 3y agoGoes all the way back to the Babylonians, 4000 years ago, at least
- marcthe12 3y agoAlot of religions kinda use the week for weekly prayer (all Abrahamic religions) so you kinda stuck with it since you need to take that into account
- mongol 3y agoYeah, momentum. I can't think of what authority would be able to change it and make it be globally followed. A tradition of thousand years, with roots in religious texts. I don't think it is within anyone's power to change it.
- njarboe 3y ago7 days for the moon to go in half a cycle. Full to half. New moon to half moon. A pretty good demarkation of a period of time between one day and a month (full lunar cycle).
- clort 3y agoThe moon cycle is approx 28 days, which is 7x4. The height of tides are rooted in this but have 7 day periods of increasing, decreasing, increasing, decreasing. I don't know if thats reason enough to continue with it, but possibly part of the history
- stvltvs 3y agoThis is a pretty common approximation, but the average lunation is closer to 29.5 days.
- fragmede 3y agoBut those 365 days don't have to all fit into weeks. Take 364 days, divide those evenly into 7-day weeks, and then have the one (two if leap) new days be not part of the weeks. Call it Caturday or something. Hold a contest.
- spc476 3y agoThe fine article talks about that---there was Jewish resistance to the idea because they felt that the Sabbath was always the 7th day and that would get out of sync.
- RupertEisenhart 3y agoI always figured the funnest thing would just be not to give it a name, and then when people ask be like, well yesterday was Sunday and tomorrow is Monday. But the more reasonable proposal I heard was just to call it New Years Day/Weekend, depending?
- nemo8551 3y agoDay’ymcdayface. That’s how that will go down. Referring to “boaty mcboatface”
- kvdveer 3y agoOr 365.25 one-day months.
- e63f67dd-065b 3y agoJust plain day number as the calendar is worse than weeks imo. We want to optimise for the common case, and wanting to know the day of week and number of weeks from today is much more common than day of year. For example, “our next meeting is w48.3” is much more understandable than “day 339”.
- alphablended 3y agoIt's indeed harder to compute the time difference, but maybe it's also an indication that mental calculation should be practiced more.
- Brian_K_White 3y agoI don't see how. You are making assumptions and claims for others with no support. To me that week.day number looks more complicated and less meaningful than plain days. Perhaps weeks seems to make sense since we sometimes use them for offsets and ranges, like "this project will take 6 weeks" and figuring out how many days that is is inconvenient. But if we were using days then we simply wouldn't use groups of 30 or 7 for things like that, we would use groups and multiples of 10 or 5. We'd probably end up using kilodays and millidays too instead of years or minutes, and years would be arbitrary, but 51.9something weeks is already arbitrary anyways. And as that # of weeks example just showed, .day is ambiguous with decimal fractions of a unit. All in all I see no special obvious rightness here. It's kinda crap actually.
- asdfasvea 3y agoMr. I-Can't-Recognize-A-Joke here to explain in painful detail why your proposal won't work...
- fsckboy 3y ago>Or 365.25 one-day months. or 365.2425 one day months and no squabbles every 400 years. (we will however be squabbling the entire rest of the time)
- zuppy 3y agoso… are we going to talk about which day is day 1? because even here we can’t agree. this also translates to not having the same week number in certain years.
- swagempire 3y agoI have no idea how this is better than just adding one month (say ("Festover") so we just continue as normal. Aside from Halloween and NYE it will be very easy for people to get used to a 28 day month.
- exclipy 3y agoBecause there's no confusion about whether you're talking about the new February or the old February. Is Feb 1 the 32nd day of the year or the 29th day?
- q7xvh97o2pDhNrh 3y agoThis sounds nice — but is it really necessary to treat our good friend, the decimal point, so badly? Calling today 44.7 means that we're effectively using base 7 after the decimal point (but it's 1 through 7 instead of the usual 0 through 6, for extra fun), while using base 10 before it. Why not just something nice and easy-to-parse without all the mathematical confusion, like "44d7"?
- fsckboy 3y ago> Why not just something nice and easy-to-parse without all the mathematical confusion, like "44d7"? how about 5Nov44d7, much easier to parse. go with 5Nov43d6 and I'm on board even quicker because I prefer 0 indexing.
