The world nearly adopted a calendar with 13 months of 28 days
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
I was thinking to myself I liked this idea until I saw this. So there are days that now do not belong to a week. I cannot imagine how much special casing this would require.
> “A ‘month’ does not mean anything,” they wrote. “A day means something. A year means something. But a month?”
Then by the same logic the week needs to be abolished. Then the problem above wouldn't exist. Now tell that to the religions.
You answered your own question in the following sentence - ISO 8601 timestamps do not require a time zone, and infer "local time" if none is provided.
The 1st would always be a Sunday, the 25th would always be a Thursday, etc.
Sure, celebrations can still be held on weekends, but it’s just not the same. And Fri 13th would die away.
Heck it's not even weird to not bother with this redefinition and just have a party on a more convenient day.
(My birthday falls on a national holiday where I live, though, so in practice I've never had to worry about school or work on my birthday.)
What's so frustrating to me is when I realize that, for example, public holiday falls on the weekend (I know this is solved by some countries by moving the holiday to Monday or Friday). Last year, 24th of Dec was a Saturday, pretty much the worst time for Christmas.
(FWIW, I agree that Monday is the second day, but mainly just because that's what I was raised to believe. Plus if Sunday is the end of the week, that means Saturday isn't a weekend anymore, which is nonsense.)
Friday and Sunday get different names, unrelated to Sabbath as far as I can tell -- paraskevi and kvira.
[1]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/Monday
Edit: also wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monday
Segunda-feira (2) = Monday
Terça-feira (3) = Tuesday
Quarta-feira (4) = Wednesday
Quinta-feira (5) = Thursday
Sexta-feira (6) = Friday
Sábado = Saturday
Domingo = Sunday
The weak parity didn't prevent a friend from booking a rental car in April although we were going to be in the destination city in July.. the days of the week matched!
More importantly the US should switch to the metric system.
https://www.nist.gov/pml/owm/metrication-law
15 USC § 205b
Like your arguments against changing the calendar to something more rational are the same arguments a lot of US folks use to justify not switching to the metric system.
Well played.
Why switch to a system that is widely agreed to be worse for normal human communication than the one we have.
Fahrenheit is far superior of a system, where 0 to 100 roughly reflects the range of temperatures one might expect in the lower 48. When you are outside that range, you know you’re in for very uncomfortable weather. Celsius doesn’t give much benefit beyond the vague water will freeze around 0.
And then we get to distance. The US has a system where a foot is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Metric is only divisible by 5 or 2. It is horrid if you need to divide things in thirds.
Which is... Pretty random? What is "very uncomfortable"? 'Switch to autumn/spring clothes' uncomfortable (<20ºC)? 'Switch to winter clothes' uncomfortable (≈0ºC)? 'Get a sweater below your winter clothes, and maybe double trousers, too' uncomfortable? (<-20ºC)
Celsius fits the mental model of normal human communication quite well if you use it.
> Celsius doesn’t give much benefit beyond the vague water will freeze around 0.
Which is a very major shift: rain turns into snow, roads get slippery, you should dry your hair extra-carefully (> 0ºC it's raining anyway, you'll get wet anyway, why bother; <0ºC it will turn to ice on your head, you definitely don't want that).
Water freezing is a VERY major weather shift.
That last bit is the key: Fahrenheit also fits the mental model of normal human communication quite well if you use it.
The F vs. C wars are silly; if you were raised using a particular unit system, then that system will most likely feel the most natural to you. If you didn't, you can certainly learn another and adapt, but for most people it won't feel right.
This is all just fine. Yes, it's annoying when you travel to a place that uses a different unit system than you're used to, but life is full of such things, and we should just live with it rather than trying to argue what's "right". Nothing is right, nothing is wrong. Whatever is, just... is.
(Note that I'm not making any arguments about which one is better for math or science or whatever. Just about what feels comfortable. For the record, I do think many things -- including global interop -- would be easier if we all used metric. But I don't think, no matter how hard I try, I'll ever be able to "feel" celsius properly.)
