7 ms·

If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days, but we could make it a special case (the

by forinti 13y ago

If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days, but we could make it a special case (the first day of the year, for instance) not belonging to any month or week. Then all months would be alike, every 1st, 8th, 15th, etc, would be a Sunday, and so on. We would never need a calendar again.

rlt3 13y ago
I don't really know why, but I like the imperfectness of our calendar system now. Stupid stuff like February having only 29 days is pretty funny and those 7 days of December 25th to January 1st is perfect because its an exact week. It would be too boring if every month was the same. Could we have fun stuff like `April Showers Bring may Flowers' if every month was just the same 28 days? I'm sure we could, but everything would be the same and that's boring.
- k-mcgrady 13y ago
  February has 28 days - 29 in a leap year.
  - Roedou 13y ago
    Thirty days has September, April, June, and November; All the rest have thirty-one except February alone which has twenty-eight; Except on every fourth year, when it has 29; Except on years divisible by 100, when it has 28 again; Unless the year is also divisible by 1000, when it's back to 29.
    - jeroen 13y ago
      Almost, but the last one should be: Unless the year is also divisible by 400, when it's back to 29.
    - andrewl 13y ago
      I grew up with this: Thirty days has September, April, June, and November, All the rest have thirty-one except February, Which has four and twenty-four, 'til leap year gives it one day more.
      - nimrod_135 13y ago
        Use your knuckles, with both hands next to each other, from left to right Jan - Dec. Each 'hump' has 31 days.
        philbarr 13y ago
        Yes, this is the way I remember. My wife quotes the rhyme and I annoy her by pointing out the following issues: 1 - 3 lines of the rhyme at the end are utterly pointless as it's much easier to just remember that leap years are actually a thing. 2 - The fact that it rhymes doesn't help you remember which months you're talking about. It could quite easily be, "30 days hath September; October, November, December" and it would still rhyme but be wrong.
        JoelAnair 13y ago
        My grandfather used to say "Thirty days has November, all the rest I can't remember."
        gpmcadam 13y ago
        > 1 - 3 lines of the rhyme at the end are utterly pointless as it's much easier to just remember that leap years are actually a thing. I was taught: Thirty Days has September, April, June and November. All the rest have Thirty One; Except February, it's a different one!
        jimgardener 13y ago
        or use just the left hand and tap twice on knuckle of forefinger for july and August :)
- pothibo 13y ago
  From a developer standpoint, I loathe our calendar/time system. The world has wasted shit load of time & money trying to fix stupid bugs with our time systems, I would welcome a more linear system.
  - fsck--off 13y ago
    You might enjoy Naggum's A Long, Painful History of Time: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
    - Groxx 13y ago
      "enjoy" or "remind you of those gaping wounds that never really healed and you may have forgotten about them but NO!"?
  - mosburger 13y ago
    Meh, a lot of that is buried away in libraries and stuff and I never worry about it. Time zones on the other hand...
- dustincoates 13y ago
  It's not a popular opinion at all, but that's how I feel about the Imperial units of measurement. I get the benefits of metric, but Imperial just feels more... poetic? It could also be just familiarity with what I grew up with, I suppose.
  - batiudrami 13y ago
    It works better as a spoken language (and therefore fairly well for estimated distances), but man, does it make any kind of calculation annoying (many engineering textbooks are from the US and use imperial units - you end up with stupidity like BTU/ft^2.s. The thing I think many people from the US don't understand about a transition is that it doesn't mean you're somehow not allowed to use imperial units anymore - in Australia it's still used regularly in spoken language (especially with regard to distances) - but anything where the number matters, the value is given in metric, so calculations can be performed simply.
- TeMPOraL 13y ago
  > I don't really know why, but I like the imperfectness of our calendar system now. Both in your case with calendar and in case of dustincoates and the Imperial units, I think you like the way things are because you got used to it.
dragonwriter 13y ago
> If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days And sometimes another extra day in order to complete 366 days.
- freehunter 13y ago
  I wonder what would be more difficult: convincing the world to switch their calendar, or convincing the Earth to speed up slightly then maintain a steady speed forever. I'll bet we could get the Earth to give us 365 days much more easily than getting its population to give us 13 months.
  - JoshTriplett 13y ago
    http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/ examines that exact question.
    - freehunter 13y ago
      That still seems easier than convincing the world to use a new calendar (we still can't convince the world to use the same calendar everywhere).
- abecedarius 13y ago
  While we're at it, change the leap-year scheme: every 4th year except every 128th year. It's both simpler and much more accurate than the Gregorian calendar, with bonus binary-number geekiness.
