1y ago

Jesse is smarter than what we give him credit for.

218 comments

Flaws:
fails to address leap years
fails to address 365th day
moon cycle will still slowly deviate
retains clunky 7-day week that doesn't interact will with decimal counting system
I like it, but I got an even better proposal. Weeks should have ten day weeks, and each month should have 3 weeks. summer/winter solstice and the spring/autumn equinox as well as new years day are special holidays that fall between months and interrupt the week cycle. In leap years, new years is two days.
The 1st, 11th and 21st of each month are now Mondays, so you can tell the weekday of any date. Months are the same length just like in Jesse's proposal, but an even 30 instead of a clunky 28.
I've thought about this a lot
- Congratulations, you've successfully reinvented the Egyptian civil calendar, complete with the intercalary holidays and all. Literally the only change is to add weeks. And yes, it did work really well, especially since the feast could add or lose a day to adjust to a known reference (the rise and fall of the Nile in their case). I second this proposal to go back.
- Our corporate overlords will want 8-day work-weeks. LOL
  
  Yeah I'm only in if we get 3 days off per week.
- Don't touch my weekends
  
  5 day weekend
  
  We could fit three break day in a a 10 day week (3/10 is slightly bigger than 2/7). We could put the third day in the middle of the week to not have 7 work days in a row. In the fourth day mabey?
- Sounds a lot like the French Revolutionary Calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Months
- It actually does account for keep years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
  
  Leap years and keep years
- There are a number of different propositions. All with some benefits and downsides.
- I hope that one of the new days is named after you and we all curse you every Potatuesday for creating more workdays.
  
  Having a day called Potatuesday... might be worth it
- What's the work schedule
  
  3-1-4-2 would work and give 70% work to 30% off - currently we have 71.4% work in a 7 day week so it's pretty similar with less friday burnout
  
  Less.
- I like the 10 days week, but people, please rush to create a new religion to cover multiple free days or im out
  
  The extra days of the week is called Lazyday, Chillsday, and Beersday.
  It is forbidden to work on these days, the Lord commands it.
  
  every other day is labour day, and thus a holiday.
  
  My religion has a holy day called I'm taking today off or I'll cut you
- Weeks should have ten day weeks, and each month should have 3 weeks.
  Here's why I'm going to say no. It's because businesses would just rip us off by turning the working week into 8 days and just retaining the 2 day weekend.
  No, and double no.
  
  That’s very pessimistic. It assumes that there is a corporate led reform. Which is unlikely. If it was a grass roots campaign, the call for change would include a weekend proposal from the start. By the time businesses come around to supporting it, the weekend will alredy be defined as 3-work-2-off, or 7-work-3-off.
  
  Businesses don't have the power to do that if we collectively tell them no. But that being said, how DO you split up a 10-day week keeping the same basic ratio of "weekend" days?
  Three weekdays, followed by a single "weekend" day or mid-week break, then four weekdays followed by a two-day weekend?
- Just don't propose a unified earth/solar time even though it's going to be necessary once we start spacefaring more lol.
  Funnily enough this issue is being brought up a lot on Lemmy recently. I've been at the IFC and Fixed Time haters for a bit in a different thread lol.
  https://www.worldtimeserver.com/learn/the-proposal-to-abolish-time-zones/
  
  I recently thought of abolishing timezones altogether and everybody I told thought I was batshit crazy. thank you!
- What names shall we give the new weekdays? Because I was thinking maybe we should rename a few existing ones, so no weekdays start with the same letters. Then they can be abbreviated to their respective first letters.
  
  Someday, Funday, and Oneday.
- Weeks should have ten day weeks
  And instead of calling them "weeks", we could call them by the much more self-explanatory term "tendays".
  summer/winter solstice and the spring/autumn equinox as well as new years day are special holidays that fall between months and interrupt the week cycle
  You can simplify it a little bit by putting the intercalary days between months, rather than using them for the solstices. We can put Midwinter between January 30 and February 1 and Midsummer between July 30 and August 1, in the northern hemisphere.
  For the sake of putting it in a more user-friendly location, our leap day should be in the summer for the northern hemisphere (where most of the population is). So put it the day after Midsummer.
  The only thing I would do differently from the Calendar of Harptos is that, like you, I would use New Year's Day as the 5th annual intercalary day.
  
