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?
I’m proposing that June is 365 days long, and we just abolish seasons. Can’t believe nobody thought of this.
Leap days would still be in February, so don’t forget to keep your jacket for one day every four years
THERE’S 365 DAYS OF SUMMER VACATION AND SCHOOL NEVER COMES ALONG JUST TO END IIIIIIT
Unless you live in a district that ends it’s school year in mid June. Then you have to go to school until lunch on June 182nd.
Schooooooooool’s out for summer
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
Happy flobday!
And tomorrow a good flobday!
And remove daylight saving time. Now I have to explain that yes, the report is correct and there were in fact 25 hours on that day.
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.
In keeping with tradition though we can only do this if we add the new month after August and name it Tiber.
I’m ok with this.
For The Emperor!
Lousy Smarch weather
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.
Your mom has 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.)
Yeah yeah Georgian reform. Problem it it breaks in 6500
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).
Fun fact: this calendar exists and was in use by Eastman Kodak for most of its existence:
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
Maybe not exactly as that, but the same idea
Are there any examples? I’m really interested in what other companies use the 13 month calendar.
I understand that businesses sometimes use a different calendar from the normal, but I think you’re describing the fiscal year, which is still a 12-month calendar. I don’t think there are any other companies that use a 13 month calendar.
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
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!
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
Ok, I’ve never heard of that site before, but I am definitely in its target market. Thanks for sharing!
You’re very welcome! It’s ultra useful for my dnd campaigns, I try to share it any chance I get
the equinoxes and solstices are roughly 90 days apart anyway so we can do both :)
Calendar of Harptos actually influenced my post hehe
the equinoxes and solstices are roughly 90 days apart anyway so we can do both
Right, but my point was that we shouldn’t use either equinoxes or solstices, because they occur around the 21st of their month at present. It’s better to put the intercalary days in between months so that a single month doesn’t get awkwardly split up.
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!
Weeks should have a prime number of days. It’s not wise to be dividing weeks up.
why not?
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.
“Hey, when are you going to do that thing I asked you to do?”
“Ohhhh, Someday… Shit.”
Realistic Answer:
Workday1, Workday2, Workday3.v2.Final
Because we would absolutely end up working on them. Who the fuck wants a longer work week?
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
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.
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.
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
Should just be 3 2 3 2
Should be from workers’ perspective, but 3-1-4-2 is still a win for pretty much everyone as it would most likely improve productivity potentially more than 4-3 while also giving “more” (marginally, but still about 4 days per year) time off than 5-2
Less.
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.
Don’t touch my weekends
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?
I vote we work on days 2,3,4 and 7,8,9 of the week.
5 day weekend
5 Day Weekends!!!
This is what I want! Fuck, this has it all! Its beautiful!
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?
It actually does account for keep years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
Leap years and keep years
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.
Hm fair enough. Let’s make the intercalary days part of the last week of the last month before they happen for programming/numbering purposes. So Midsummer is just June 31st, or the 11th day of the 18th week.
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).
They didn’t have software though and you don’t know if it either worked well (since the ppl who kept this system going were the same people who wrote about it) nor of it kept ppl happy. Besides: you can do that without the “not counting those” part, couldn’t you?
I think of it like the appendices of a book. The main story is counted with numbers, page 10, but the appendix is counted with Roman numerals, page X. While adding to the appendix increases the number of pages in the book, it does not change the length of the story.
Or just have days that are just not a part of the week - like Leap years - are their own day.
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.
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?
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.
Our corporate overlords will want 8-day work-weeks. LOL
Yeah I’m only in if we get 3 days off per week.
I dunno man, if hump day meant I still had the rest of the day plus 3 more days until the weekend, I think I’d snap.
Yeah you’d definitely need one day in the middle. Or Id say even better, a 3 day and 2x2 day work weeks with days off in between.
No dammit, we want 3 days off in the current 7 day week cycle. 5 days off a 10 day week works for me. We ask for that, get negotiated down to 4 day weekends and it works.
Fair enough, make it happen!
That would be amazing. Rn we take a little under a third of a week off. With that we would take almost half a week off.
Five days off at least.
Sounds a lot like the French Revolutionary Calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Months
I like the 10 days week, but people, please rush to create a new religion to cover multiple free days or im out
My religion has a holy day called I’m taking today off or I’ll cut you
every other day is labour day, and thus a holiday.
The extra days of the week is called Lazyday, Chillsday, and Beersday.
It is forbidden to work on these days, the Lord commands it.
The 365th day is new years day… duh.
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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.
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.
Unfortunately, you’re right.
just think of everything in terms of seconds from 1970 and itll all fall out
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.
Relativity would like a word.
Better idea: instead of Epoch time move it back a few months to the moon landing.
Until someone adds a leap second
Until 2038
64 bit computers exist
Until 292000002023ish
I know, it was just a joke. It’s not really like our brains can have an overflow error (…yet?).
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Now those are some prime months
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.
Not necessarily, some companies do half way and end of the month instead of strict every two weeks so they can claim a consistent monthly wage
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.
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.
Well hot damn!
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.
I like 13, it’s a prime number.
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.
No system can avoid arbitrary bullshit because the earth doesn’t go around the sun in an amount of time that’s an exact multiple of the time it takes to rotate.
Sounds like why fuck with it then. There’s a cost to converting that will be paid only to replace one set of arbitrary bullshit with another set of arbitrary bullshit. You can say you prefer one bullshit to another and no one can dispute you on that, but in the end it’s just one set of bullshit vs another and I’m already committed to the current one.
It’s probably too difficult to implement now because of computers being entrenched in the existing system. If we were going to implement it, it would have been 100 years ago.
Same issue with a dozenal number system…
The problem is that the earth doesn’t orbit around the sun in a whole # of days. A sidereal year is 365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes and 10 seconds, or 365.256 days.
Likewise, the moon doesn’t orbit the earth in a perfect whole # of days either. The moon takes 27.3 days.
Since we cannot change the orbital period or rotation of the earth, we are kind of stuck with accommodating the “arbitrary bullshit” of astrophysical bodies.
then, as I said to the last person who pointed this out even though my math implies that I already know it, why this new bullshit instead of the bullshit we’ve already implemented?
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
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