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Deciyear Calendar
- dave4420 3y agoThis is a proposal to change the clock, change the calendar, and abolish timezones in one fell swoop. This would be harder to introduce than introducing each of these three things separately. But I think it is satire.
- B1FF_PSUVM 3y agoYou should see a real hoot, decimal time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
- Titan2189 3y agoObligatory link to XKCD's "Standards" https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/
- cbarrick 3y agoObligatory xkcd 320 "28-hour day" https://xkcd.com/320/ https://xkcd.com/320/ And xkcd 1061 "EST" https://xkcd.com/1061/ https://xkcd.com/1061/
- Skeime 3y agoMy favorite part is that they designed a new calendar system where the months are named starting at one (Primilis, Secundilis, etc.) but numbered starting at 0. So Primilis is month 0, Secundilis is month 1, and Decilis is month 9. This somehow feels even worse than our current system where there’s a shift of 2 in the other direction for September to December. They also claim that this is useful when dealing with quarters despite their number of month not being divisible by 4. (Admittedly, it works on the level of weeks.)
- demondemidi 3y agoWhy even name the months?
- vorticalbox 3y agoFor conversation, "last October" is easier than "last month 10"
- demondemidi 3y agoNo it isn’t. If they were named Blorple and Frotz it would be harder than 10. Only because you’ve had your lifetime to learn the order of the Gregorian months is it in any way easier.
- captn3m0 3y agoDay:Month::Number:Word makes for an easier pattern recognition. It’s the same DD/MM ambiguity problem, but using DD/OCT solves it quite well in conversation and otherwise.
- demondemidi 3y agoOnly because you’ve been trained your life to know the order. Plus the words don’t even sort.
- Juliate 3y agoThey don't sort... in your language, or how you call them. So what?
- demondemidi 3y agoHaving dates (month names) that sort is great if you are a programmer. Otherwise, so what indeed.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- danaugrs 3y agoSix weeks of six days (4 work days and 2 rest days) in a month would be better than four weeks of nine days (6 work days and 3 rest days) in my opinion.
- demondemidi 3y agoI like the variety and history reminders of the Gregorian. Why do we have to make a homogenous suburb out of everything?
- thsksbd 3y agoEfficiency. Its always efficiency.
- demondemidi 3y agoI know, right? I'd rather eat a good meal than take a pill or drink soylent.
- veganjay 3y agoSeems like a combination of the Kodak Calendar (1) and Swatch Internet Time (2): 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
- jacknews 3y ago6-day work week? Through sheer fatigue, you'll get nothing done on the 5th day (just like now), and certainly not the 6th.
- kevincox 3y agoMaybe it would be better to do something like 3 on 1 off 3 on 2 off.
- thsksbd 3y agoAll the problems listed aren't real world problems. No one has a problem understanding the calendar and there are no engineering problems with it either unlike the inch. For the few folks in astronomy we have computers. Why would there be a problem? Half the world's population prays according to a base 7 week. Nor is this proposal new. Its been tried (at least) twice before failed spectacularly embittering people. Based 10 (french) or 5 (soviet) weeks were introduced at the blood thirsty peak of thise anti-religious regime with the explicit goal of also erasing worship to the God of Abraham.
- jowea 3y agoAbout understanding, we're used to it but you can't trivially know whether 02/05/2026 is a Monday. Even remembering whether July has 30 or 31 days can be a chore. Irregular months also can have some small annoying effects since "in a month" is not always the same amount of days. There's even the 360 day calendar for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-day_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-day_calendar Just one more in the long history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform#Proposals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform#Proposals
- thsksbd 3y agoActually there are trivially easy ways to calculate DOW off the top of your head. No one bothers because it was never a real problem. People used to carry their calendar books on them to keep track of their engagements. Now we carry a smartphone. Nevertheless, my colleague bothered to do it and he could tell you the DOW without pausing. He is of average intelligence maybe a little more intelligent than I (though I was better at mental math)
- CyberDildonics 3y agoActually there are trivially easy ways to calculate DOW off the top of your head. Then what are they?
- robobro 3y agoYear 2, month 5, day 2026?
- franciscop 3y agoNot a single mention of the topic/reason calendars were invented in the first place: keeping track of the 4 seasons (for agriculture purposes). Though since each month has 4 weeks, I can see a season being 2.5 months making sense. At least much more than the 13-month year.
- bradley13 3y agoProposals like thus are so unrealistic that it's difficult to take then seriously. This one has lots of problems, but perhaps the worst (and yet, easiest to fix) are the millidays. People do not naturally think in thousands. Put a separator in there. More fundamentally, the "second" is embedded everywhere in culture, science and engineering. Trying to replace the second with microdays is...let's be polite...suboptimal.
- tolmasky 3y agoThis is worse than my 365 month calendar since it still has that ugly 5-day “year end”. In my calendar, every month is exactly one day long, no exceptions. Leap years simply add an extra month.
- kevincox 3y agoI think the 5 day "year end" is actually fine. So many people take lots of holidays around the end of the year so that period is kinda messed up anyways. It seems that it would be nice to just give everyone 5 days off and sort of unify it. Since unfortunately 365 isn't a round number it seems like the best compromise. The other top approach would be counting days.