I'm Canadian. I deal with a bastard mix of metric and imperial daily. Farenheit is the one unit I've never needed to learn in the slightest. I can deal with lbs, feet, inches, etc.
As for claiming base 12 is superior because you can divide by 3, what happens when you divide by 10? Surely if base
First, 0 and 100 F seem completely arbitrary.
Second, if they have such immense value, people using centigrade could manage to remember "-18" and "38."
My brain is sadly stuck on the default "F" units since I grew up in and continue to reside in the US, yet even I can remember general mappings of Centigrade to "how it feels" as a human. This is not a difficult thing to do/learn.
Widely agreed by whom? Because the rest of the planet thinks otherwise.
Water freezing around 0 is a good indicator that the temperature is cold enough to kill you given that you're mostly water.
If I'm dividing a length of wood in thirds, I use my metric ruler, and I mark out three even cuts. It's crazy how they sold me a 2x4 in feet and it still divided into centimeters.
A foot is 12 inches, a yard is 3 feet and a mile is 1760 yards. And don't get me started on the weight and volume units.
I entertain a hypothesis that such inconsistent unit systems (and heavy usage of fractions instead of decimal or other positional system) do make people less apt in handling numbers. Having lived for a while in England (which is legally metric but in practice imperial for many things) for a while, I think it is reflected in how things involving numbers are often stated in quite convoluted terms.
Most religions deal by having their own religious calendar. That the civil calendar is the Christian one is not a requirement.
Visionaries at companies like Google and Apple are known for their "ugh, special cases!?" approach to not finishing Jira tickets, which is why they are where they are today.
Someone who administered a scheduling system for flight crew was telling me how hard it is. Multiple time zones, contracts, unions, jurisdictions, companies and staff roles (which require frequent recertification) etc.
Imagine handling a bonus day in this context. It does not sound good.
A week means 7 days.
Every month is 4 weeks long, or 28 days long. (I'm not sure how it handles leap year.)
This way, people can play with legacy dates for their birthdays, religious observances, etc but use a sane system at all other times. This already happens with Chinese/Islamic calendars anyways, Chinese new year is a date I have to look up every year, and that’s OK because the calendar is used for literally nothing else outside traditional festivals. Optimise for the common case, after all. Christmas is w52.1 this year, w52.3 the next, etc, just as CNY is 22-jan and 10-feb this and next year (but 1/1 on the Chinese calendar).
The only trouble is that some years have 52 weeks and some 53, but such is the price to pay for backwards compatibility.
Having worked in banking and hedge funds for many years for US, UK and European firms i have never once encountered this ISO calendar. I also part trained as an auditor when i started out, similarly never saw this. In fact this is the first time I've ever heard of it.
They do sometimes pretend each month is 30 days though.
Calling today 44.7 means that we're effectively using base 7 after the decimal point (but it's 1 through 7 instead of the usual 0 through 6, for extra fun), while using base 10 before it.
Why not just something nice and easy-to-parse without all the mathematical confusion, like "44d7"?
That dot has many interpretations; in dates, sometimes it separates the month from year, or the day from a month. In version numbers, it separates major from minor, etc.
It's so much not a "decimal point", that in some languages (Hungarian and German, for instance) it is a thousands separator, whereas for decimal fractions a comma is used (10,000.00 in English is 10.000,00 in Hungarian, making Excel flip)
It is really just a dot. Our interpretation is what makes it a certain kind of separator. Or not a separator at all, like at the end of this sentence.
Numbers with a dot or comma means it's decimal. Your date reference makes no sence because either / or - is used in those cases, not dots or comma's.
Basically, having a dot or comma adds to the confusion when working with non decimal numbers.
You’re not playing cricket, I guess. There, an over is six throws, and 4.3 overs is four and an half over.
how about 5Nov44d7, much easier to parse. go with 5Nov43d6 and I'm on board even quicker because I prefer 0 indexing.
