10 ms·

The Death and Life of the 13-Month Calendar

136 points by skinofstars 12y ago

Tossrock 12y ago
"The International Fixed calendar sucked the personality out of marking time, making every week and month as predictable as humanly possible. [...] It's an impossible feat that doesn't need pulling off and, thankfully, no one is trying to anymore." Spoken like someone who's never had to write date handling logic. Having "personality" in your calendar system is a bug, not a feature. I feel confident that we could maintain our overall levels of personality/joie de vivre/je ne sais quoi by spending less time dealing with an incredibly arbitrary calendar system and more time doing things we actually enjoy.
- tempestn 12y ago
  A very small percentage of the population ever has to write date handling logic. For the rest, things "just work", thanks to those few. Besides, even as a member of that small group, I like the variety of the current calendar, inefficient as it is.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    Someone's never written very many sql queries. I'm pointing at you, tempestn.
  - 32bitkid 12y ago
    One has to admit that it complicates even trivial communications about days and times. Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Or "Is Nov 12th on the weekend?" I feel these are practical things that _most_ people would _like_ to easily reason about, but can't. It imperial units for days; or like trying to do math in a numerical system where each significant digit has a different random radix. Does it have variety? Yes... Is even remotely fun to do anything practical with? No.
    - drostie 12y ago
      Well, we already do math in a crazy-radix system for time, and the not-easily-divisible unitless variable of (1 year / 1 day) means that we can't do too much better -- we can reduce the problem to about one crazy radix, but no smaller; that radix will probably always depend on the value of the more-significant number in the date (the year). But yes, we probably should quash the "variety is fun" argument early in the discussion. The problem is that it's a persistent low cost in the back of everyone's heads. Sure, when you think about it you might like it a lot, but it will then stress you out in hard-to-perceive ways during the rest of the year, with no real benefit to show for it. The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months. This is a bad idea; if two systems are going to exist in parallel they need to be disambiguated in practice.
      - toyg 12y ago
        >The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months. The problem is, you'll find, that naming things is an incredibly political act. Agreeing on a new name for anything is a terribly complicated process, and when you're talking about something every single person has a stake in... well, it would have never happened. He tried very skillfully to bypass all that, and basically succeeded. No, his mistake was to underestimate the clout that religious tradition still had on large sectors of the ruling elites. Even now, when we pride ourself in the "scientificness" and rationality of our societies, we're still enslaved by stories written by agrarian priests at the dawn of civilization -- in many ways, it's worse now because nobody would even entertain proposals as bold as modernizing a system we've been using, almost unchanged, for two millennia, no matter how broken it might be.
    - chongli 12y ago
      Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Fortunately we don't have a very pressing need to answer these sorts of questions; we have tools galore to handle them for us: smartphones, calendars, messaging apps, meetup etc. Topics like these often remind me of one of Einstein's more famous quotes: [I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think. We used to spend an enormous amount of time teaching our children mathematical tricks which have now all been made completely obsolete by the scientific calculator. Only the most rudimentary of arithmetical strategies have survived, if only for the fact that it's still a little inconvenient to reach into your pocket when scanning and counting objects with your eyes.
  - wtbob 12y ago
    You know, given that we have computers to perform the calculations, my own mad dream is to return to solar hours: twelve hours from sunrise to sunset, and twelve from sunset to sunrise. Thus summer hours would be longer and winter days would be shorter. Ditto minutes and seconds. Science would of course need to have a standardised second almost always different from the current second, but that's no different from having a standardised temperature and pressure almost always different from the current temperature and pressure.
    - juliangregorian 12y ago
      What on earth do you see the benefit of this as?
      - wtbob 12y ago
        My theory is that living according to the sun is more natural and consequently more pleasant than living according to a metronome.
- sk5t 12y ago
  An excellent video touching on some of the intractable aspects of our datetime-marking system's personality quirks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
- delecti 12y ago
  I've never felt any positive feelings towards any of the variances in how we keep time. "Oh golly gee, December's got a full 31 days, how exciting"
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  Yeah, it sucks the personality out of marking time like metric sucks the personality out of measuring space. I like personality in my dog and my friends, not in my systems of measurement. Dates are almost impossible to reason about, and yet people are so used to our current broken system they aren't even aware of how badly they manage it. It is routine for date-time packages to produce bizarre results like "a month before a month from now" not being "today" in all cases because no one has any idea what anyone else means by "month", although everyone who has never thought about these problems is certain that everyone else means exactly what they mean in all ambiguous cases. Anyone who has worked on date-time problems (not even libraries, just trying to correct for the special cases, cultural differences or just plain weirdness that the library of your choice doesn't deal with) will recognize the horrible truth of the joke, "I used to be in favour of space-travel, then I realized what effect it will have on date-time libraries."
  - Swizec 12y ago
    My favourite example of this is "tomorrow" because obviously, tomorrow is when you and I wake up the next day, NOT a minute past midnight. Annoys me to no end that most calendar systems still don't understand that.
    - novaleaf 12y ago
      ... perhaps it is telling: I can't figure out if you are being sarcastic or not. :/
    - daurnimator 12y ago
      Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. If I said "the servers are down for maintenance at 2am tomorrow" when would you think they will be unavailable?
      - Swizec 12y ago
        I wasn't being sarcastic at all. If you said "2am tomorrow" I would assume two hours after next midnight. Perhaps this is a result of my usually late schedule because I normally go to bed around 2am, so everything up to then and including midnight is "tonight".
- jerf 12y ago
  "I feel confident that we could maintain our overall levels of personality/joie de vivre/je ne sais quoi by spending less time dealing with an incredibly arbitrary calendar system and more time doing things we actually enjoy." Backing your claim, I'd observe this is already a manifested fact. Consider holidays like Easter, which already are set by rules that have little to do with the calendar itself, and there's a number of such holidays floating about without any special problems of their own (above and beyond the problems of the calendar in general). The "personality" of the year is already independent of how we mark the time.
gtbcb 12y ago
I love the idea of a 13 months calendar; however, you're birthday would be on the same day every year :0/.
- lanna 12y ago
  Unless you were born Feb 29, I guess everyone's birthday is on the same day every year. Mine, for instance, is always on Sep 11, every single year.
  - ComSubVie 12y ago
    You're confusing day (Monday, ...) with date (12th Dec).
    - jamie_ca 12y ago
      He's pointing out that those stuck on a leap day are still stuck. If you count by day-of-year when doing the conversion, though, it's the people born new year's eve on a leap year that are impacted.
hasenj 12y ago
Why do we even have a 7-day week? 7 and 28 are just as arbitrary as 12. Why do we even have a solar year? If the year was 100 days, we could have a whole year of summer.
- ijk 12y ago
  Except that the year is based on the solar orbit, which has some quite obvious effects via the axial tilt causing seasons. The month is based on the lunar orbits, which are a bit more arbitrary now and less important with an urban rather than agricultural economy, but still not completely arbitrary. Weeks are a bit arbitrary, as far as we can tell, but very widespread and we seem to be stuck with them.
  - aetherson 12y ago
    I'm always blown away by people who don't understand weeks. A lunar month is 28 days. There are few divisors of 28. 2, 4, 7, and 14 are the only ones. 28 days is too long for convenience if it's your shortest grouping of days. 2 days is too short. So, 4x7 or 7x4. Having 7 4 day weeks every month is probably a bit less convenient than 4 7 day weeks. Hence, 7 day weeks. (Or two 14 day weeks, which I think you essentially used to see some of the time: it seems like 17th-19th Century Britain was more aligned on fortnights than weeks). Not NECESSARY in the same way that days are, but it's not exactly mysterious how they came about. Edit: Oh, also, in terms of preferring 7 or 14 to 2 or 4, think about the lunar cycle. It easily breaks down into 7 or 14 day periods (7 days = new to half, or half to full, or full to half, or half to new. 14 days = new to full or full to new. 4 days = ?) Edit2: Of course, a lunation (full moon to full moon) is 29.5 days, as opposed to the sidereal month (same part of sky to same part of sky) of 27.3 days. But I suspect that in antiquity, most people dealt with a conventional 28 days for both.
    - jccooper 12y ago
      Weeks mostly have to do with the market cycle, which has been anywhere from 4 to ten days depending on the local economy. The Chinese in particular used 5 or 10 day weeks for quite some time. That works better for lunation than 7. The seven day standard seems to have worked as a reasonable compromise across a wide variety of ancient economies and plan
cvburgess 12y ago
I really like this idea - it makes scheduling things a whole lot easier. I also like the concepts of the one week month and "year day" - for some reason I feel like I'd get more pumped about year day than I'll ever get about new years.
- function_seven 12y ago
  I didn't see anything about a one-week month on there, but the diagrams sure make it look that way.
latortuga 12y ago
This would complicate anything that is paid for monthly, including but not limited to: employee salaries, rent/mortgage, subscriptions, utilities, etc. Do we just ignore Sol for those purposes or roll it into another month? Having your birthday perpetually on a wednesday would also not be so much fun. Perhaps "year day" could shift every year forward by 1 week day - year day could be Monday and then Jan 1 of the next year could be a Tuesday etc.
- krschultz 12y ago
  If we all switched to it, wouldn't it simplify all of those things? Right now if you get paid every other week, you get paid 3 times in 2 months and twice in all the other months. If you get paid twice a month on the 15th and last day of the month, payroll constantly has to take account of holidays and weekends because the day of the week is always fluctuating. All of those things would have to change, but they would be simpler after the change. It's the same argument as switching to the metric system in the US. Unfortunately the fixed cost of having to switch outweighs the benefits of switching (certainly for the calendar, less so for metric).
- estel 12y ago
  Don't some companies already run salary in thirteen four week periods? I've worked at at least one that did.
  - jeffasinger 12y ago
    I'm not 100% sure, but in the US, this is relatively rare, as it's required in most situations to be paid at least 2 times per month. I think all but 5 states have laws dictating pay frequency, and in most cases they require at least two times a month pay frequency. The most popular pay schedules tend to be 24, 26, and 52 times per year. EDIT: This was supposed to be a reply to redblacktree. State law examples: - http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm - http://labor.ny.gov/legal/counsel/pdf/frequency-of-pay-frequently-asked-questions.pdf http://labor.ny.gov/legal/counsel/pdf/frequency-of-pay-frequ...
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IgorPartola 12y ago
This. I have been thinking about this for a long time. Basically, 364 days are exactly the same, and what is currently December 31st would become the Year Day where everyone has it off. If it's a leap year, there'd be two Year Days. Simple, efficient, and easy to understand. Birthdays being on the same day of the week is a poor objection: your birthday already falls on a weekday much more often then not, and chances are you celebrate it on the weekend before or after. We'd lose variability in holidays that are "last Thursday of the month": they'd just be on a specific date every year. One nice thing we'd gain is that the phase of the moon would shift much slower with respect to our calendar (the moon doesn't do a Year Day). I suppose some superstitious healthcare workers might object to this. If you think about it, there are many more things naturally tied to 28 days than 28/30/31.
