8 ms·

Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

88 points by crux 12y ago

joeclark77 12y ago
> Finally it is perennial, in that the weekdays of every year are always the same. No, the epagomenal/intercalary days would change this from year to year. The weekdays would be the same from month to month within a given year, of course (assuming the extra day doesn't fall somewhere in the middle).
- yaddayadda 12y ago
  According to the great and wise Wikipidia, >This extra day added to the last month was outside of the days of the week cycle, and so the first of a month was always a Monday. On leap years, an additional festival day (also outside the week cycle), to celebrate holy women, would join the memorial day of the dead. Which to me reads that the extra day/s are not one of the 7 weekdays. Hence these days would fall between a Sunday and Monday, but would not be refereed to by any of our current weekday names. So, each year there would be the forth Sunday of Bichat, followed by the The Festival of All the Dead epagomenal day, followed by the first Monday of Moses. edited out some typos
  - moron4hire 12y ago
    You know, I just really like the idea of leap days not being called anything. It sort of reminds me of the Egyptian mythology. Something-something-something, why doesn't the year have 360 days like degrees in a circle, blah blah blah, so here's some fake days to get around Ra and have your babies by another man. It's like metaphysical hackers.
  - joeclark77 12y ago
    Oh, great. Extra Mondays. "Festival of the Dead" is a pretty good name for that idea.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
0x0 12y ago
Inserting a day between the regular weekdays once a year sounds pretty dangerous to me. I bet there are a lot of things that need to happen weekly that would quickly go out of whack if they are delayed a day.
- ecma 12y ago
  I think we would need to be more precise about our measures of lifetime for some things (recent e.g. would be MH370's black box battery life rating) but the idea of measure lifetime with days since an event is already used quite widely (I rarely heard the phrase 2 weeks since that event) and could be adjusted to without much difficulty. Financial and similar institutions would likely treat the festival day(s) as they do any long weekend at the moment. Pay cycles could be adjusted with end of year 'bonus' to cover out of cycle days. I'm sure there's something but we've dealt with quirky calendars for a long time so really we're just attacking the same problem that we currently have with 30 day fixed cycles.
  - dsr_ 12y ago
    Once we get off the surface of the earth, seconds are more useful than days. Or, more likely, Ksecs and Msecs. A kilo-second is 16.67 minutes, 100 Ksecs is 27.7 hours, an Msec is 11.57 days. 30 Msecs is 95% of an Earth year. These are all useful measures for humans to work in.
- oska 12y ago
  Why? What things need to happen every exact 7 days? Isn't it rather the case that we do some things weekly because that is a conventional unit of time? And if you are designing something so that some process needs to be performed on it every week, you should be building some tolerance into that time-period. Which the eight day span, once every year, would test.
ishener 12y ago
The article fails to make the distinction between lunar and solar calender. It's just about dividing the solar year to equal months, but we also want to make the month align with the moon, which circles earth for 29.5 days on average. The big problem with the Gregorian calendar, in my opinion is that it so clearly missed the lunar month. it just feels intolerably close, but not quite there... by the way, no need to invent a new calendar. the Hebrew calendar is both solar and lunar.
- ecma 12y ago
  I suspect the authors intention here was to present a simplified calendar with some nice guarantees (e.g. dates matching days), not a lunisolar alternative. The Positivist calendar ignores the lunar cycle to reduce complexity that others have in spades, including both the Gregorian and the Hebrew calendars.
- saraid216 12y ago
  It's actually unclear to me why we particularly care about how long it takes to orbit the Sun. Axial rotation, sure, the length of a day is important. But outside of that... why do we need particular units like weeks, months, and years at all?
  - toyg 12y ago
    Religion and seasonality. 7-days as a unit of measurement is written into unamendable documents hold as holy by all Judaist monotheisms (Jewish, Christian and Islamic). The ciclical experience of seasonal-weather and daylight-lenght changes are also too powerful to deny.
    - notdonspaulding 12y ago
      Unrelated, why do you call Islam "judaist"? AFAIK, Islam traces its roots back to Abraham, who was Judah's great-grandfather. So it would seem more appropriate to call it an Abrahamic religion, no?
      - 12y ago
chinpokomon 12y ago
I've been a proponent of this reform for a while. Strangely on my way into work this morning I was trying to figure out why a week is 7 days and not some other division. I thought maybe it was religious, but I now think it has more to do with lunar cycles being close to 28 days and that predating any religious foundation. 12 months has the benefit of dividing the seasons into 3 month quarters. However having an uneven number of days per month and with the solstices and equinoxes falling somewhat haphazardly on the calendar, this doesn't seem like a good reason to stick with the current system. As long as we're redesigning the calendar system, I think the solstice and the equinox should fall in the middle of a season with the Winter Solstice effectively marking the start of the calendar year as a holiday. The leap day could be the day that proceeds that, effectively being used as a day to mark the end of the year. Seasons would then define periods of similar daylight. The only reasons not to adopt this sort of calendar are ceremonial. Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides. I have no idea how to promote widespread adoption of a new calendar, but it is something I've thought about a lot.
- jack-r-abbit 12y ago
  > Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides. It seems like that would complicate the business practice of dividing your fiscal year into quarters. I guess each quarter would be 3 months + 1 week but then you don't have quarters starting/ending evenly with months.