The one where there are years without a new year’s day, and years with two?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Week_dates
“As a consequence, if 1 January is on a Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, it is in week 01. If 1 January is on a Friday, Saturday or Sunday, it is in week 52 or 53 of the previous year (there is no week 00). 28 December is always in the last week of its year.”
The problem is mapping it to your legacy calendar holiday, which like everything else is going to vary somewhat year by year.
a new calendar not mapping cleanly to the current months hardly seems like a valid criticism of a calendar that intentionally doesn't map to the current months.
Aside from Halloween and NYE it will be very easy for people to get used to a 28 day month.
For example, “our next meeting is w48.3” is much more understandable than “day 339”.
or 365.2425 one day months and no squabbles every 400 years. (we will however be squabbling the entire rest of the time)
And keep the named 7-day week cycle as-is independently of that, this one has been going for millenia and we need some weekends after all
Actually, looking it up now it looks like the usage of the name "Julian" is due to the way the old tracking systems were programmed and used "JDATE" or similar. Nowadays it's just burned in habit that it's called the Julian Date.
My guess is that the idea of counting days attached the "Julian" name to day number in a year.
year/day/hectosecond.second(.millisecond and so on to the desired precision)
The current date-time, to the second, would be 2023/308/342.65
The days, like the years and second-based units, are 0-indexed.
There are 100 seconds in a hectosecond, and normally 864 hectoseconds in a day.
And to go with it, I'd advocate either a "3-on, 2-off", or "6-on, 4-off" work cycle, depending on the nature of the work, or even just personal preference. This way, today(308) would obviously be on a "weekend" either way.
So did mankind keep the universal 7 day week (as god intended it) and in doing so, inadvertently prove it to be a man-made construct?
7 days feels like it aligns well with the way we think and communicate about time. But maybe that is because it’s the only week length I’ve ever known.
One could imagine early humans being much more aware of the phase of the moon (whereas I haven't even seen that thing in months), and the 29.5 day cycle naturally splits into two pieces, since it's (new moon) -> (full moon) -> (new moon).
And one could also imagine people were pretty aware of when they were halfway between a new moon and a full moon — so now we've naturally arrived at a rough time interval of 29.5/4 = ~7 days.
Only 0.5 days out instead of 1.5.
Edit: though with the sinusiodal variation in the moon, I guess it makes sense to divide it into 4. 3 weeks doesn't make sense for that.
The French tried it for several years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
The advantage being that you can do a lot more on your weekends (international travel on a weekend is now possible), and during the week you'd have a lot of uninterrupted time to work. I imagine the productivity would be similar to a five-day week but it would feel like a lot more time off.
We should go in the opposite direction - something like Weekend Wednesday [1] appeals to me. That way, you always have a break to look forward to, and you don't feel like your off days are unproductive. For longer breaks and international travel, that's what vacations and holidays could be for.
I could see that a one-day weekend might not seem long enough for some people, in which case I have a compromise: the current system. It isn't perfect for everyone, and isn't immune from change, but it's a decent enough middle ground.
[1] CGP Grey - https://youtu.be/ALaTm6VzTBw
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300271157/the-week/
tldr: here's an interview he did on a 50 minute radio show about It (starts about 8.5 minutes in. I don't know why they distribute it this way either)
https://kpfa.org/episode/letters-and-politics-december-30-20...
(I know some people say base-12 would be better, as it has lots of integer divisors, but I think the ease of repeated doubling and halving, along with that of binary conversion, makes base-8 a clear win.)
I was amused to learn that there are societies dedicated to the cause of dozenal system who write papers and books urging everyone to switch. On the other hand, I don't know if it is exaggerated but French revolutionist had grand ideas of creating decimal based systems even for time. But better sense prevailed in the long run!
It is interesting to think how can changes of the form "if we can align everyone to change and adopt this new way" can be brought about at any scale beyond a few thousand folks. I think large mass adopted switches (horses to cars, smart phones) have been about incentives and convenience demonstrated by some early adopters. But for basic arithmetic this seems impossible to pull off!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordination_failure_(econom...