- beefman 12y ago
  Actually the synodic month is closer to 365/12 days than to 28 days, so the 13-month calendar drifts slightly faster with respect to phases of the moon.
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dfar1 12y ago
My birthday would always be on a Sunday!
- tempestn 12y ago
  Did you check the day-month of your current birthday, or the day of the year? My birthday is April 8; that's the 98th day of the year (most years), which would be April 14 in the new calendar.
- tehaugmenter 12y ago
  Also for the superstitious there would always be Friday the 13th
  - johnnyo 12y ago
    Easy fix, just start the month on a Monday instead of a Sunday
    - someear 12y ago
      but then there would never be a Friday the 13th, which is also a problem. When would Hollywood release all its horror movies?
      - Pxtl 12y ago
        Won't somebody please think of the bikers!?
    - vorg 12y ago
      Starting the week on Monday seems more common than Sunday for most countries, I believe France does. And China and Japan name their days literally "Day 1" for Monday, ... "Day 6" for Saturday, and "Day Sun" for Sunday.
      - MichaelBurge 12y ago
        This is wrong. Saturday in Japanese is 土曜日, which is like "Earth day". There's also "Sun day"(Sunday), "Moon day"(Monday), "Fire day"(Tuesday), "Water day"(Wednesday), "Tree day"(Thursday), "Gold day"(Friday), "Earth day"(Saturday). So your claim is wrong in Japanese for every day except Sunday. If you see something written like 四日("4 day"), this refers to the day of the month not the day of the week(for Japanese).
kcovia 12y ago
Also in alternate calendars: Each day in the Republican Calendar was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds. Thus an hour was 144 conventional minutes (more than twice as long as a conventional hour), a minute was 86.4 conventional seconds (44% longer than a conventional minute), and a second was 0.864 conventional seconds (13.6% shorter than a conventional second). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
faehnrich 12y ago
Lousy Smarch weather.
caio1982 12y ago
Somewhat related: the other day (this week even!) my wife was puzzled by the names of months and she asked me about the meaning of each. If you think about it for a moment you'll figure most of them out, but in any case this is a good summary: http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/month_names.html http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/month_names.html
function_seven 12y ago
From the article: > Easter would fall on April 15 every year on Cotsworth's calendar I don't understand why this would be. Can someone explain?
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  Easter is tied to the days of the week, it's always on a Sunday. So it's going to be week-aligned. This calendar aligns months with weeks. Months are always exactly 4 weeks.
  - function_seven 12y ago
    But Easter moves around quite a bit during the year, sometimes being on the 83rd day of the year (in 2008), sometimes on the 110th day of the year (2014), and various dates between. I don't see how changing to a 13 month calendar would affect the first full moon after the spring Equinox, since the lunar cycle doesn't mesh with the solar one.
    - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
      > I don't see how changing to a 13 month calendar would affect the first full moon after the spring Equinox, since the lunar cycle doesn't mesh with the solar one. Just checked... you seem to be correct. The lunar calendar isn't aligned with this well enough. While the equinox date is fixed, the first full moon after that should bounce around by several days at least. Even allowing that it's always the Sunday after that, it still seems as if it could fluctuate by a week in either direction.
- aetherson 12y ago
  I think that they're suggesting that this would be conventionally the case: "Okay, we're now deciding that Easter Sunday will be April 15, which is always a Sunday." I think this is on the basis that it's important for Easter to be on a Sunday, and not nearly as important that it be the Sunday following the first full moon following the equinox, or whatever: just that once you say "it's got to be on a Sunday," you need some damn way to figure out which Sunday each year.
ChuckMcM 12y ago
When I was at Intel they marked everything in Work Weeks, that was essential for scheduling things like chip fabrication plants. It took a little while to get used to but then it made computing questions of 'when' quite straight forward. I'm personally in favor of a more structured system like this, my wife on the other hand is viscerally opposed. If that schism is widespread I expect the next calender change to occur when the known world is ruled by an emperor :-)
gtirloni 12y ago
Mars Inc. uses 13-period calendar for everything.
- coleca 12y ago
  When I worked for Royal Ahold they used a 13 period calendar. The date logic was much worse to manage because you still had the rest of the world and every programming language and database that used the Gregorian calendar. We had a single mainframe subprogram that managed the whole thing. It was written in assembler and the few times it broke, the entire company stopped. Financials, ordering, invoicing, everything. Eventually they rewrote it in a more modern language, COBOL. This was in 2010.
0x45696e6172 12y ago
This seems to be slightly inferior to the Pax calendar[1]. The Pax calendar has another very cool property, which is that the weekdays are always in sync with Gregorian calendar. This is done by carrying over leapdays until you have one full week accumulated, which is then inserted as a leapweek, in the same way we insert leapdays in the Gregorian calendar. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Calendar
msoad 12y ago
Fun fact: The arabic calendar which is based on Moon movements used to have an extra month every four(?) years to adjust the season changes. It was called Nasi' month. But after a Quran Sura published that prohibited this month Arabic calendar lost it's accuracy for seasons.[1] The Iranian Calendar that is based on sun movements was safe from this Sura because it didn't have an extra month but an extra day each five years.[2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasi%27 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasi%27 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_calendars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_calendars
- cauterized 12y ago