  Intercalary is one of those words I never expect to hear outside of the https://app.fantasy-calendar.com userbase
  
  the equinoxes and solstices are roughly 90 days apart anyway so we can do both :)
  Calendar of Harptos actually influenced my post hehe
- The 365th day is new years day... duh.
- Current workforce is schedule around a 7day centric week. It's far easier to reorganize where the weeks fall in the year than changing the structure of a week. Suddenly the workforce would have segment of work overlapping between weeks, it's an organizational nightmare.
  The international fixed calendar did propose a solution for the 365 days and leap year but it's basically out-of-the-week holidays.
  
  wdym? How is 10 more difficult than 7?
- This is what I want! Fuck, this has it all! Its beautiful!
- I don't see why 7 day weeks are bad in regard to the number system. We rarely need to divide the days of the week into equal portions. Remembering 1, 8, 15 and 22 as mondays would be trivial after a while.
  You also claim that failure to address the 365th day and leap years is an issue, but your proposal also includes several cycle-breaking days. So the same issue would persist.
  Moon deviation isn't something I really worry about, but having a period which almost align with the cycle seems useful. It would be easy to just examine the initial phase within the month to chart out the rest of the month.
  However, I think the biggest flaw is that the calendar would be divided into 13 equal parts, which sucks to divide into typical use cases, i.e. into 2 parts. You could split the 7th month, but it's not really elegant. Dividing the year into 3 or 4 parts would be a mess.
- I do five day holiday for end of the year to account for the extra days like the Mayans did but I really like your idea of spreading four of them out to the solstices and equinoxes!
- Or just have days that are just not a part of the week - like Leap years - are their own day.
- Any solution that has some form of "oh those days? Nah, we don't count those" is disqualified immediately in my book.
  
  As a software developer, I would rather give up the 1.25 days off a year just to not have to work around some weird monthless and weekless date every year.
  
  laughs in Egyptian...
  They had 5 or 6 intercalary holidays to celebrate the new year and adjust to the rise of the Nile (and we'd adjust it to astronomical time with leap years). It actually worked really well, and kept the people happy with a 5-day rest and celebration each year (something this world could definitely use).
- Dec can be the month with 29 days and a 4 year leap day. That way all the nonsense is in one place.
  Moon cycle doesn't matter.
  7 day system is not clunky it is human.
- Weeks should have a prime number of days. It’s not wise to be dividing weeks up.
  
  why not?

This meme brought to you by your local landlord
- I mean it also benefits salaried employees, 13 months means 26 pay periods
  
  But you typically get paid an amount per year, divided between pay periods. You work the same amount, get paid the same amount overall, and get more pay periods at the expense of less pay per period
  
  There's the same amount of weeks though. It's just spread over 13 months instead of 12 so it would be the same total bi-weekly pay periods.

I would like to believe in calendar reform as a goal. At the same time, I think calendars are one of the only pretty decent somewhat universal standards we have going for us, and if we changed it at all, you KNOW we would just be using two competing standards, not everyone would want to switch because people are stupid, so unless you forced it from the top down through technology, like a really advanced, shitty version of y2k, which would make people super pissed, I dunno if any of it would work.
- XKCD: Standards
  
  This is the reason. Small changes like un-doing Daylight Savings is doable. But moving every holiday, birthday, and anniversary to another month+day combo would make this move daunting. The inertia of this kind of data would just make any transition period super long. So while you could implement the new calendar as a locale for phones and computer operating systems, but you'd probably be using two calendars for the rest of your life.
- Counterpoint: 1st shift, 2nd shift and 3rd shift work. Some people are better off using different systems that exist alongside but separate from the norm.
  ... And vice versa, workplaces and life offer us systems that dont work well for us but we need to use them because we need money to live. So not only would 3rd shift be a bad fit for most people, I'd argue most people do worse with the current calendar than they could with a new one.
  