  - jberryman 12y ago
    Solution: everyone takes the extra month off.
  - JelteF 12y ago
    Quarters are broken now as well. Currently the quarters aren't actually quarters. Since the months that are in them aren't all the same length.
  - 12y ago
toyg 12y ago
It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I wish we could have a wrapper or something.
- maxerickson 12y ago
  Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).
  - munificent 12y ago
    > the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.
    - jack-r-abbit 12y ago
      Monday
    - mbreese 12y ago
      How often do you really need to know what day of the week a specific date in 40 years will fall on? The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough. Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days. That is another hack that would probably end up doing more harm than good. How would you model that extra day (or two)? You wouldn't have (13) 4 week months. You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
      - toyg 12y ago
kbmax 12y ago
I love the idea, but this has no chance of happening in my lifetime. I'm still holding out hope that the US will switch to the metric system however.
- toyg 12y ago
  Believe it or not, world elites were once on the brink of adopting the International Fixed Calendar, which was basically the same as Comte's. Then judaist religious backlash kicked in, and here we are.
  - cgore 12y ago
    Our current calendar has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism, it is the calendar of Rome with some very minor tweaks. http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm
    - toyg 12y ago
      "The origin of the seven-day week is the religious significance that was placed on the seventh day by ancient cultures, including the Babylonian and Jewish civilisations." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week "Some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic groups have been historically opposed to the calendar because their tradition of worshiping every seventh day would result in either the day of the week of worship changing from year to year or eight days passing when Year Day or Leap Day occurs.[11] Others have contended that Year Day and Leap Day could be counted as additional days of worship." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar "Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform
jack-r-abbit 12y ago
We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right? If the 28th of Bichat is 2014-13-28 and the 1st of Moses is 2015-01-01, how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be 2014-13-29 (and 2014-13-30 on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?
- crux 12y ago
  Good question. In the library, intercalary days are just their own month. So it would just be 2015-14-1.
  - userbinator 12y ago
    In other words, there's actually a 14 month that either contains 1 or 2 days, both of which have no weekday associated with them? I don't see how it would make things much easier, especially for timestamps in various date formats and date-input fields.
    - toyg 12y ago
      Why? It's still three numeric digits. If anything, it would be much easier to calculate date validity. In Python: acceptable_days = range(1,29) if pickedMonth == 14: acceptable_days = [1]; if isLeapYear(year): acceptable_days = [1,2] # any future hack will just go here if pickedDay not in acceptable_days or pickedMonth > 14: raise InvalidDateException() Compare this with anything we use today. Which code is simpler?
- Avshalom 12y ago
  2015-00-00 2015-00-01 And making dates 0 indexed will make all the C-weenies happy.
  - notdonspaulding 12y ago
    Are you saying you'd put the extra days at the start of the first month of the year? Wouldn't that put you back to where the days are not consistently ordered based off their position in the month?
midhir 12y ago
So is the extra day, or two days during a leap year, simply appended to the year, waited out and ignored? It's an interesting concept; similar to the Time-slip in Red Mars. Wanting a Martian day to equal that of an Earth day, colonists define the time between 00:00 and 00:01 as being 39 minutes 40 seconds in length. I guess most peoples' minds go immediately to, "do I have to work it?". Mine did.
- lsh 12y ago
  In case anyone hasn't read it, it's my LOTR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mars
tylerneylon 12y ago
Another mathematically elegant calendar is the 7date: http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/ http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/
- lsh 12y ago
  I really like the 7date notation with the base-7 notation counting the weeks down, but the 7month with the remaining 22/23 days of the year are still a kludge. With a 13 month calendar those remaining 1/2 days are neatly packaged and disposed of as "festival days". Harder to deal with 22/23 tailing days.
truantbuick 12y ago
I understand this is a bit of fun trying to rethink a very old thing, but the benefits are really bare even when looking past all the damage of a potential transition. Basically, you're consolidating the unevenness between years/months/days of the week to one special 1 or 2 day period. Ok, that's alright, but it still requires a bit of extra help. You still have to think through calendars understanding "Oh! I have to add a day for the epagomenal. Oh, it's a leap year, so it will be 2 actually." That might be preferable to having to think through 31 or 30 or 28 or 29 days, but not by that much. Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good thing? I suppose it's easier to determine what day Thanksgiving is every year, but otherwise, it seems like a minute benefit. On the other hand, I wonder if there are some benefits of that not happening. The only one that comes to mind is it would suck for your Birthday to be on a Monday every year, but I suspect there might be other reasons where enforcing a day to occur on the same place in the week could be harmful.
- resu_nimda 12y ago
  Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good thing? There are benefits for things like accounting, logistics/scheduling, standardizing periods for better comparative analysis, etc. Such systems are already in common use (though the extra day of the year does create a wrinkle): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-5_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-5_calendar
kps 12y ago
Fri Sep 7535 20:02:59 EDT 1993 Think big. Let's decrease the speed of Earth's rotation so that a day is 20 (old) minutes 58 (old) seconds longer. Then we get to sleep in a little, and 1 day = 1°.
tunesmith 12y ago
With all this talk about universal basic incomes and automation taking away jobs, etc etc, there really might be something to the idea of switching to 73 5-day weeks. I wouldn't be in support of taking away Saturday and Sunday ;) but a 3-day workweek of W-F followed by a weekend of Saturday and Sunday could have real possibilities!
- ecma 12y ago
  Automation doesn't preclude the need for high levels of human productivity, especially in a knowledge industry based society. Having a 60% productivity (admittedly soft and cultural) limit for the week would be a more significant change than if we were to do 4-1 weeks instead of 5-2 (71.4%). 4-1 seems like it could be a perfectly reasonable way of doing things for a lot of hackers, maybe not for everyone though.
  - thaumasiotes 12y ago
    > Having a 60% productivity (admittedly soft and cultural) limit for the week The culture will quickly adjust productivity levels back up. This isn't something you need to bother worrying about. The Chinese government mandates an excessive holiday total; during those holidays, businesses and schools close. But the cultural solution is that schools open and businesses work for however many nearby weekend days the official holiday legally consists of (this irritates expats no end; I'm not quite sure why). So if M-W are a holiday one week, expect to work for the preceding weekend and the saturday after.
- notdonspaulding 12y ago
  I'm not sure what the statement "religious backlash" in other comments on this page are in reference to, but modifying the week length would certainly be the most disruptive to the vast majority of the world's religious people. Less so if you kept "Saturday" and "Sunday" as weekend days-off, but probably still enough to encounter significant resistance.
  - toyg 12y ago
    It's basically what stopped a good reform from being introduced by the League of Nations: "Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. [British Chief Rabbi] Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform
dfc 12y ago
> Comte set year 1 of his new calendar as the first year of the > truly modern age: 1789, the first year of the Great Crisis. For me 1789 is the first year of the Great Constitutional Ratification. I did a quick google search for "great crisis" and came up empty. Google seems to be convinced that when I type "great crisis" I am looking for "Great Depression." What is the Great Crisis?
- ecma 12y ago
  It might be referring to la Grande Peur[0] (the Great Fear) which was the panic reaponse to the initial rebellions at the beginning of the French Revolution. [0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear
lsh 12y ago
There is also the slightly more modern International Fixed Calendar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar It's essentially the same as the positivist calendar except: * gregorian names are kept * the extra month is inserted before july and is called Sol * the extra day on leap years is inserted before the 1st of Sol * was in actual use by Kodak until 1989 (amazing!)
tzs 12y ago
I like Asimov's calendar [1]. The year is divided into 4 seasons of 91 days (13 weeks per season), with one extra day a year that is not part of any season and is not part of the weekday count. For leap years, another extra day occurs between the second and third seasons. I'd make one change to Asimov's scheme. He gets rid of months. I'd keep them, with each season consisting of 3 months: 2 of 30 days and 1 of 31 days. [1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/World_Season_Calendar http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/World_Season_Calendar
donpdonp 12y ago
The Terran Computational Calendar (http://terrancalendar.com/ http://terrancalendar.com/) is an interesting read - "13 identical 28-day months, followed by a 'minimonth' that is generally composed of leap days and leap seconds."
cyborgx7 12y ago
>There are 365 days in a year (366 on leap years) Wrong already. I do not understand this obsession to make a year exactly the length of a given number of days. They are both completely unrelated, exept in that they are units of time. A year should be exactly one time the period of the earth moving around the sun. We just need to agree on a starting point. The day on which that starting point falls would be the last day of that year or the first day of the next (or both). And while I understand the need to group days (not sparate the year) into weeks the concept of month seems completely unnecessary. Just agree on a number of weeks on which pay is given out, rent payed,...
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > Just agree on a number of weeks on which pay is given out, rent payed,... You can do this now. In particular, pay is quite frequently handled by the week.
krick 12y ago
I like French Republican Calendar [1] much more for some reason. Months are 30 day each, no 7-day weeks, 10-day decades instead, so any day of the year is the same day of the "week" and the same day of the month. The rest 5 or 6 days are simply treated as "special days" (sansculottides), so it would be pretty easy to deal with them in any accounting software as well. The whole calendar has very nice spirit to it, each month is named in due to climatic effects of this one (at least it happens so in my location, and weather happens to change exactly according to this calendar, not Gregorian one), and each day of the year also has it's own name (something natural, like tree or fruit, no human names or something, which I find really cool). I really really like that symbolism. Such a calendar isn't just boring list of numbers, but something truly beautiful. So I was using it for some time for reminders and such, but using calendar nobody else uses is pretty pointless, so I dropped it. Such a pity. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