  The Hebrew calendar (also lunar) still does this - a leap month in (IIRC) 7 out of every 19 years.
frogpelt 12y ago
In addition to the 13 month calendar, I wish the year started in March or April. The beginning of Spring* makes more sense for a new year than the middle of winter. *I realize this is only true in the northern hemisphere, but 90% of the world's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere. The other 10% can start their year in the Fall.
- logfromblammo 12y ago
  Given that the northward equinox is relevant to astronomy and geographic reference frames, I have also had occasions to wish that not only would the year start at that instant, but also that it be considered day 0 of the new year, rather than day 1.
- gohrt 12y ago
  This is how the calendar originally worked (DECemeber is 10th month), until politics intervened in ancient Rome.
  - tjradcliffe 12y ago
    The Julian calendar typically started the year on the 25th of March (Lady Day) at noon (prior to clocks it was much easier to reckon mid-day than mid-night... navies kept this practice at least into the 1800's). This was true into the 1600's in parts of Europe and North America.
imroot 12y ago
This is a little bit different from the accounting 13 month calendar -- an "Adjustment" month that usually falls in the next FY that the accounting/auditors can do adjustments and still have 'true' dates on everything. Honestly, having another month to pay bills (and you know that nobody's going to pro-rate everything down to 13 months) isn't really appealing right now, nor would the additional overhead of two more payroll cycles. Logically, it makes sense, though.
- redblacktree 12y ago
  For what it's worth, I'm already paid for 26 pay cycles each year, and I work at a company of 30k+.
minikites 12y ago
This makes more sense than switching to the metric system.
- bharath28 12y ago
  Why? I'm curious.
cesarbs 12y ago
I wonder what Jews, Seventh Day Adventists, and Sabbatarians in general would think of this.
dredmorbius 12y ago
Eviatar Zerubavel's Seven Day Circle is a detailed and complex history of time telling. It really helps to understand that in a calendar we're trying to measure three distinct (and variable) cycles, none of which fits precisely into the others, and each of which imposes its own rhythms on human life. Attempts to break each from the current 7/12/365 basis have virtually all failed. The first is the Earth's rotation about its own axis -- different when measured with respect to the stars or the Sun. The second is that of the Moon about Earth. The third is of the Earth about the Sun. We overlay them on each other and pick rough correspondences. Much of the division has to do with Babylonian time reckoning, based on 360, and its factors: 2 * 2 * 2 * 3 * 3 * 5. From that you find 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 45, 72, 90, 180, and 360. A seven-day week doesn't fit this directly but is close (between 6 and 8), and a 30-day month also fits well. Then you come to realize that all timekeeping, _especially_ that which picks a specific starting point, is arbitrary. The book also details several attempts to change the system, particularly following the French and Russian revolutions (oh, and the reason for that being the October revolution -- and there's the question of what was the last nation to adopt the Gregorian calendar, and why the output of 'cal 1752' is what it is ... and why even _that_ is arbitrary (it depends on where you're specifying the date). http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780226981659-2 http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780226981659-2
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  In New England (and likely elsewhere) you can see gravestones from the sixteen and seventeen hundreds that have two death dates on them, as different parts of the world converted to the Gregorian calendar at different times, and both Gregorian and Julian dates were in use in the area for a while (parts of Europe converted as early as the late 1500's).
- canjobear 12y ago
  It's not clear that the rotation of the moon has much significance in modern life any more, so maybe the problem can be simplified. What was the significance of cycles of the moon in the past, anyway? The main thing I can think of is astrology. Can tides be predicted accurately using phases of the moon?
SixSigma 12y ago
"We've always done it this way" are the seven most expensive words in business. Catherine DeVrye (2000)
narrator 12y ago
There's also the ill-fated Soviet Revolutionary Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar
- midhir 12y ago
  And the similarly fated French Republican Calendar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
seccess 12y ago
Okay, but can we come up with a calendar system where the months September, October, November, and December don't have the wrong names? It has always bothered me that the prefix sept- means seven, but it is the ninth month, oct- is for the tenth month, etc...
- vorg 12y ago
  Have a 14-month year, then start the following year in March.
  - seccess 12y ago
    Sold. This could have the added benefit that every leap year we can get two days off for new years eve, since people will be used to getting Feb 28th off anyway ;)
- saraid216 12y ago
  Those names are from when the calendar only had 10 months. They tacked on two months at the beginning. In other fun facts, March is so named because that's when you go to war.
drdeadringer 12y ago
Reading this article is my first exposure to this 13-month calendar [I don't count the Simpson's episode]. I'm glad for the read and found it very interesting.
kijin 12y ago
Using the same calender every year might work fine in America and some of the Western European countries. (According to the article, Easter and Thanksgiving can be given fixed dates in the 13-month calendar.) But many non-Western cultures have holidays tied to phases of the moon. Chinese New Year would still move around a lot from year to year, making it impossible to reuse last year's calendar. Ditto for Chuseok in Korea, which needs to coincide with a full moon. So yeah, this looks like a nice change, but it's not going to be completely static from year to year in every culture. Besides, I don't think it will completely eliminate the difficulty of figuring out what date "next Thursday" is. We at HN tend to be mathematically competent, so we can easily calculate multiples of 7 in our heads and subtract a few without breaking a sweat. Most ordinary people, on the other hand, have difficulty figuring out what date next Monday is even when it's Friday and you just need to add 3. They'll just look it up in a paper calendar or their mobile device.
Pxtl 12y ago
It's brilliant, I love it! That said, I'd be happy just to see the Daylight Saving time-switch left on the dustbin of history.