  Fair point actually, I suppose, then, that my point, retrospectively, is that nobody should ever expect that, were we to adopt any new calendar or time measurement system, we'd somehow do less math. We will only ever do more math.
  There is only math.

It really annoys the hell out of me that we don't use a better calendar. I think about this once a week at least. I feel like being stuck with the Gregorian calendar is a good example of why so many inefficient structures exist in society - some assholes centuries ago decided on a thing, and out of habit and laziness we've stuck with it since.
- just think of everything in terms of seconds from 1970 and itll all fall out
  
  Until 2038
  
  A compromise for the time keeping purists:
  Set the current time to exactly 13.77 billion years (in seconds) then add the current Unix time in seconds from January 1, 1970 to maintain continuity. Just conveniently forget about the 40 million year uncertainty, it will cloud your mind.
  This way we have an absolute clock that is closer to reality than from some religiously based calendar.
  
  Until someone adds a leap second
  
  Better idea: instead of Epoch time move it back a few months to the moon landing.
- They programming community calls this technical debt.
- Right? Imagine using the sun and the moon to track time. So fucking dumb.
- Can we give the UN all the power it can and have them implement this new calendar?
  
  No.
- Persian calendar exists, a lot of people use it.

I came up with this independently years ago. It'll never catch on for the idiotic reason that you can't subdivide 13 like you can 12. 13 is a prime number, while 12 can be divided easily by 2, 3, 4, and 6. 12 is like the whore of simple math.
- Yeah, but that only matters for months. We could instead just use weeks since there are 52 weeks per year, so a quarter would be 13 weeks instead of 3 months. It would be easier to determine how many weeks there are in a span of a couple months because it's not variable, or any number of months because they're just multiples of 4. I know a lot of people would be turned off by the system because the number 13 comes up so often and people are superstitious but it really would make things easier imo.

But that's only 364 days. Which month gets the extra day, throwing the while thing off?
- can we put the extra 30 hours on the end of each year as a formless blob of 'time off'?
- On new years eve at midnight we stop the clocks for 1.24 days, then start them again.
  
  What about syncing with the sun? I feel like doing that for a day every year and every 4 years an extra day after would be better.
- You could have one day outside of all months. It could be a holiday or something.
- Only let the new "last month" have one extra day would fix this. That would break the Weekdays, but perhaps that's not so bad as recurring events like birthdays and holidays are then not always destined per se to be on the same weekday.
- February. Just because it's always been shorter.
- The day doesn't have to exist in a month. It can be its own day at the end/beginning of the year.
- At a certain point in each year, probably at the end, we get one extra monthless day, a holiday.
  Every 4 years we do two monthless days.
  Also, what the fuck is wrong with Jesse? We start each month on Sunday, so that the month is divided into 4 weeks. Not one almost-week, three full weeks, and a spare hanging chad of a Sunday.
  
  He's thinking Mexican. They start weeks on Monday

The prime factors of 365 is 5 and 73, hence a month should either be 73 days and there should be 5 of them, or there should be 73 months with 5 days each.
Mathematical perfection!
- Problem here is there's actually 365.25 days in a year, the .25 is why we have leap years.
  
  Ok, thats fine, we'll just... The factors of 365.25 are: 487¹×3¹×2⁻²
  Wait....
  
  The problem here is that 0.25 is actually an overestimate by about 3 in every 400 years. That's why we don't have leap years on every hundredth year, but we do have them again every 400. (And, of course, you can get even more precise than that.)
  
  Your mom has leap years
- Yes also 364 days from 13x28 would not align with years around the sun. We'd still need a leap year with 5x73 but that's easier than correcting from 364.
  
  12x30, 5 or 6-day intercalary (government-mandated) days off for rest and celebration of Yule + New Year's (just make them all December 31-35/6).