untog 13y ago
Is the existing system really that broken, though? It's a pain, but it works. People know it. The pain of moving to a new calendar system would be considerably bigger than the pain of dealing with the current system.
- forinti 13y ago
  It's a shame nobody had the idea in 1582. Since they were tweaking the Julian calendar, they could have been a bit bolder.
- freehunter 13y ago
  Every Intro to CS class could take a week out of their syllabus as suddenly the assignment "create a calendar application that takes input as dd/mm/yyyy and prints the day of the week" disappears from textbook. Although it would be quickly replaced with "create a calendar app to translate between Gregorian and Modern calendars."
  - saidajigumi 13y ago
    Which would be a terrible idea. Delivering actual software is all about understanding the real-world problem domain, with all of the complexities inherent to it. Doing a "nerd normalization" of the calendar instead of teaching students how to model and deal with the existing one is pretty much exactly the wrong pedagogical approach.
    - icebraining 13y ago
      The point would be that the "existing one" itself would change. Many countries adopted the current calendar less than a hundred years ago.
- dalore 13y ago
  Would it really be a big pain? It's not like you have memorized the calendar. You always look it up, you will just be looking it up in a new system (or not needing to look it up as it's a logical system).
finnh 13y ago
And people's birthdays wouldn't rotate around the days of the week, which would be lame for 5/7 of the population. Edit: back to Forebruary, I think it's quite nice looking. and the timeline at the bottom is awesome. Reminiscent of the timeline in "Rock Me Amadeus". one of these things is not like the others...
- YokoZar 13y ago
  I suggest you do what I did and redefine your birthday the way they do Federal Holidays. It's not "September 22nd" for me anymore, it's "The 4th Saturday in September".
  - justinpombrio 13y ago
    Under the proposed system, "The 4th Saturday in September" would also be known as "September 28". I suppose you mean to suggest simply celebrating your birthday on a nearby weekend.
  - ygra 13y ago
    How well does that work with authorities and other entities that demand your birthdate? I mean, here they don't like it already when I give them a date in YYYY-MM-DD; I can't imagine what they'd do if one used FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=SA;BYMONTH=9;BYSETPOS=4 ...
    - YokoZar 13y ago
      Authorities generally aren't invited to my birthday parties.
stevejohnson 13y ago
If you read the Lord of the Rings appendices, you will find that Shirefolk do something similar: they divide the year into 12 months of 30 days each, with a four-day midsummer holiday called Lithe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_calendar#Hobbit_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_calendar#Hobbit_C... If we were to adopt a similar scheme outside of Middle Earth, I'd be in favor of borrowing the name.
- blatherard 13y ago
  Which is itself quite similar to the French Republican Calendar adopted after the revolution, and which was used for about 13 years. This divided the year into 12 months, each composed of 3 weeks of 10 days each. At the end of the year there were 5 'extra' days (or 6 in the case of leap years). http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-french.html http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-french.html
  - anonymous 13y ago
    A 10-day week would be really uncomfortable. It would mean 8 days work and 2 days rest, rather than the current 5-2 split, which seems to be the most comfortable.
    - ygra 13y ago
      It could also mean 7/3 which is a better fit to the other ratio.
- sneak 13y ago
  I'll celebrate with you on Friday the first when this is actually implemented.
maxerickson 13y ago
Or just use 3 digits for the day.
- bobwaycott 13y ago
  I've long wished we simply numbered days from the first of the year onward, and didn't bother with months. Today is 213.2013.
  - sbierwagen 13y ago
    If you're going to make that big of a change, why not go all the way and use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
    - bobwaycott 13y ago
      Well, switching to metric is a far bigger change than people continuing to count the days consecutively through the year.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    2013.213 would sort better (in existing systems).
    - bobwaycott 13y ago
      Naturally.
    - ygra 13y ago
      Actually in ISO-8601 it's 2013-213. There is a standard for dates and stuff we can readily use ;-)
      - officemonkey 13y ago
        At work, I prefer 2013-08-02, because humans can read and understand it, and it sorts correctly.
stevewilhelm 13y ago
The National Retail Federation has a different monthly layout that helps solve the year over year retail sales comparison problem. http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=Pages&sp_id=392 http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=Pages&sp_id=392
sthommes 13y ago
+1 - I've always thought the Gregorian calendar was arcane and awkward, a weird artifact. Is there like an ICANN for the calendar?
frogpelt 13y ago
Let's make Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec the 7/8/9/10th months again. Jan and Feb can be 11 and 12. Make March the 1st month. I would rather start every new year near spring time anyway.