136 points by skinofstars 12y ago

"The International Fixed calendar sucked the personality out of marking time, making every week and month as predictable as humanly possible. [...] It's an impossible feat that doesn't need pulling off and, thankfully, no one is trying to anymore." Spoken like someone who's never had to write date handling logic. Having "personality" in your calendar system is a bug, not a feature. I feel confident that we could maintain our overall levels of personality/joie de vivre/je ne sais quoi by spending less time dealing with an incredibly arbitrary calendar system and more time doing things we actually enjoy.

tempestn 12y ago
A very small percentage of the population ever has to write date handling logic. For the rest, things "just work", thanks to those few. Besides, even as a member of that small group, I like the variety of the current calendar, inefficient as it is.
- NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
  Someone's never written very many sql queries. I'm pointing at you, tempestn.
- 32bitkid 12y ago
  One has to admit that it complicates even trivial communications about days and times. Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Or "Is Nov 12th on the weekend?" I feel these are practical things that _most_ people would _like_ to easily reason about, but can't. It imperial units for days; or like trying to do math in a numerical system where each significant digit has a different random radix. Does it have variety? Yes... Is even remotely fun to do anything practical with? No.
  - drostie 12y ago
    Well, we already do math in a crazy-radix system for time, and the not-easily-divisible unitless variable of (1 year / 1 day) means that we can't do too much better -- we can reduce the problem to about one crazy radix, but no smaller; that radix will probably always depend on the value of the more-significant number in the date (the year). But yes, we probably should quash the "variety is fun" argument early in the discussion. The problem is that it's a persistent low cost in the back of everyone's heads. Sure, when you think about it you might like it a lot, but it will then stress you out in hard-to-perceive ways during the rest of the year, with no real benefit to show for it. The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months. This is a bad idea; if two systems are going to exist in parallel they need to be disambiguated in practice.
    - toyg 12y ago
      >The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months. The problem is, you'll find, that naming things is an incredibly political act. Agreeing on a new name for anything is a terribly complicated process, and when you're talking about something every single person has a stake in... well, it would have never happened. He tried very skillfully to bypass all that, and basically succeeded. No, his mistake was to underestimate the clout that religious tradition still had on large sectors of the ruling elites. Even now, when we pride ourself in the "scientificness" and rationality of our societies, we're still enslaved by stories written by agrarian priests at the dawn of civilization -- in many ways, it's worse now because nobody would even entertain proposals as bold as modernizing a system we've been using, almost unchanged, for two millennia, no matter how broken it might be.
  - chongli 12y ago
    Even questions like "What's the date of friday next week?" can't be quickly answered. Fortunately we don't have a very pressing need to answer these sorts of questions; we have tools galore to handle them for us: smartphones, calendars, messaging apps, meetup etc. Topics like these often remind me of one of Einstein's more famous quotes: [I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books. ...The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think. We used to spend an enormous amount of time teaching our children mathematical tricks which have now all been made completely obsolete by the scientific calculator. Only the most rudimentary of arithmetical strategies have survived, if only for the fact that it's still a little inconvenient to reach into your pocket when scanning and counting objects with your eyes.
- wtbob 12y ago
  You know, given that we have computers to perform the calculations, my own mad dream is to return to solar hours: twelve hours from sunrise to sunset, and twelve from sunset to sunrise. Thus summer hours would be longer and winter days would be shorter. Ditto minutes and seconds. Science would of course need to have a standardised second almost always different from the current second, but that's no different from having a standardised temperature and pressure almost always different from the current temperature and pressure.
  - juliangregorian 12y ago
    What on earth do you see the benefit of this as?
    - wtbob 12y ago
      My theory is that living according to the sun is more natural and consequently more pleasant than living according to a metronome.
sk5t 12y ago
An excellent video touching on some of the intractable aspects of our datetime-marking system's personality quirks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY
delecti 12y ago
I've never felt any positive feelings towards any of the variances in how we keep time. "Oh golly gee, December's got a full 31 days, how exciting"
tjradcliffe 12y ago
Yeah, it sucks the personality out of marking time like metric sucks the personality out of measuring space. I like personality in my dog and my friends, not in my systems of measurement. Dates are almost impossible to reason about, and yet people are so used to our current broken system they aren't even aware of how badly they manage it. It is routine for date-time packages to produce bizarre results like "a month before a month from now" not being "today" in all cases because no one has any idea what anyone else means by "month", although everyone who has never thought about these problems is certain that everyone else means exactly what they mean in all ambiguous cases. Anyone who has worked on date-time problems (not even libraries, just trying to correct for the special cases, cultural differences or just plain weirdness that the library of your choice doesn't deal with) will recognize the horrible truth of the joke, "I used to be in favour of space-travel, then I realized what effect it will have on date-time libraries."
- Swizec 12y ago
  My favourite example of this is "tomorrow" because obviously, tomorrow is when you and I wake up the next day, NOT a minute past midnight. Annoys me to no end that most calendar systems still don't understand that.
  - novaleaf 12y ago
    ... perhaps it is telling: I can't figure out if you are being sarcastic or not. :/
  - daurnimator 12y ago
    Not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. If I said "the servers are down for maintenance at 2am tomorrow" when would you think they will be unavailable?
    - Swizec 12y ago
      I wasn't being sarcastic at all. If you said "2am tomorrow" I would assume two hours after next midnight. Perhaps this is a result of my usually late schedule because I normally go to bed around 2am, so everything up to then and including midnight is "tonight".
jerf 12y ago
"I feel confident that we could maintain our overall levels of personality/joie de vivre/je ne sais quoi by spending less time dealing with an incredibly arbitrary calendar system and more time doing things we actually enjoy." Backing your claim, I'd observe this is already a manifested fact. Consider holidays like Easter, which already are set by rules that have little to do with the calendar itself, and there's a number of such holidays floating about without any special problems of their own (above and beyond the problems of the calendar in general). The "personality" of the year is already independent of how we mark the time.