Though, the benefits to calculation come from the fact that the numerals are iconic, not due to it being base-20.
IF people with an extra digit on their hand were more common and they were somehow elevated to a priestly / godly class at some point by a dominant tribe ... we would pronbably have had base-12 number system
That would mean moving the Earth slightly closer to the sun. I wonder what side effects that would create (assuming of course, you could actually find a way to do it - not exactly in the realm of possibility).
We could either change our eccentricity in order to shorten our year to exactly 364 days, or we could keep our eccentricity constant and change our perihelion and aphelion.
I'm too lazy to do the math to figure out whether the change via either approach would be less than the difference we already experience due to our current orbital eccentricity.
Would love to know, if anybody feels like doing the algebra at the very least in terms of insolation.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ΔT_(timekeeping)#Geological_ev...
May as well correct that eccentricity while we're fiddling about.
We slow the rotation, give us twenty-five hours in a day. We could all use a little extra. Then we go for four hundred days per year, with the extra near-thirty-five days as a kind of bonus. This gives us a nice hundred thousand hours per year. We just tighten up the second a tad, so we have a hundred thousand of those per day.
We could just decide to define it as 25 hours. But we won't, because the reason 24 was picked was because it was easy to divide.
As an aside, i have created the same thing for a clock where a day is 100 hours.
I threw it all here https://idiallo.com/blog/100
How will you stay up for a 40 hour work day? There will be an adjustment period that will be helped by G.A.S. Government Amphetamine Supplement.
> When rendering a clock that ticks with this new time, I realize that a second is too fast for a human to count. In fact, it's a little over 10 times faster (11.574x). So I invented a new term: Tenet. A tenet is 10 seconds. It's a human friendly time counter. Not affiliated with Christopher Nolan.
I've seen this repeated before, but never with any details or attribution. Did Kodak really use this 13 month calendar? What about the 140 other companies? If it was really so popular, I would have expected it to leave more of a mark.
Also might be nice if we can fix names so that months match their names again (September being the seventh, October the eighth and so on.). It's insane we lost this because two emperors named some months after themselves 2000 years ago and we are still stuck with it.
Upon [intentional?] billing confusion, it was sneakily explained that the rental company uses 28-day "billing periods" for its "monthly rental promotion."
Sneaky. What I did (since we had an agreement for "toilet rental, six months") was not pay for the ficticious/additional "month." They can literally eat a turd.
Edit: I wonder if there is a legal definition of "month" and contracts are not allowed to redefine it...
I prepaid for six months (allegedly, "in full"), only to receive a "7th 28-day month" invoice right around when I needed it gone [clever billing?].
The only penalty is I can no longer rent a portable from that company.
What's the next date that we'll celebrate Christmas on? On what date is your 4 week follow-up appointment?
You could also switch to decimal periods of 10/100/1000 days, but the whole source of the calendar problem is that humans care about the seasons outside.
One variation I would support is a 19 day week, with 14 days on then 5 days off. That’s 266 working days per year, about the same as our present 260.
Alternatively, 10 days on 9 days off is 190 working days, basically instituting 2 months of vacation, which our friends in Europe already enjoy.
Have separate counters for days and years. There could be separate revolution years and rotation years. Moon years could be a thing.
But you would certainly never convince everyone. :-)
I’ll be sticking with good ol’ Gregorian until those heathen Sundayists pipe down.
However, I know only one god, and his name is ISO 8601.
The in the US the week has a free day at the start, a free day at the end, and 5 work days in the middle.
In the Jewish calendar Saturday is the only free day, Sunday is a regular work day, and is the start of the week - in Hebrew the days of the week are not named, they are simply "1st day", "2nd day", etc. (Israel added Friday as a free day because that's the Islamic holy day.)
But on second thought it can’t be right as 28 is wrong here.
Or even lump week numbers into ranges. First 4 weeks, second 4 weeks, etc.
You don't have to invent an entirely new calendar.
Days 1 - 365.whatever.
Non-prime number days are “business”.
Prime number days are “le weekend”.