88 points by crux 12y ago

> Finally it is perennial, in that the weekdays of every year are always the same. No, the epagomenal/intercalary days would change this from year to year. The weekdays would be the same from month to month within a given year, of course (assuming the extra day doesn't fall somewhere in the middle).

yaddayadda 12y ago
According to the great and wise Wikipidia, >This extra day added to the last month was outside of the days of the week cycle, and so the first of a month was always a Monday. On leap years, an additional festival day (also outside the week cycle), to celebrate holy women, would join the memorial day of the dead. Which to me reads that the extra day/s are not one of the 7 weekdays. Hence these days would fall between a Sunday and Monday, but would not be refereed to by any of our current weekday names. So, each year there would be the forth Sunday of Bichat, followed by the The Festival of All the Dead epagomenal day, followed by the first Monday of Moses. edited out some typos
- moron4hire 12y ago
  You know, I just really like the idea of leap days not being called anything. It sort of reminds me of the Egyptian mythology. Something-something-something, why doesn't the year have 360 days like degrees in a circle, blah blah blah, so here's some fake days to get around Ra and have your babies by another man. It's like metaphysical hackers.
- joeclark77 12y ago
  Oh, great. Extra Mondays. "Festival of the Dead" is a pretty good name for that idea.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]

0x0 12y ago

Inserting a day between the regular weekdays once a year sounds pretty dangerous to me. I bet there are a lot of things that need to happen weekly that would quickly go out of whack if they are delayed a day.

ecma 12y ago
I think we would need to be more precise about our measures of lifetime for some things (recent e.g. would be MH370's black box battery life rating) but the idea of measure lifetime with days since an event is already used quite widely (I rarely heard the phrase 2 weeks since that event) and could be adjusted to without much difficulty. Financial and similar institutions would likely treat the festival day(s) as they do any long weekend at the moment. Pay cycles could be adjusted with end of year 'bonus' to cover out of cycle days. I'm sure there's something but we've dealt with quirky calendars for a long time so really we're just attacking the same problem that we currently have with 30 day fixed cycles.
- dsr_ 12y ago
  Once we get off the surface of the earth, seconds are more useful than days. Or, more likely, Ksecs and Msecs. A kilo-second is 16.67 minutes, 100 Ksecs is 27.7 hours, an Msec is 11.57 days. 30 Msecs is 95% of an Earth year. These are all useful measures for humans to work in.
oska 12y ago
Why? What things need to happen every exact 7 days? Isn't it rather the case that we do some things weekly because that is a conventional unit of time? And if you are designing something so that some process needs to be performed on it every week, you should be building some tolerance into that time-period. Which the eight day span, once every year, would test.