gtbcb 12y ago

I love the idea of a 13 months calendar; however, you're birthday would be on the same day every year :0/.

lanna 12y ago
Unless you were born Feb 29, I guess everyone's birthday is on the same day every year. Mine, for instance, is always on Sep 11, every single year.
- ComSubVie 12y ago
  You're confusing day (Monday, ...) with date (12th Dec).
  - jamie_ca 12y ago
    He's pointing out that those stuck on a leap day are still stuck. If you count by day-of-year when doing the conversion, though, it's the people born new year's eve on a leap year that are impacted.

hasenj 12y ago

Why do we even have a 7-day week? 7 and 28 are just as arbitrary as 12. Why do we even have a solar year? If the year was 100 days, we could have a whole year of summer.

ijk 12y ago
Except that the year is based on the solar orbit, which has some quite obvious effects via the axial tilt causing seasons. The month is based on the lunar orbits, which are a bit more arbitrary now and less important with an urban rather than agricultural economy, but still not completely arbitrary. Weeks are a bit arbitrary, as far as we can tell, but very widespread and we seem to be stuck with them.
- aetherson 12y ago
  I'm always blown away by people who don't understand weeks. A lunar month is 28 days. There are few divisors of 28. 2, 4, 7, and 14 are the only ones. 28 days is too long for convenience if it's your shortest grouping of days. 2 days is too short. So, 4x7 or 7x4. Having 7 4 day weeks every month is probably a bit less convenient than 4 7 day weeks. Hence, 7 day weeks. (Or two 14 day weeks, which I think you essentially used to see some of the time: it seems like 17th-19th Century Britain was more aligned on fortnights than weeks). Not NECESSARY in the same way that days are, but it's not exactly mysterious how they came about. Edit: Oh, also, in terms of preferring 7 or 14 to 2 or 4, think about the lunar cycle. It easily breaks down into 7 or 14 day periods (7 days = new to half, or half to full, or full to half, or half to new. 14 days = new to full or full to new. 4 days = ?) Edit2: Of course, a lunation (full moon to full moon) is 29.5 days, as opposed to the sidereal month (same part of sky to same part of sky) of 27.3 days. But I suspect that in antiquity, most people dealt with a conventional 28 days for both.
  - jccooper 12y ago
    Weeks mostly have to do with the market cycle, which has been anywhere from 4 to ten days depending on the local economy. The Chinese in particular used 5 or 10 day weeks for quite some time. That works better for lunation than 7. The seven day standard seems to have worked as a reasonable compromise across a wide variety of ancient economies and plan

cvburgess 12y ago

I really like this idea - it makes scheduling things a whole lot easier. I also like the concepts of the one week month and "year day" - for some reason I feel like I'd get more pumped about year day than I'll ever get about new years.

function_seven 12y ago
I didn't see anything about a one-week month on there, but the diagrams sure make it look that way.

latortuga 12y ago

This would complicate anything that is paid for monthly, including but not limited to: employee salaries, rent/mortgage, subscriptions, utilities, etc. Do we just ignore Sol for those purposes or roll it into another month? Having your birthday perpetually on a wednesday would also not be so much fun. Perhaps "year day" could shift every year forward by 1 week day - year day could be Monday and then Jan 1 of the next year could be a Tuesday etc.

krschultz 12y ago
If we all switched to it, wouldn't it simplify all of those things? Right now if you get paid every other week, you get paid 3 times in 2 months and twice in all the other months. If you get paid twice a month on the 15th and last day of the month, payroll constantly has to take account of holidays and weekends because the day of the week is always fluctuating. All of those things would have to change, but they would be simpler after the change. It's the same argument as switching to the metric system in the US. Unfortunately the fixed cost of having to switch outweighs the benefits of switching (certainly for the calendar, less so for metric).
estel 12y ago
Don't some companies already run salary in thirteen four week periods? I've worked at at least one that did.
- jeffasinger 12y ago
  I'm not 100% sure, but in the US, this is relatively rare, as it's required in most situations to be paid at least 2 times per month. I think all but 5 states have laws dictating pay frequency, and in most cases they require at least two times a month pay frequency. The most popular pay schedules tend to be 24, 26, and 52 times per year. EDIT: This was supposed to be a reply to redblacktree. State law examples: - http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm http://www.dir.ca.gov/dlse/faq_paydays.htm - http://labor.ny.gov/legal/counsel/pdf/frequency-of-pay-frequently-asked-questions.pdf http://labor.ny.gov/legal/counsel/pdf/frequency-of-pay-frequ...

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IgorPartola 12y ago

This. I have been thinking about this for a long time. Basically, 364 days are exactly the same, and what is currently December 31st would become the Year Day where everyone has it off. If it's a leap year, there'd be two Year Days. Simple, efficient, and easy to understand. Birthdays being on the same day of the week is a poor objection: your birthday already falls on a weekday much more often then not, and chances are you celebrate it on the weekend before or after. We'd lose variability in holidays that are "last Thursday of the month": they'd just be on a specific date every year. One nice thing we'd gain is that the phase of the moon would shift much slower with respect to our calendar (the moon doesn't do a Year Day). I suppose some superstitious healthcare workers might object to this. If you think about it, there are many more things naturally tied to 28 days than 28/30/31.

beefman 12y ago
Actually the synodic month is closer to 365/12 days than to 28 days, so the 13-month calendar drifts slightly faster with respect to phases of the moon.