Done.
Replace all that with:
- the 72 prime number days
- add the days that end in 0, that’s 108, perfect, and gives several 2-day “weekends”
- make the 00 days 4-day holidaysPerhaps fill the gaps between twin primes, otherwise there are almost no multiple-consecutive-day weekends
How’s this? 72 primes plus 50 fillers:
(1), 2, 3, 5, 7, (10), 11, 13, 17, 19, (20), 23, 29, (30), 31, 37, (40), 41, 43, 47, (50), 53, 59, (60), 61, 67, (70), 71, 73, 79, (80), 83, 89, (90), 97, (100), 101, (102), 103, 107, 109, (110), 113, (120), 127, (130), 131, 137, (138), 139, (140), 149, (150), 151, 157, (160), 163, 167, (170), 173, 179, (180), 181, (190), 191, 193, 197, 199, (200), (201), (202), (210), 211, (220), 223, 227, 229, (230), 233, 239, (240), 241, (250), 251, 257, (260), 263, 269, (270), 271, 277, (280), 281, 283, (290), 293, (300), (301), (302), (303), 307, (310), 311, 313, 317, (320), (330), 331, (332), (333), 337, (340), 347, 349, (350), (351), (352), 353, 359, (360), (361), (364), (365)
UK has 252 working days in 2023. Above is 243. The 41 single “off” days could be treated specially to give people more chance to set appointments or do certain kinds of business, like a more business-y Saturday.
Also, can we just switch to the duodecimal system. 12 is a much better base as divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6. Divisions into 12 are already fairly natural - hours, months, inches in feet, dozens...
The only months named after emperors are July and August.
I'm not entirely sure about Roman times specifically, but the number 12 was used a lot more in the past (hence words like "dozen") because it's easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6, and doesn't have nonsense like 10/3 (well, 12/9, but who does that?)
The old Roman calendar had 10 months, which is why "December" comes from Roman "deci" for 10. Herp derp. IIRC they could add an extra "leap month" decided manually, or something. I'd have to look it up how it worked exactly. It was pretty complex and irregular, which is why it was replaced with what we have now. Aside from one minor bugfix it's worked pretty well for about 2,100 years.
Maybe some time zone borders are dumb, but mostly they follow the necessary complexities of political boundaries, geography, history, etc.
Only on timezone.
From the eastern border with Russia, to the border with Afghanistan.
You could just have the same time everywhere. The only thing that changes is that 12 o’clock isn’t midday anymore, which doesn’t match with the current system almost anywhere.
Nothing will change for a very long time.
I’m confused. Everyone understands what 12 tonnes are here. Besides, is your average car really 2 tonnes? That sounds like an awful lot, and it varies depending on location.
> SI is nice because you can attempt to change 12 Mg into something like 12 kL of water (since every L of water weighs a kg) or the amount of water in a pool of size 1m by 1m by 12m.
SI is nice because it does not depend on your cultural background. A gram is a gram regardless of your daily experience. So you can be sure that it will be understood the same way by anyone on Earth, contrary to overly heavy cars.
> Still, 6 cars is much easier to reason about.
I think this is highly culture dependent. As a matter of fact it is very rare to see this sort of analogies here (it’s more common to see football pitches for large areas, for example).
(inb4 link to mars reconnaissance orbiter wikipedia page)
"A 5-feet tall monster ...". As a reader I have no idea if that's big or small.
No one's mad.
It's just mildly amusing in a tragic way, like a slow motion train-wreck.
The USofA standard foot has been officially defined in terms of the SI International System of Units since 1893.
Since 1866 if you date it from the specification proposed by US Congress.
The primary length standard at the time of US independence appears to have been the length of a physical yardstick, which first appears to have come into existence sometime in the Middle Ages. What was used to determine the size of the various yardsticks is extremely unclear, but at no point does it seem to have been based on anybody's foot (although an arm is one of the suggestions).
I dunno. When do you predict all national, ethnic and religious identities will go away? I'm going with 100,000 years.