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.
Sounds a lot like the French Revolutionary Calendar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Months
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
It actually does account for keep years. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
Leap years and keep years
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.
I like the 10 days week, but people, please rush to create a new religion to cover multiple free days or im out
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.
My religion has a holy day called I’m taking today off or I’ll cut you
This is what I want! Fuck, this has it all! Its beautiful!
The 365th day is new years day… duh.
And the leap day is just after new year
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.
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?
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!
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?
Weeks should have a prime number of days. It’s not wise to be dividing weeks up.
why not?
Any solution that has some form of “oh those days? Nah, we don’t count those” is disqualified immediately in my book.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I will concede that it would make some things easier, like if someone says are you busy on the 5th, you can instantly know the 5th is a Friday or whatever. But I still don’t like it. And without researching in detail, I’m betting there are holidays, particularly religious ones, that wouldn’t be okay with moving the date to match the weekend closest to it for reasons.
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.
You know, I knew that, and I really don’t know how that happened. In any case thanks.
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.
Well, pregnancies are measured in weeks, so not that big of a leap.
Can’t be as bad as daylight savings though.
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
64 bit computers exist
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
They programming community calls this technical debt.
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 just wish a year had 360 days so each day gives you a clean one degree of angular movement (or we defined a full revolution around an axis as 365 degrees. 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.
It takes only about 19 years for a 360 day calendar to be off by a whole season. Every ~38 years, winter and summer would swap entirely. Grandparents would have told their grandchildren about how much easier the summers were and how much harder the winters were.
I doubt the ancient Sumerians thought there were 360 days in a year.
Ah. Fair enough then.
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.)
Yeah yeah Georgian reform. Problem it it breaks in 6500
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).
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.
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
Didn’t you know the world sits on the back of a giant turtle??
Turtles all the way down.
It’s a turtle, bro.
how did the cherokee account for the fact that this is mathematically incorrect and would cause dates to drift across the actual solar year?
Well, it’s incorrect when it comes to the solar year but is correct when it comes to the lunar cycles. So I guess they didn’t track time by the solar year then. It’s just a matter of cultural perspective. Tracking the seasons and the lunar cycles were probably more important to Indigenous Americans because of needing to know when to seed, harvest, and hunt as opposed to knowing the exact time it takes for the earth to loop around the sun.
the seasons are a function of the earth’s position in its orbit around the sun, not the number of moon cycles that have taken place
OK. Whatever you say. I guess the turtle shell is all bullshit.
You must’ve come from reddit.
you’re the one badly misunderstanding the how the solar cycle works, how the lunar cycle works (it’s not exactly 28 days, the turtle shell method wouldn’t work here either), how seasons work, mythologizing “Indigenous Americans” as though they’re a monolith and pretending they’re too stupid to realize that the flower moon of this year is a lot warmer than the flower moon of the year they were born. you’ve substituted pop mythology for actually thinking about a problem, then got defensive, insulting and shitty when someone pointed out that your basic assumptions are deeply, provably flawed. if you’re gonna be a dick, at least be smart.
How bouts you shut the fuck up and quit your childish fucking arguing. I’m sooo sorry that I ruined your fucking day so bad for mentioning a method of keeping track of time that differs from your understanding of the world. You do realize I didn’t create the concept, right? Just keep focusing your anger on me since it’s obviously my fault. Fucking drama queen Redditor piece of shit.
Have a nice day. 🖕
But that’s only 364 days. Which month gets the extra day, throwing the while thing off?
On new years eve at midnight we stop the clocks for 1.24 days, then start them again.
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
He’s also thinking European.
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.
In keeping with tradition though we can only do this if we add the new month after August and name it Tiber.
For The Emperor!
I’m ok with this.
Lousy Smarch weather
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.
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 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
Preferably year/quarter/week/day but good idea
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
I work and converse with people globally, as much as I love the idea of being able to use seasons as a marker of time like that, it’s just not possible.
Now let’s work on names for this 13th month…
I have yet to hear anything better than Smarch
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I mean it’s the same amount you were paying before so just save for it like you had before
Lousy Smarch
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.