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dfar1 12y ago

My birthday would always be on a Sunday!

tempestn 12y ago
Did you check the day-month of your current birthday, or the day of the year? My birthday is April 8; that's the 98th day of the year (most years), which would be April 14 in the new calendar.
tehaugmenter 12y ago
Also for the superstitious there would always be Friday the 13th
- johnnyo 12y ago
  Easy fix, just start the month on a Monday instead of a Sunday
  - someear 12y ago
    but then there would never be a Friday the 13th, which is also a problem. When would Hollywood release all its horror movies?
    - Pxtl 12y ago
      Won't somebody please think of the bikers!?
  - vorg 12y ago
    Starting the week on Monday seems more common than Sunday for most countries, I believe France does. And China and Japan name their days literally "Day 1" for Monday, ... "Day 6" for Saturday, and "Day Sun" for Sunday.
    - MichaelBurge 12y ago
      This is wrong. Saturday in Japanese is 土曜日, which is like "Earth day". There's also "Sun day"(Sunday), "Moon day"(Monday), "Fire day"(Tuesday), "Water day"(Wednesday), "Tree day"(Thursday), "Gold day"(Friday), "Earth day"(Saturday). So your claim is wrong in Japanese for every day except Sunday. If you see something written like 四日("4 day"), this refers to the day of the month not the day of the week(for Japanese).

kcovia 12y ago

Also in alternate calendars: Each day in the Republican Calendar was divided into ten hours, each hour into 100 decimal minutes, and each decimal minute into 100 decimal seconds. Thus an hour was 144 conventional minutes (more than twice as long as a conventional hour), a minute was 86.4 conventional seconds (44% longer than a conventional minute), and a second was 0.864 conventional seconds (13.6% shorter than a conventional second). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

faehnrich 12y ago

Lousy Smarch weather.

caio1982 12y ago

Somewhat related: the other day (this week even!) my wife was puzzled by the names of months and she asked me about the meaning of each. If you think about it for a moment you'll figure most of them out, but in any case this is a good summary: http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/month_names.html http://www.design.caltech.edu/erik/Misc/month_names.html

function_seven 12y ago

From the article: > Easter would fall on April 15 every year on Cotsworth's calendar I don't understand why this would be. Can someone explain?

NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
Easter is tied to the days of the week, it's always on a Sunday. So it's going to be week-aligned. This calendar aligns months with weeks. Months are always exactly 4 weeks.
- function_seven 12y ago
  But Easter moves around quite a bit during the year, sometimes being on the 83rd day of the year (in 2008), sometimes on the 110th day of the year (2014), and various dates between. I don't see how changing to a 13 month calendar would affect the first full moon after the spring Equinox, since the lunar cycle doesn't mesh with the solar one.
  - NoMoreNicksLeft 12y ago
    > I don't see how changing to a 13 month calendar would affect the first full moon after the spring Equinox, since the lunar cycle doesn't mesh with the solar one. Just checked... you seem to be correct. The lunar calendar isn't aligned with this well enough. While the equinox date is fixed, the first full moon after that should bounce around by several days at least. Even allowing that it's always the Sunday after that, it still seems as if it could fluctuate by a week in either direction.
aetherson 12y ago
I think that they're suggesting that this would be conventionally the case: "Okay, we're now deciding that Easter Sunday will be April 15, which is always a Sunday." I think this is on the basis that it's important for Easter to be on a Sunday, and not nearly as important that it be the Sunday following the first full moon following the equinox, or whatever: just that once you say "it's got to be on a Sunday," you need some damn way to figure out which Sunday each year.

ChuckMcM 12y ago

When I was at Intel they marked everything in Work Weeks, that was essential for scheduling things like chip fabrication plants. It took a little while to get used to but then it made computing questions of 'when' quite straight forward. I'm personally in favor of a more structured system like this, my wife on the other hand is viscerally opposed. If that schism is widespread I expect the next calender change to occur when the known world is ruled by an emperor :-)

gtirloni 12y ago

Mars Inc. uses 13-period calendar for everything.

coleca 12y ago
When I worked for Royal Ahold they used a 13 period calendar. The date logic was much worse to manage because you still had the rest of the world and every programming language and database that used the Gregorian calendar. We had a single mainframe subprogram that managed the whole thing. It was written in assembler and the few times it broke, the entire company stopped. Financials, ordering, invoicing, everything. Eventually they rewrote it in a more modern language, COBOL. This was in 2010.

0x45696e6172 12y ago

This seems to be slightly inferior to the Pax calendar[1]. The Pax calendar has another very cool property, which is that the weekdays are always in sync with Gregorian calendar. This is done by carrying over leapdays until you have one full week accumulated, which is then inserted as a leapweek, in the same way we insert leapdays in the Gregorian calendar. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_Calendar

msoad 12y ago

Fun fact: The arabic calendar which is based on Moon movements used to have an extra month every four(?) years to adjust the season changes. It was called Nasi' month. But after a Quran Sura published that prohibited this month Arabic calendar lost it's accuracy for seasons.[1] The Iranian Calendar that is based on sun movements was safe from this Sura because it didn't have an extra month but an extra day each five years.[2] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasi%27 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nasi%27 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_calendars http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iranian_calendars

cauterized 12y ago
The Hebrew calendar (also lunar) still does this - a leap month in (IIRC) 7 out of every 19 years.