by forinti 13y ago

rlt3 13y ago

I don't really know why, but I like the imperfectness of our calendar system now. Stupid stuff like February having only 29 days is pretty funny and those 7 days of December 25th to January 1st is perfect because its an exact week. It would be too boring if every month was the same. Could we have fun stuff like `April Showers Bring may Flowers' if every month was just the same 28 days? I'm sure we could, but everything would be the same and that's boring.

k-mcgrady 13y ago
February has 28 days - 29 in a leap year.
- Roedou 13y ago
  Thirty days has September, April, June, and November; All the rest have thirty-one except February alone which has twenty-eight; Except on every fourth year, when it has 29; Except on years divisible by 100, when it has 28 again; Unless the year is also divisible by 1000, when it's back to 29.
  - jeroen 13y ago
    Almost, but the last one should be: Unless the year is also divisible by 400, when it's back to 29.
  - andrewl 13y ago
    I grew up with this: Thirty days has September, April, June, and November, All the rest have thirty-one except February, Which has four and twenty-four, 'til leap year gives it one day more.
    - nimrod_135 13y ago
      Use your knuckles, with both hands next to each other, from left to right Jan - Dec. Each 'hump' has 31 days.
      - philbarr 13y ago
        Yes, this is the way I remember. My wife quotes the rhyme and I annoy her by pointing out the following issues: 1 - 3 lines of the rhyme at the end are utterly pointless as it's much easier to just remember that leap years are actually a thing. 2 - The fact that it rhymes doesn't help you remember which months you're talking about. It could quite easily be, "30 days hath September; October, November, December" and it would still rhyme but be wrong.
        JoelAnair 13y ago
        My grandfather used to say "Thirty days has November, all the rest I can't remember."
        gpmcadam 13y ago
        > 1 - 3 lines of the rhyme at the end are utterly pointless as it's much easier to just remember that leap years are actually a thing. I was taught: Thirty Days has September, April, June and November. All the rest have Thirty One; Except February, it's a different one!
      - jimgardener 13y ago
        or use just the left hand and tap twice on knuckle of forefinger for july and August :)
pothibo 13y ago
From a developer standpoint, I loathe our calendar/time system. The world has wasted shit load of time & money trying to fix stupid bugs with our time systems, I would welcome a more linear system.
- fsck--off 13y ago
  You might enjoy Naggum's A Long, Painful History of Time: http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html
  - Groxx 13y ago
    "enjoy" or "remind you of those gaping wounds that never really healed and you may have forgotten about them but NO!"?
- mosburger 13y ago
  Meh, a lot of that is buried away in libraries and stuff and I never worry about it. Time zones on the other hand...
dustincoates 13y ago
It's not a popular opinion at all, but that's how I feel about the Imperial units of measurement. I get the benefits of metric, but Imperial just feels more... poetic? It could also be just familiarity with what I grew up with, I suppose.
- batiudrami 13y ago
  It works better as a spoken language (and therefore fairly well for estimated distances), but man, does it make any kind of calculation annoying (many engineering textbooks are from the US and use imperial units - you end up with stupidity like BTU/ft^2.s. The thing I think many people from the US don't understand about a transition is that it doesn't mean you're somehow not allowed to use imperial units anymore - in Australia it's still used regularly in spoken language (especially with regard to distances) - but anything where the number matters, the value is given in metric, so calculations can be performed simply.
TeMPOraL 13y ago
> I don't really know why, but I like the imperfectness of our calendar system now. Both in your case with calendar and in case of dustincoates and the Imperial units, I think you like the way things are because you got used to it.

dragonwriter 13y ago

> If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days And sometimes another extra day in order to complete 366 days.

freehunter 13y ago
I wonder what would be more difficult: convincing the world to switch their calendar, or convincing the Earth to speed up slightly then maintain a steady speed forever. I'll bet we could get the Earth to give us 365 days much more easily than getting its population to give us 13 months.
- JoshTriplett 13y ago
  http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/ http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/ examines that exact question.
  - freehunter 13y ago
    That still seems easier than convincing the world to use a new calendar (we still can't convince the world to use the same calendar everywhere).
abecedarius 13y ago
While we're at it, change the leap-year scheme: every 4th year except every 128th year. It's both simpler and much more accurate than the Gregorian calendar, with bonus binary-number geekiness.