- WaitWaitWha 3y agoDidn't the French try this during the revolutions (1792?) like Vendémiaire, Brumaire, Frimaire, etc. Found it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
- mugwumprk 3y agoWrong approach. We should change our numbering system to base-12 instead.
- function_seven 3y agoYou’re a Dozenalist. There are dozens of us! What makes it especially appealing to me is that we don’t need to invent new names for the digits A and B (though I’d like to come up with better glyphs than reusing those letters). Ten and Eleven work just fine, and can be used for larger numbers like “forty-ten” (₁₀58) and “eleventy-four” (₁₀136) Another bonus is that when we transition to this superior numbering system, I can sneer at the metric world, what with their archaic finger-based measuring system. The Foot will return to a place of honor.
- thsksbd 3y agoA more sensible proposal than changing the calendar. But consider base 12 has few advantages over base 6 but base6 greatly simplifies math since you only need to remember 24 entries for the commutative pair tables (multiplication)
- kibwen 3y agoWhen it comes to the number of months in the year, 10 is an entirely arbitrary number because, unlike the metric system, there's no opportunity to leverage the convenient zero-shifting property of a base-10 numeral system (the concept of "kilomonths" and "megamonths" is incoherent as a unit of measure given that the number of days in a year is not divisible by 10). Might as well just smooth out the current 12 months (12 being a more highly composite number than 10) to 30 days each and then save the leftover days for a worldwide party outside of time.
- waveBidder 3y agoyou're right of course, but man I wish we had megamonths, the name is great. you're describing the French Republican calendar btw. I blame Christianity for the travesty of stopping it's adoption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar?wpr...
- thsksbd 3y agoYa, those pesky Christians. If only Robespierre wasn't so reluctant to use the guillotine. Too few Vendees I tell you!
- zokier 3y agoI don't completely agree; when using a year as base unit, it makes somewhat sense both directions. Deka- and hectoyears are equal to common decades and centuries, and megayears would be relevant for geology and astronomy etc. In other direction deci- and centiyears could be sensible, equaling a decimal "month" and "week" respectively. Playing devils advocate here, the problem with this proposal is that it didn't go far enough with its decimalization. A "better" (more decimal) approach would be to divide year to 100 "weeks" (10 "months" with 10 "weeks" each), and have each "week" vary in number of days. This would open up to fun ways to notate it, for example now (2023-12-17T21:03:31Z) could be "2023.95/2.87744Z", i.e. "week" 95 (or month 9 week 5) of 2023, day 2 of the "week", and 877.44 millidays ("minutes") since midnight. It's only slight abuse of decimal notation :)
- nvahalik 3y agoWhat benefit does this have besides just being a thought experiment? Nobody would adopt this, so why bother?
- sj4nz 3y agoCalendars are a prime example of Metcalf's Law. (The influence of a network is the square of the number of elements participating.) https://hankehenryontime.com https://hankehenryontime.com is another alternative calendar, but doesn't attempt to also "decimalize" time units shorter than the day.
- lordfrito 3y agoEarth has 4 corner simultaneous 4-day Time Cube within single rotation. I only use calendars that acknowledge the 96-hour Cubic Day. https://timecube.2enp.com/ https://timecube.2enp.com/
- SuperHeavy256 3y agoLMFAO thanks that was hilarious
- mcny 3y agoMy mind blown moment back in middle school was the example of a ballerina spinning in the back of a flat bed truck going round and round on a race track. It is obvious to anyone here I guess but to my child mind, this was a revelation. The fact is the speed at which the ballerina spins in her own dance has nothing to do with the speed at which the truck goes around the track means. Similarly, Earth's day of 24 hours and 365 days (I guess 365.25 something) a year are unrelated. Back to the topic, I think it is useless to try to square the circle of a scientific time measurement goal while trying to guarantee that a day has 24 hours while also trying to guarantee a year has integer number of days. We can try to say that we have defined a meter as something or a kilogram as something and pretend they are not arbitrary but how can any self-respecting physicist / astronomer pretend that our concept of time is anything but arbitrary?
- OisinMoran 3y agoIf we really want to, we could shift the Earth almost exactly 7000 km closer to the Sun to permanently destroy February the 29th.
- zokier 3y agoCalendar reformations are fun perennial thought experiment topic, even if at this point it seems very unlikely that we'd change away from Gregorian. That being said, this seems particularly weak proposal. If we were to accept this "yearend" thing (which I think is unpalatable), then 12 months of 5 weeks with 6 days each (i.e. 30 day months) would be massive improvement over this 10 × 4 × 9 structure. You'd get even quarters (3 months vs 2.5 months), more palatable work-week (4 days vs 6 days), and best of all the yearend could be a full 6 day week which keeps the year and week cycles in sync. You could simply drop the yearend completely roughly every 8th year to keep in sync with tropical year ((7×366 + 360)/8 = 365.25).
- kwhitefoot 3y agoWhat real problem does it solve?