frogpelt 12y ago

In addition to the 13 month calendar, I wish the year started in March or April. The beginning of Spring* makes more sense for a new year than the middle of winter. *I realize this is only true in the northern hemisphere, but 90% of the world's population lives in the Northern Hemisphere. The other 10% can start their year in the Fall.

logfromblammo 12y ago
Given that the northward equinox is relevant to astronomy and geographic reference frames, I have also had occasions to wish that not only would the year start at that instant, but also that it be considered day 0 of the new year, rather than day 1.
gohrt 12y ago
This is how the calendar originally worked (DECemeber is 10th month), until politics intervened in ancient Rome.
- tjradcliffe 12y ago
  The Julian calendar typically started the year on the 25th of March (Lady Day) at noon (prior to clocks it was much easier to reckon mid-day than mid-night... navies kept this practice at least into the 1800's). This was true into the 1600's in parts of Europe and North America.

imroot 12y ago

This is a little bit different from the accounting 13 month calendar -- an "Adjustment" month that usually falls in the next FY that the accounting/auditors can do adjustments and still have 'true' dates on everything. Honestly, having another month to pay bills (and you know that nobody's going to pro-rate everything down to 13 months) isn't really appealing right now, nor would the additional overhead of two more payroll cycles. Logically, it makes sense, though.

redblacktree 12y ago
For what it's worth, I'm already paid for 26 pay cycles each year, and I work at a company of 30k+.

minikites 12y ago

This makes more sense than switching to the metric system.

bharath28 12y ago
Why? I'm curious.

cesarbs 12y ago

I wonder what Jews, Seventh Day Adventists, and Sabbatarians in general would think of this.

dredmorbius 12y ago

Eviatar Zerubavel's Seven Day Circle is a detailed and complex history of time telling. It really helps to understand that in a calendar we're trying to measure three distinct (and variable) cycles, none of which fits precisely into the others, and each of which imposes its own rhythms on human life. Attempts to break each from the current 7/12/365 basis have virtually all failed. The first is the Earth's rotation about its own axis -- different when measured with respect to the stars or the Sun. The second is that of the Moon about Earth. The third is of the Earth about the Sun. We overlay them on each other and pick rough correspondences. Much of the division has to do with Babylonian time reckoning, based on 360, and its factors: 2 * 2 * 2 * 3 * 3 * 5. From that you find 2, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10, 12, 15, 18, 20, 24, 30, 45, 72, 90, 180, and 360. A seven-day week doesn't fit this directly but is close (between 6 and 8), and a 30-day month also fits well. Then you come to realize that all timekeeping, _especially_ that which picks a specific starting point, is arbitrary. The book also details several attempts to change the system, particularly following the French and Russian revolutions (oh, and the reason for that being the October revolution -- and there's the question of what was the last nation to adopt the Gregorian calendar, and why the output of 'cal 1752' is what it is ... and why even _that_ is arbitrary (it depends on where you're specifying the date). http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780226981659-2 http://www.powells.com/biblio/61-9780226981659-2

tjradcliffe 12y ago
In New England (and likely elsewhere) you can see gravestones from the sixteen and seventeen hundreds that have two death dates on them, as different parts of the world converted to the Gregorian calendar at different times, and both Gregorian and Julian dates were in use in the area for a while (parts of Europe converted as early as the late 1500's).
canjobear 12y ago
It's not clear that the rotation of the moon has much significance in modern life any more, so maybe the problem can be simplified. What was the significance of cycles of the moon in the past, anyway? The main thing I can think of is astrology. Can tides be predicted accurately using phases of the moon?

SixSigma 12y ago

"We've always done it this way" are the seven most expensive words in business. Catherine DeVrye (2000)

narrator 12y ago

There's also the ill-fated Soviet Revolutionary Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_calendar

midhir 12y ago
And the similarly fated French Republican Calendar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar

seccess 12y ago

Okay, but can we come up with a calendar system where the months September, October, November, and December don't have the wrong names? It has always bothered me that the prefix sept- means seven, but it is the ninth month, oct- is for the tenth month, etc...

vorg 12y ago
Have a 14-month year, then start the following year in March.
- seccess 12y ago
  Sold. This could have the added benefit that every leap year we can get two days off for new years eve, since people will be used to getting Feb 28th off anyway ;)
saraid216 12y ago
Those names are from when the calendar only had 10 months. They tacked on two months at the beginning. In other fun facts, March is so named because that's when you go to war.

drdeadringer 12y ago

Reading this article is my first exposure to this 13-month calendar [I don't count the Simpson's episode]. I'm glad for the read and found it very interesting.

kijin 12y ago

Using the same calender every year might work fine in America and some of the Western European countries. (According to the article, Easter and Thanksgiving can be given fixed dates in the 13-month calendar.) But many non-Western cultures have holidays tied to phases of the moon. Chinese New Year would still move around a lot from year to year, making it impossible to reuse last year's calendar. Ditto for Chuseok in Korea, which needs to coincide with a full moon. So yeah, this looks like a nice change, but it's not going to be completely static from year to year in every culture. Besides, I don't think it will completely eliminate the difficulty of figuring out what date "next Thursday" is. We at HN tend to be mathematically competent, so we can easily calculate multiples of 7 in our heads and subtract a few without breaking a sweat. Most ordinary people, on the other hand, have difficulty figuring out what date next Monday is even when it's Friday and you just need to add 3. They'll just look it up in a paper calendar or their mobile device.

Pxtl 12y ago

It's brilliant, I love it! That said, I'd be happy just to see the Daylight Saving time-switch left on the dustbin of history.