untog 13y ago

Is the existing system really that broken, though? It's a pain, but it works. People know it. The pain of moving to a new calendar system would be considerably bigger than the pain of dealing with the current system.

forinti 13y ago
It's a shame nobody had the idea in 1582. Since they were tweaking the Julian calendar, they could have been a bit bolder.
freehunter 13y ago
Every Intro to CS class could take a week out of their syllabus as suddenly the assignment "create a calendar application that takes input as dd/mm/yyyy and prints the day of the week" disappears from textbook. Although it would be quickly replaced with "create a calendar app to translate between Gregorian and Modern calendars."
- saidajigumi 13y ago
  Which would be a terrible idea. Delivering actual software is all about understanding the real-world problem domain, with all of the complexities inherent to it. Doing a "nerd normalization" of the calendar instead of teaching students how to model and deal with the existing one is pretty much exactly the wrong pedagogical approach.
  - icebraining 13y ago
    The point would be that the "existing one" itself would change. Many countries adopted the current calendar less than a hundred years ago.
dalore 13y ago
Would it really be a big pain? It's not like you have memorized the calendar. You always look it up, you will just be looking it up in a new system (or not needing to look it up as it's a logical system).

finnh 13y ago

And people's birthdays wouldn't rotate around the days of the week, which would be lame for 5/7 of the population. Edit: back to Forebruary, I think it's quite nice looking. and the timeline at the bottom is awesome. Reminiscent of the timeline in "Rock Me Amadeus". one of these things is not like the others...

YokoZar 13y ago
I suggest you do what I did and redefine your birthday the way they do Federal Holidays. It's not "September 22nd" for me anymore, it's "The 4th Saturday in September".
- justinpombrio 13y ago
  Under the proposed system, "The 4th Saturday in September" would also be known as "September 28". I suppose you mean to suggest simply celebrating your birthday on a nearby weekend.
- ygra 13y ago
  How well does that work with authorities and other entities that demand your birthdate? I mean, here they don't like it already when I give them a date in YYYY-MM-DD; I can't imagine what they'd do if one used FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=SA;BYMONTH=9;BYSETPOS=4 ...
  - YokoZar 13y ago
    Authorities generally aren't invited to my birthday parties.

stevejohnson 13y ago

If you read the Lord of the Rings appendices, you will find that Shirefolk do something similar: they divide the year into 12 months of 30 days each, with a four-day midsummer holiday called Lithe. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_calendar#Hobbit_Calendar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_calendar#Hobbit_C... If we were to adopt a similar scheme outside of Middle Earth, I'd be in favor of borrowing the name.

blatherard 13y ago
Which is itself quite similar to the French Republican Calendar adopted after the revolution, and which was used for about 13 years. This divided the year into 12 months, each composed of 3 weeks of 10 days each. At the end of the year there were 5 'extra' days (or 6 in the case of leap years). http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-french.html http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-french.html
- anonymous 13y ago
  A 10-day week would be really uncomfortable. It would mean 8 days work and 2 days rest, rather than the current 5-2 split, which seems to be the most comfortable.
  - ygra 13y ago
    It could also mean 7/3 which is a better fit to the other ratio.
sneak 13y ago
I'll celebrate with you on Friday the first when this is actually implemented.

maxerickson 13y ago

Or just use 3 digits for the day.

bobwaycott 13y ago
I've long wished we simply numbered days from the first of the year onward, and didn't bother with months. Today is 213.2013.
- sbierwagen 13y ago
  If you're going to make that big of a change, why not go all the way and use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time
  - bobwaycott 13y ago
    Well, switching to metric is a far bigger change than people continuing to count the days consecutively through the year.
- maxerickson 13y ago
  2013.213 would sort better (in existing systems).
  - bobwaycott 13y ago
    Naturally.
  - ygra 13y ago
    Actually in ISO-8601 it's 2013-213. There is a standard for dates and stuff we can readily use ;-)
    - officemonkey 13y ago
      At work, I prefer 2013-08-02, because humans can read and understand it, and it sorts correctly.

stevewilhelm 13y ago

The National Retail Federation has a different monthly layout that helps solve the year over year retail sales comparison problem. http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=Pages&sp_id=392 http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=Pages&sp_id=392

sthommes 13y ago

+1 - I've always thought the Gregorian calendar was arcane and awkward, a weird artifact. Is there like an ICANN for the calendar?

frogpelt 13y ago

Let's make Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec the 7/8/9/10th months again. Jan and Feb can be 11 and 12. Make March the 1st month. I would rather start every new year near spring time anyway.