- KineticLensman 3y agoWhich century is that?
- mongol 3y agoIf you prefer zeo indexing, you would want 4Nov43d6
- fsckboy 3y agoi also have a competing preference to maintain communication with other people
- em500 3y agoAs sibling mentioned, ISO already defines a standard notation (2023-W44-7), precisely so that different people don't have to go invent their own. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date
- kmarc 3y agoFun fact: it's a dot, not a "decimal point". That dot has many interpretations; in dates, sometimes it separates the month from year, or the day from a month. In version numbers, it separates major from minor, etc. It's so much not a "decimal point", that in some languages (Hungarian and German, for instance) it is a thousands separator, whereas for decimal fractions a comma is used (10,000.00 in English is 10.000,00 in Hungarian, making Excel flip) It is really just a dot. Our interpretation is what makes it a certain kind of separator. Or not a separator at all, like at the end of this sentence.
- retube 3y ago> commonly used in finance Having worked in banking and hedge funds for many years for US, UK and European firms i have never once encountered this ISO calendar. I also part trained as an auditor when i started out, similarly never saw this. In fact this is the first time I've ever heard of it.
- potatopatch 3y agoThe day is pretty irrelevant in finance as it is too granular, but the problem of converting from US week numbers comes up.
- mtreis86 3y agoIts also used in manufacturing, tire date codes for instance are week.year or year.week
- contravariant 3y agoAs far as I have seen finance prefers months and quarters, not being able to tell which year a month is in is a non-starter. They do sometimes pretend each month is 30 days though.
- Svip 3y agoWhy even have years? Like Unix epoch, pick a start date, and just have the number of weeks increment indefinitely. If you really wish to do some separation, just say "last 50 weeks" or something.
- Aardwolf 3y agoIf making such a change, why not make it even simpler: use year + day number in year. e.g. today is 2023 day 309 (or day 308 if more sensible 0-based indexing would be used) And keep the named 7-day week cycle as-is independently of that, this one has been going for millenia and we need some weekends after all
- stvltvs 3y agoThe 7-day cycle is so important to our lives that it's better to have a date notation for human consumption that includes it.
- LandStander 3y agoI know not to hope for it to ever catch on, but my dream date-time format would be: year/day/hectosecond.second(.millisecond and so on to the desired precision) The current date-time, to the second, would be 2023/308/342.65 The days, like the years and second-based units, are 0-indexed. There are 100 seconds in a hectosecond, and normally 864 hectoseconds in a day. And to go with it, I'd advocate either a "3-on, 2-off", or "6-on, 4-off" work cycle, depending on the nature of the work, or even just personal preference. This way, today(308) would obviously be on a "weekend" either way.
- CobaltFire 3y ago
- throwaway2990 3y agoIt is not commonly used in finance.
- Someone 3y ago> I think the best backwards-compatible calendar that we should adopt is the ISO week date calendar The one where there are years without a new year’s day, and years with two? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Week_dates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Week_dates “As a consequence, if 1 January is on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it is in week 01. If 1 January is on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, it is in week 52 or 53 of the previous year (there is no week 00). 28 December is always in the last week of its year.”
- anon84873628 3y agoWell that calendar has a new year's day, it's 01.1. The problem is mapping it to your legacy calendar holiday, which like everything else is going to vary somewhat year by year.
- notatoad 3y agono, the one where there are years without a january 1, and years with two january 1. there's nothing that says january 1 has to be new years, and in some cultures it already isn't. there's also nothing that says you can't continue celebrating january 1 as the new year, while using a week-day calendar for all official purposes. a new calendar not mapping cleanly to the current months hardly seems like a valid criticism of a calendar that intentionally doesn't map to the current months.
- Grimblewald 3y agoi typically use day of year only, its super helpful, especially when calculating time between dates, or time until date. Also i use metric time which makes life even easier for to the second calcs. For many people, myself included, regular breaks through things like weekends do not truly exist so there is no point tracking them in the main date format. You might need it on occasion but it is information so rarely useful that recording it every time i write or use a date is wasted energy, especially when you consider how frequently you need to handle long range dates which DOY does more direct than day of week / week of year.