Is this true??? If so WHY THE F... ARE WR STILL USING THE CURRENT CALENDAR.
Honestly I would be all for a new calendar if this is true
- The main hiccup is the system is off by a day. Some people "fix" this by saying the extra day should be "new years day" or something similar that exists outside the main calendar and doesn't have an actual date or day assigned to it. Personally I think that's kind of silly but it does work.
  The second problem which to me is a much bigger problem, is he argues every month starting on Monday is a feature, I think it's a bug. The result of this is every date is the same day, every year. If you are born on a Wednesday, your birthday will always be on a Wednesday. I like it mixing up and getting to have your birthday on different days.
  Also almost everyone will have a new birthday they have to learn and too many people would simply be unwilling to go along with that.
  And all that is ignoring the monumental task of changing every computer system in the world.
  Edit: also 13 is just kind of a rubbish number to work with and doesn't divide into anything nicely.
  
  Excellent discussion actually.
  
  Same day every year is definitely a feature. Make holidays on Fridays or Mondays. Celebrate your birthday on Saturday if you want.
  
  Yes, I am that guy but the word is 'hiccup', not hickup. Although, coming from a family of rednecks, this fits as we do tend to mess stuff up quite often.
- The issue is that 13 is not divisible by anything, so we can't split the year by halves or quarters like we do now.
  
  Sure you can, just not by months, you would need to use weeks instead to retain integer values. A half year would be 26 weeks and a quarter year would just be 13 weeks. Of course this fails if you wish to divide further, but at that point you could just say 2 months and people would know for certain you are saying 8 weeks.
  
  Can't be as bad as daylight savings though.

The thirteen month calendar is called the International Fixed Calendar. George Eastman instituted its use at the Eastman Kodak Company back in 1928, and it was used there until 1989.
- It's been around a lot longer than that.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_calendar
  
  All indigenous people around the world knew the wisdom of the turtle .... It's almost as it white man severed the connection between the people and the sun ....
  Wtf is this woo woo garbage lmao
  
  how did the cherokee account for the fact that this is mathematically incorrect and would cause dates to drift across the actual solar year?

I just wish the Earth turned a little slower so a year has 360 days and each day gives you a clean one degree of angular movement (or we defined a full revolution around an axis as 365 degrees since 360 is arbitrary too as far as math is concerned. Actually, anyone know why we didn't do that?)
- 360 isn't as arbitrary as you think and was chosen specifically for its divisibilty. 365 doesn't divide well by much of anything.
  
  I'd always heard that it was because the ancient sumarrians thought there were 360 days in a year combined with the fact that their holy number was 60 so it divided cleanly.
  
  Ah. Fair enough then.
- I just wish the Earth turned a little slower
  Good news, all you have to do is wait...several billion years!
  
  What level civilization do we need to be to fix this ourselves

Fun fact: this calendar exists and was in use by Eastman Kodak for most of its existence:
International Fixed Calendar
- It's the calendar business use to divide up quarters/periods for the year. Except one quarter has an extra month.
  
  Do other businesses besides Kodak use this calendar? Kodak is the only one named in that linked Wikipedia article

I just thought of something that could be better,
Scrap months altogether, just divide the year into quarters of 13 weeks each, name them for the seasons, Winter, Spring, Summer, Fall, there isn't really a reason why we need months specifically, if it's to shorten date numbers then count by week number and day number
Day/Week/Quarter/Year
Today's 7/8/4/23
- I don't like how I have to write another / and number. As a human, I am lazy.
  
  That, and Americans would do something stupid like have it be quarter/day/week/year or something.
  
  Year/quarter/day would be sufficient
- Preferably year/quarter/week/day but good idea
  
  nah hold on it has to be
  day/quarter/week/year
  /s
- Seasons vary by hemisphere, and it's counterintuitive to force half of the globe to accept summer as winter or winter as summer.
  
  Nothing stopping the other half from just flipping it to match their seasons, that's what they do already, and the number for date stays the same anyways
  
  Hey technically only 12% of the world's population lives in the southern hemisphere. Nowhere close to half.

The only authority I’ve seen that pushes 13 months is WMATA in DC, so they can charge you 13 times per year for a metro pass instead of 12. I always felt like that was some BS.