ishener 12y ago

The article fails to make the distinction between lunar and solar calender. It's just about dividing the solar year to equal months, but we also want to make the month align with the moon, which circles earth for 29.5 days on average. The big problem with the Gregorian calendar, in my opinion is that it so clearly missed the lunar month. it just feels intolerably close, but not quite there... by the way, no need to invent a new calendar. the Hebrew calendar is both solar and lunar.

ecma 12y ago
I suspect the authors intention here was to present a simplified calendar with some nice guarantees (e.g. dates matching days), not a lunisolar alternative. The Positivist calendar ignores the lunar cycle to reduce complexity that others have in spades, including both the Gregorian and the Hebrew calendars.
saraid216 12y ago
It's actually unclear to me why we particularly care about how long it takes to orbit the Sun. Axial rotation, sure, the length of a day is important. But outside of that... why do we need particular units like weeks, months, and years at all?
- toyg 12y ago
  Religion and seasonality. 7-days as a unit of measurement is written into unamendable documents hold as holy by all Judaist monotheisms (Jewish, Christian and Islamic). The ciclical experience of seasonal-weather and daylight-lenght changes are also too powerful to deny.
  - notdonspaulding 12y ago
    Unrelated, why do you call Islam "judaist"? AFAIK, Islam traces its roots back to Abraham, who was Judah's great-grandfather. So it would seem more appropriate to call it an Abrahamic religion, no?
    - 12y ago

chinpokomon 12y ago

I've been a proponent of this reform for a while. Strangely on my way into work this morning I was trying to figure out why a week is 7 days and not some other division. I thought maybe it was religious, but I now think it has more to do with lunar cycles being close to 28 days and that predating any religious foundation. 12 months has the benefit of dividing the seasons into 3 month quarters. However having an uneven number of days per month and with the solstices and equinoxes falling somewhat haphazardly on the calendar, this doesn't seem like a good reason to stick with the current system. As long as we're redesigning the calendar system, I think the solstice and the equinox should fall in the middle of a season with the Winter Solstice effectively marking the start of the calendar year as a holiday. The leap day could be the day that proceeds that, effectively being used as a day to mark the end of the year. Seasons would then define periods of similar daylight. The only reasons not to adopt this sort of calendar are ceremonial. Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides. I have no idea how to promote widespread adoption of a new calendar, but it is something I've thought about a lot.

jack-r-abbit 12y ago
> Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides. It seems like that would complicate the business practice of dividing your fiscal year into quarters. I guess each quarter would be 3 months + 1 week but then you don't have quarters starting/ending evenly with months.
- jberryman 12y ago
  Solution: everyone takes the extra month off.
- JelteF 12y ago
  Quarters are broken now as well. Currently the quarters aren't actually quarters. Since the months that are in them aren't all the same length.
- 12y ago

toyg 12y ago

It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I wish we could have a wrapper or something.

maxerickson 12y ago
Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).
- munificent 12y ago
  > the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.
  - jack-r-abbit 12y ago
    Monday
  - mbreese 12y ago
    How often do you really need to know what day of the week a specific date in 40 years will fall on? The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough. Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days. That is another hack that would probably end up doing more harm than good. How would you model that extra day (or two)? You wouldn't have (13) 4 week months. You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
    - toyg 12y ago

kbmax 12y ago

I love the idea, but this has no chance of happening in my lifetime. I'm still holding out hope that the US will switch to the metric system however.

toyg 12y ago
Believe it or not, world elites were once on the brink of adopting the International Fixed Calendar, which was basically the same as Comte's. Then judaist religious backlash kicked in, and here we are.
- cgore 12y ago
  Our current calendar has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism, it is the calendar of Rome with some very minor tweaks. http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm
  - toyg 12y ago
    "The origin of the seven-day week is the religious significance that was placed on the seventh day by ancient cultures, including the Babylonian and Jewish civilisations." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week "Some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic groups have been historically opposed to the calendar because their tradition of worshiping every seventh day would result in either the day of the week of worship changing from year to year or eight days passing when Year Day or Leap Day occurs.[11] Others have contended that Year Day and Leap Day could be counted as additional days of worship." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar "Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform

jack-r-abbit 12y ago

We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right? If the 28th of Bichat is 2014-13-28 and the 1st of Moses is 2015-01-01, how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be 2014-13-29 (and 2014-13-30 on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?

crux 12y ago
Good question. In the library, intercalary days are just their own month. So it would just be 2015-14-1.
- userbinator 12y ago
  In other words, there's actually a 14 month that either contains 1 or 2 days, both of which have no weekday associated with them? I don't see how it would make things much easier, especially for timestamps in various date formats and date-input fields.
  - toyg 12y ago
    Why? It's still three numeric digits. If anything, it would be much easier to calculate date validity. In Python: acceptable_days = range(1,29) if pickedMonth == 14: acceptable_days = [1]; if isLeapYear(year): acceptable_days = [1,2] # any future hack will just go here if pickedDay not in acceptable_days or pickedMonth > 14: raise InvalidDateException() Compare this with anything we use today. Which code is simpler?
Avshalom 12y ago
2015-00-00 2015-00-01 And making dates 0 indexed will make all the C-weenies happy.
- notdonspaulding 12y ago
  Are you saying you'd put the extra days at the start of the first month of the year? Wouldn't that put you back to where the days are not consistently ordered based off their position in the month?

midhir 12y ago

So is the extra day, or two days during a leap year, simply appended to the year, waited out and ignored? It's an interesting concept; similar to the Time-slip in Red Mars. Wanting a Martian day to equal that of an Earth day, colonists define the time between 00:00 and 00:01 as being 39 minutes 40 seconds in length. I guess most peoples' minds go immediately to, "do I have to work it?". Mine did.

lsh 12y ago
In case anyone hasn't read it, it's my LOTR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mars

tylerneylon 12y ago

Another mathematically elegant calendar is the 7date: http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/ http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/

lsh 12y ago
I really like the 7date notation with the base-7 notation counting the weeks down, but the 7month with the remaining 22/23 days of the year are still a kludge. With a 13 month calendar those remaining 1/2 days are neatly packaged and disposed of as "festival days". Harder to deal with 22/23 tailing days.

truantbuick 12y ago

I understand this is a bit of fun trying to rethink a very old thing, but the benefits are really bare even when looking past all the damage of a potential transition. Basically, you're consolidating the unevenness between years/months/days of the week to one special 1 or 2 day period. Ok, that's alright, but it still requires a bit of extra help. You still have to think through calendars understanding "Oh! I have to add a day for the epagomenal. Oh, it's a leap year, so it will be 2 actually." That might be preferable to having to think through 31 or 30 or 28 or 29 days, but not by that much. Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good thing? I suppose it's easier to determine what day Thanksgiving is every year, but otherwise, it seems like a minute benefit. On the other hand, I wonder if there are some benefits of that not happening. The only one that comes to mind is it would suck for your Birthday to be on a Monday every year, but I suspect there might be other reasons where enforcing a day to occur on the same place in the week could be harmful.

resu_nimda 12y ago
Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good thing? There are benefits for things like accounting, logistics/scheduling, standardizing periods for better comparative analysis, etc. Such systems are already in common use (though the extra day of the year does create a wrinkle): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-5_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-5_calendar

kps 12y ago

Fri Sep 7535 20:02:59 EDT 1993 Think big. Let's decrease the speed of Earth's rotation so that a day is 20 (old) minutes 58 (old) seconds longer. Then we get to sleep in a little, and 1 day = 1°.

tunesmith 12y ago

With all this talk about universal basic incomes and automation taking away jobs, etc etc, there really might be something to the idea of switching to 73 5-day weeks. I wouldn't be in support of taking away Saturday and Sunday ;) but a 3-day workweek of W-F followed by a weekend of Saturday and Sunday could have real possibilities!