I like 10 months each with 6 weeks of 6 days each for a total of 360 days and a 5 day holiday at the end of every year (6 days during a leap year)
But Jesse really has opened my eyes to the possibility of a lunisolar calendar.
- 10 months used to be the standard, until some Caesers ended up getting a couple of months named after them.
  September (7th month) October (8th month) November (9th month) December (10th month)
  Those months would also be named appropriately again if we dropped July and August…. But then I’d lose my birthday.
  
  I used to think this too, but it turns out that it's not the case.
  July and August weren't new months added in. They were renamings of the existing months Quintilis and Sextilis. The disconnect between the months' numbers and the names their numbers represent actually comes from a later shifting of the start of the year from March back to January.
- The Chinese clanander is lunisolar. It has alternating 29 and 30 day months and a leap month once in a while to catch up with the seasons and such.

In keeping with tradition though we can only do this if we add the new month after August and name it Tiber.

Lousy Smarch

itt: 13 * 28 = 365.25
- It's an incomplete explanation. You have New Year's Day as an intercalary day, essentially January 0th creating a 3 day weekend. It's either considered a Saturday or not assigned a day of the week at all. Leap days are either immediately after or inserted as June 0th the same way.
  
  so it's still full of arbitrary bullshit? "we'll just have a day that doesn't count every year and another day that doesn't count every 4 years except when the year is divisible by 100".
  the idea here is that this system is more intuitive than our own, but it's not.

Aztec and mayan calendars iirc was 18 months of 20 days each and 5 extra days at the end of the year.

I would like to point out the biggest difficulty this faces.
There are about as many different ideas for new formats, complete with arguments about how they'd be the best one, as there are comments in this thread. And those arguments mostly hold up too.
A new format is never going to work because no one will be able to agree on what the best one is.

deleted
- Which star?
  
  Judi Dench

So here's what'd be a better alternative when considering seasons and quarters
March, June, September, and December are all 35 days long, every other month is 28 days long.
Day 365 is Year's End Day outside of the Calendar months, and Leap Day is an additional holiday inserted before January 1st when it happens.
The last adjustment I'd make is the Saint Monday plan, which is to say, make Monday a weekend day.
It's named after the moon, you see the moon at the end of the day, so the moon's day is the end of the week!
- Autumn and winter should be 5 days, rest should be split between spring summer half and half and then we would all be much more happier
  
  And how exactly would changing the calendar have an impact on the seasons?
- Or you'd make every season and quarter just three months and one week. Seems easy enough to work with.
  
  Fuck it, stop counting altogether, and call every day flobday

we need a decimal based clock like during the french revolution
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time
twelve months, each divided into three ten-day weeks called décades. The tenth day, décadi, replaced Sunday as the day of rest and festivity. The five or six extra days needed to approximate the solar or tropical year were placed after the final month of each year and called complementary days. This arrangement was an almost exact copy of the calendar used by the Ancient Egyptians, though in their case the year did not begin and end on the autumnal equinox.
A period of four years ending on a leap day was to be called a "Franciade". The name "Olympique" was originally proposed[8] but changed to Franciade to commemorate the fact that it had taken the revolution four years to establish a republican government in France.[9]
The leap year was called Sextile, an allusion to the "bissextile" leap years of the Julian and Gregorian calendars, because it contained a sixth complementary day.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

Fuckn year we have now was made way back in Rome, it was made in a way so no governing body would have the responsibility to fix the calendar every year to catch up, it was made even if there is no proper nation it'll still be accurate and be self sufficient

Now those are some prime months

I like 13, it's a prime number.

Well not exactly, this would require a leap month every so often

I saw this a few days ago already. Guys, this is not redditcirclejerk.

So funny thing I'm in a leftist discord and they convinced me that 24 hour time is better. I immediately switched to using it....
... And struggled to understand what time it was for months before switching back to my normal 12 hour clock. 😂
Basically, while I would eagerly support calendar reform, I may find the change difficult.
- I can't understand why anyone would be confused by this. We learn about 24h time format in primary school! It's also extremely easy to just subtract by 12.
  
  I'm just american and didnt learn 24 hour time as a child. It is easy in theory, just old habits die hard.

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