ecma 12y ago
Automation doesn't preclude the need for high levels of human productivity, especially in a knowledge industry based society. Having a 60% productivity (admittedly soft and cultural) limit for the week would be a more significant change than if we were to do 4-1 weeks instead of 5-2 (71.4%). 4-1 seems like it could be a perfectly reasonable way of doing things for a lot of hackers, maybe not for everyone though.
- thaumasiotes 12y ago
  > Having a 60% productivity (admittedly soft and cultural) limit for the week The culture will quickly adjust productivity levels back up. This isn't something you need to bother worrying about. The Chinese government mandates an excessive holiday total; during those holidays, businesses and schools close. But the cultural solution is that schools open and businesses work for however many nearby weekend days the official holiday legally consists of (this irritates expats no end; I'm not quite sure why). So if M-W are a holiday one week, expect to work for the preceding weekend and the saturday after.
notdonspaulding 12y ago
I'm not sure what the statement "religious backlash" in other comments on this page are in reference to, but modifying the week length would certainly be the most disruptive to the vast majority of the world's religious people. Less so if you kept "Saturday" and "Sunday" as weekend days-off, but probably still enough to encounter significant resistance.
- toyg 12y ago
  It's basically what stopped a good reform from being introduced by the League of Nations: "Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. [British Chief Rabbi] Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform

dfc 12y ago

> Comte set year 1 of his new calendar as the first year of the > truly modern age: 1789, the first year of the Great Crisis. For me 1789 is the first year of the Great Constitutional Ratification. I did a quick google search for "great crisis" and came up empty. Google seems to be convinced that when I type "great crisis" I am looking for "Great Depression." What is the Great Crisis?

ecma 12y ago
It might be referring to la Grande Peur[0] (the Great Fear) which was the panic reaponse to the initial rebellions at the beginning of the French Revolution. [0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear

lsh 12y ago

There is also the slightly more modern International Fixed Calendar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar It's essentially the same as the positivist calendar except: * gregorian names are kept * the extra month is inserted before july and is called Sol * the extra day on leap years is inserted before the 1st of Sol * was in actual use by Kodak until 1989 (amazing!)

tzs 12y ago

I like Asimov's calendar [1]. The year is divided into 4 seasons of 91 days (13 weeks per season), with one extra day a year that is not part of any season and is not part of the weekday count. For leap years, another extra day occurs between the second and third seasons. I'd make one change to Asimov's scheme. He gets rid of months. I'd keep them, with each season consisting of 3 months: 2 of 30 days and 1 of 31 days. [1] http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/World_Season_Calendar http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/World_Season_Calendar

donpdonp 12y ago

The Terran Computational Calendar (http://terrancalendar.com/ http://terrancalendar.com/) is an interesting read - "13 identical 28-day months, followed by a 'minimonth' that is generally composed of leap days and leap seconds."

cyborgx7 12y ago

>There are 365 days in a year (366 on leap years) Wrong already. I do not understand this obsession to make a year exactly the length of a given number of days. They are both completely unrelated, exept in that they are units of time. A year should be exactly one time the period of the earth moving around the sun. We just need to agree on a starting point. The day on which that starting point falls would be the last day of that year or the first day of the next (or both). And while I understand the need to group days (not sparate the year) into weeks the concept of month seems completely unnecessary. Just agree on a number of weeks on which pay is given out, rent payed,...

thaumasiotes 12y ago
> Just agree on a number of weeks on which pay is given out, rent payed,... You can do this now. In particular, pay is quite frequently handled by the week.

krick 12y ago

I like French Republican Calendar [1] much more for some reason. Months are 30 day each, no 7-day weeks, 10-day decades instead, so any day of the year is the same day of the "week" and the same day of the month. The rest 5 or 6 days are simply treated as "special days" (sansculottides), so it would be pretty easy to deal with them in any accounting software as well. The whole calendar has very nice spirit to it, each month is named in due to climatic effects of this one (at least it happens so in my location, and weather happens to change exactly according to this calendar, not Gregorian one), and each day of the year also has it's own name (something natural, like tree or fruit, no human names or something, which I find really cool). I really really like that symbolism. Such a calendar isn't just boring list of numbers, but something truly beautiful. So I was using it for some time for reminders and such, but using calendar nobody else uses is pretty pointless, so I dropped it. Such a pity. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar