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13 Month Calendar?
jhaberman writes "Fox News has an article concerning the "human calculator" and his promotion of a 13 month calendar. " It'll never happen, but ya gotta dig it. Starts counting at 0, gives New Years a monthless status, and it makes paychecks arrive on the same day of the week.
And, to clinch it all, it isn't even the long cycle of the Mayan calendar which wraps in 2012; it's a shorter, 400 year cycle that ends in 2012. That is, the long count cycles from 12.19.19.17.19 to 13.0.0.0.0. The last time the Mayan calendar wrapped from 11.19.19.17.19 to 12.0.0.0.0 was on 18 September 1618AD.
It'd be a pisser if the universe ended every 400 years.
... I read the article, first thought to mind, "HAHAHAHAHA" and, "This guy is crazy!", no leap years, etc.. so then we go out of sync with the seasons, and a day of the year called '00' (zeros are bad, mmm kay), that just topped it off, this is really brightened up my day, and on the scale of working things out easier, this may as well be the same as the current gregorian calender.
.25...)days, worked out by some poor scientest stuck in his lab :) - and around that you would base the seasons, or even overlay the gregorian calender over it, the gregorian calendar has one main use, you know when to go fishing, when to plant your crops, when to expect rain, and when you need the air conditioner fixed by :) Imagine waking up to a 40degC day (it is here today) in month 5, when you are sure last time you saw a 40degC day was in month 2 or 3.
I have done a little research into calenders, and the myans had a very similar system, 20 lots of 18 (I am pretty sure), but, after a few years, they noticed crops weren't working sine they were out of sync with the seasons... the myans also had a 260 day religious calender. If you want to look into various myan calenders, checkout mdate: http://mdate.sourceforge.net/
The easiest way to design a calender (I believe) would be to trash the idea of years, use a base of 10, and make years an "artificial" part of it, a day that is celebrated every 365.2??? (not quite
Anyway, my point is that, yes we do need a better calender, but this is the wrong way of doing it IMHO.
VK3TST
-- "People aren't stupid. Usually." -- jd
The article said he was from Arizona, which already doesn't observe DST. He's probably there because he thinks DST is stupid. Either that, or he's too lazy to renew his drivers liscence because he has trouble remembering which month the renewal is due.
I remember reading about that it was 34 hours in a day, if we lived by our bodys clock. Some interesting sci-fi books based off that information, how maybe we are from a planet with 34 hours in a day. (-;
2000.356 = the 356th day of 2000
You have an off-by-one error in two places there. Dancin' Santa
Check this page out...
"The 13-month calendar was devised by Auguste Comte in 1849"
the current calendar is solar based not lunar based. You may want to do some research before you spout nonsense.
this space for rent
Uhhh, I _think not_. Currently, one second is defined as the time needed for light in a vacume to travel 299,792.458 km.
Note that the speed of light is defined to be this number of kilometers exactly, and I believe that now, the meter is defined this way as well.
I see no reason why we should abandon this current measuring unit for time, which is based on physical constants.
(i forget)
tyr's day...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
All calendars now in use are based on the confusion resulting from the fact that
a) the sun is almost exactly 400 as big and 400 times as far away as the moon, so that the two are the same size in the sky and
b) the lunar cycle is almost exactly a thirteenth of the solar cycle.
A implies that B should be exact. Unfortunately, 28 x 13 = 364 so you end up about 1.25 extra days a year.
The week is a handy way to divide up a month, and everyone likes weeks (or at least weekends) so there's no hopes of dropping them.
But why have months at all? After all, no one gives a damn anymore about the lunar cycle any more - any dissenter plaese tell me off the top of his head how many days have passed since the last full moon was.
In Germany its common business practice to promise delivery in a given KW (Kalendarwoche). Works fine. Just adopt that practice and you there.
You know, "the container will arrive in Rotterdam in week 36 (if we're lucky)"
What about Easter? As I recall, it's the first Sunday after the first full moon after the Vernal Equinox. How's 13 months gonna fix that? You still have the solar / lunar problem.
Plenty of Asian countries use two calendars at the same time. Japan and Taiwan both have two year numbers, for example (Japan based on the accession of the new Emperor, Taiwan based on the revolution in 1911).
And like Easter, dates like Chinese New Year wander.
Of all countries, India probably's got the biggest problem. No idea how many calendars sloshing around over there. The Indian government recommended to the UN in the '50s that a new calendar be adopted which had twelve months and an extra non- month week at the end of each quarter - seems more "human" than what's being offered here. Needless to say it was no go.
I really disagree with the claim that there are no arguments against changing. It'd be a huge pain, and people (remember them?) wouldn't like it.
During the French revolution they succeeded in adopting a decimal clock and calendar, but it was abandoned after a few years. They even debated abandoning the decimal system and replacing it with base twelve, but Karl-Friedrich Gauss squelched that debate by offering a compromise solution - base eleven! He had some really good arguments about the length of repeating decimals (or whatever the base eleven version would be called).
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
The Hebrew calendar is actually really cool. It, BTW, is also incredibly complicated -- much more than just changing things every 17 days. It has to accomodate certain holidays not falling on certain days of the week while still keeping accurate time. It also has essentially been the same for a very long time -- No messy Julian-Gregorian switch, although leap seconds may or may not be needed (I don't know about this one), as nobody back then could keep time to sub-milliseconds.
A great (Unix) Hebrew calendar program is Hebcal. More info about the Hebrew calendar can be found at this site
--
Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
Your solutions puts eight days between sabbaths once every four years, violating 3 major world religions. The "seventh" day is a holy day of worship to billions of monothiests. Ignore that, and you might as well junk the 7-day week while you are at it. Any "human calendar" should take human behavior into account.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
no, there would be an extra day between Sunday and Monday. This guys calendar starts on Mondays.
well personally i liked the celestial refferences fo rthe days...
sun's day, moon's day, (i forget), wodin's day, thor's day, freya's day and saturn's day
but other than that i think a 13 month calander is long overdue.. heck let's switch the the old aztec lunar calander.. that was off by 1 day in 400 years or soemthing like that.. who need the sun?!
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
1792, and they dropped it because people did not like 10 day work weeks for the same reason the government of France advocated it: because people who get the weekends off are expected to work 9 days instead of 6 before the weekend starts (they got one day a week off).
Which tells me if you want a chance in hell of convincing people to change the number of days in a work week, make the number >, such as 5 days a week. (Meaning we only have to work 3 days before getting a two day weekend...)
Hmm. Since society isn't going to adapt the new (extremely useful) 28 hour day and 13 month calendar, it seems like it will take a great cataclysm for the change to take place. It seems like a society as big as ours (6+ billion people) is too reliant on the legacy systems such as the old metrics, old calendar, 24 hour day, and so on. But if this planet was to explode for some reason, and all but a few people would survive, a change could easily take place.
More likely, however, is that the change will occur when people will leave our planet for some other worlds. Why stick to the 24 hour clock if your spaceship (or new planet) doesn't even have 24 hour light/darkness cycles.
As a programmer (and previously, a college student), I definitely noticed that if I don't force a rhythmical cycle on myself, I end up on something close to a 28 hour rhythm. It's a shame I can't go dance to Drum'n'Bass on (new) Thursday and Friday because my calendar doesn't sync with everyone else's. -pm
And all I'm going to get is a lump of coal.
--Kai
--slashsuckATvegaDOTfurDOTcom
Humans like base 10. Computers like binary. Nature likes base 3 (and binary). Why not compromise on base 60? A number with 12 factors should satisfy almost every number system.
"Watch these suckers jump when I get root." - l33t j03
...to annoy all the Goths by getting rid of Halloween. I say let's do it!
UNIX: Find it, fsck it, forget it.
And back then, there weren't entire industries based around the calendar, so the change only effected the literate minority. Today, the majority of business requires a consistent calendar.
Of course, if you read the article, that is exactly his point. Businesses require a consistant calendar, and don't have one. Accounting periods are a horrible way to deal with the uneven calender that we have now.
If it wasn't for the "ignored" new years day, it would be even better. Maybe if we change the orbit of the earth somehow we can...
-rt-
-rt-
** Evil Canadians are taking over the world. Learn about the conspiracy
Published in the Appendices of J.R.R. Tolkein's The Lord of the Rings is an interesting way of dividing the year up.
It is based on a year with 365 days, with leap years on the same intervals. The Calendar has 12 months of 30 days each, with the last day of the year being 1 Yule, and the first day of the new year being 2 Yule. In between the 6th and 7th months are the "Lithe" days. There is 1 Lithe, then Midsummers Day, then 2 Lithe. On leapyears an additional day is added, called Overlithe. Midyears day, and Overlithe when it occurs, have no weekday names.
Some people will say "Isn't that harder? Non-days?" It really isn't because with this system, every day of every month always falls on the same day year after year. After some time, you wouldn't even need to put the day when you date something. Everyone would just know.
Something to think about, since this has as much a chance at being implemented as the original idea.
How will people know what zodiac sign they are, though?
Send your friends messages of love at fuck-you.org
I always thought they should make 0-hour for each location at the point where the sun-line hits that location every morning (I'll assume you have to abstract the Earth's surface to be smooth, so you don't get weird effects due to mountain shadows & such).
Then your time zones are defined by physical phenomena, and "daylight savings" happens automatically all the time.
Well, it might be constant in reality, but our knowledge of the number will keep changing as we perform more precise experiments.
Doing an actual measurement on an quantum-level, easily-measurable oscillating phenomena which is generally resistant to external influences (like they do in atomic clocks) is probably the best way to have a time standard.
Speak for yourself, sparky. I don't get tired until I've been up for about 18 hours, but then I like a good 10 hours of sleep. Although 24 and 12 work okay, too.
itachi
- Calendars are deeply tied to the religion, an attack on the calendar is seen as an attack on the religion, as the French discovered in 1790
- A fixed week calendar is grossly unfair especially if your birthday falls on a tuesday, and someone else's falls on a sunday each year.
- Investment in the current calendar is high so it is not likely to succeed, because of the associated costs.
None the same, a transitional calendar can be made to work, as long as the two are seen to co-operate. The calendar can expanded in operation, or left as a passing fad. We use base 16 in computers in much the same wayThe planetary names of the week do follow a logical order, though the logic is more obscure today. The seven day week can be made into 10 days by adding days as follows: Monday, Uranus, Tuesday, Wendneday, Neptune, Thursday, Friday, Pluto, Saturday. Unravel these using *7 mod 10, and you will see the Greek order of planets, with the three modern ones at the end.
Clock reform is more closely allied to the weights and measurements. The measurement system works as well under the Christian or Moslem calendars, but fail under a decimal system, because the day is a fixed measure, and measurement systems rely on the second, not the month.
The native metric system is to divide the day into 40 kc , and then into 1000 c, and so forth. Then, the km/kc = m/c. Metric + Decimal Days = unusable, as the km/h is too slow, and the m/s is way too fast.
If you intend to use a hundred-based system (day = 10 hrs of 100 min of 100 sec), the measurement system should be 100-based (eg mile of 100 ch of 100 ft of 100 lines).
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Actually, a place I used to work used three different calendars. Most applications used the traditional Gregorian calendar (payroll was semi-monthly with payday on the 15th and the last day of the month, and so on), the General Ledger people used a 4-5-4 calendar (where each "month" was four weeks long, then five week, then four weeks to make a thirteen week "quarter"; this adds up to 364 days and so "year end" processing was hitting in November while I was there), and finally, the accounting people used some mysterious "fiscal" calendar that started the year in early February. Working in the data center was loads of fun; month-end processing every week and a half or so, twelve "quarter-end" runs a year, and three "year-end" runs. I could very easily see a business that put up with that nonsense having no problem with yet another calendar.
On the other hand, they got bought out by a larger (and presumably better organized) chain about five years ago...
"I'm a scientist! I don't think, I observe!" - Dr. Clayton Forrester
neer the end of last year, my dad was elected (or something) at his rotary club to handle the making of a calander featuring ads for local buisness, so he spent weeks getting all the ads layed out in ms publisher and all the gfx sorted, saved the file to disk, took it to a printers and had a whole load of copies printed out (several boxes). i was looking at one of the finished products in the car as we drove to deliver a box and i noticed that ms publisher had given the calender two "1st"s of january. boy, my dad wasnt happy ;)) fortunatly, there wasnt any 24th of january so it made it a bit better..
Heh, and this plan will be enacted on "HellHathFrozenOverDay" in the month of "Never"...
But with no clocks around, why did they all "program themselves" to a longer cycle, unless they were natrually inclined to do so? They could have just as easilly forced themselves into shorter days by turning the lights down earlier.
If you wanted to really nitpick, I suppose you could give them persistant low light that does not change... but living in perpetual dusk would screw with their heads far more than artificial lighting.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Is linux M13 compliant?
http://www.dbeat.com/28/
Mantle
Hmmm... But:
Thank goodness it's Fiveday?
TGI-Fivedays?
Sevenday Drivers?
What happens when the new calendar says that it is Wednesday, but your religious beliefs say that it is the Sabbath?
FIVE DAY WEEKEND!!!
And note that the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendars did not involve a substantial change to the calendar--other than causing a 10 day shift, primarly it only changed the leap year rules to omit centuries not divisible by 400. Everything else was the same: the names of the months, the general pattern of days in a month, the 7 day week: all remained the same except for these two minor adjustments. That made the change to the Gregorian Calendar quite easy for most people to swallow.
Futher, the switch to the Gregorian Calendar from the Julian was not uniform: while divised in 1582, it took almost three to four hundred years for all the countries of the world to switch. (Most predominately Catholic european nations switched in the 1580's-1600's; Protestant countries switched in the 1750's, and some countries, such as Afganistan, waited as late as the 1920's. (!).
In today's world, switching from one calendrical system to another would be virtually impossible, given how highly dependant we have become around the world on a unform date/time counting system for shipping and communications. In most areas of the world (such as in the Middle East) where other calendrical systems are used, the Gregorian calendar is also used as a sort of calendrical "lingua franca".
So I agree--why fix what isn't broken? The only major change that will be needed with the Gregorian calender may be an adjustment to the leap year rules in order to prevent drift going out tens of thousands of years. And I suspect we'll be long forgotten before there is enough accumulated drift to cause people to tinker with the leap year rules.
OK, here's the deal.... there is NO REASON to make a system that has a prime number of months. Why have months in the first place? Why not simply have 52 weeks, with new year being 'day 0' and to heck with the rest.
if you want to name the different weeks, fine. If not, fine. With this system, everything is divisible by 4 (four quarters, four seasons, etc.)
The old calendar, btw, has the advantage of being based on base 12: divide by 2, 3, 4, and 6. base 12 is a much better way of doing numbers that need to be divided rather than base 10 or *ich* base13
If you are going to make a new system, at least make a better system!
the guy did say he was trying to get in touch with Bill Gates, but nobody would return his calls.
Uhhh, I _think not_.
You are backwards, that is how the metre is defined. The second is based around the vibration of a cesium atom.
This is the best way to do it, as we are starting at a unit which is useful to people, and then defining it terms of scientific constants.
"Individual nations would decide what to name each month, under Flansburg's plan." us.themes.org - vote for you nation's theme for next year. --made by gimp
A real genius would have figured out how to give us more hours in the day -- without shortening the length of those hours
/me Drools over the prospect of a 28 hour day...
God, i'd love it.
You mean, Like this?
Any idiot can come up with a calendar that makes more sense than the one we use now.
If the world was willing/able to switch to a new system, it certainly would _not_ be to a system as complex as Flansburg's.
13 months!?!?! The superstitious would never go outside. \\:^)
Nope. Japanese weekdays predate ever hearing of Christianity. Which makes a 7 day week even more interesting. Perhaps based on phases of the moon (yes! really this time!). New, First quarter, Full, Last Quarter. Time from phase to phase? About 7 days.
Base 120 beats them all hands down. Not only do all of the numbers 1/(2**a*3**b*5**c) terminate, but 7, 11, 17 have refreshingly short periods. eg 1/7 is 0:17.17.17...,
If you want something smaller, try, eg 18 [where 7*7*7=111, and so 7 divides 1/7, and the same is true for 5 dividing 1/5].
Those of you who think it's a hard base to calculate in have never tried. It's actually easier to work in than base 60.
Historically, it has been used by the Germanic nations, the conversion taking place around 900 onwards. Check out Wright's `Old Norse', where the numbers are given, like "200=one hundred and eighty".
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
The original idea didn't fly because Comte gave the months "superfluous" names.
Funny you should mention that. The name of our months are out of whack. September should be the 7th month, October the 8th, November, the 9th, December the 10. One wonders how it ever came to be the way it is currently.
A change of this magnitude wouldn't affect how *nix handles time since it counts the seconds from 1/1/1970. All that would have to be changed is the way that is converted to please us. Am I correct on this one?
My other sig is extremely clever...
Oh, so you want to use chrons , do you?
heck... let's make a binary calander with a year.month.day format? that would make it real easy for computers...
1111101000.1100.10100 would be today... er.. i think
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
While the current calendar is solar based (meaning that events are tied to solar events), the duration of a month definitely comes from lunar events. That is, the fact that the length of a month is approximately the length from one new moon to another is not just coincidence.
:-)
Most man-made calendrical systems use a "month" which is roughly (or precisely) based on lunar events. (The Chinese and Islamic calendars are based on lunar events--the Chinese calculate, and the Muslems observe.) The few exceptions I can think of use months that are based on a day count that has mystical significance, but a day count which is roughly one lunar cycle in length. (The Baha'i's 19-day month, for example, or the Discordian 60-day month. Here, by "roughly" I mean they don't pick months that are longer than a year in duration, or shorter than about a week in duration.)
The only exception to this that I can think of is the ISO weekly calendar which records the date as the current day of the week and the number of 7-day weeks from the Gregorian New Year.
The flip side of this is that there is only one calendrical system I can think of that is purely lunar-based, and that's the Islamic calendar, with precisely 12 months. That calendrical system drifts by about a half a month per solar year. All other calendrical systems are either purely solar (by unlinking the length of a month from the lunar cycles they were drived from), or luni-solar (such as the Chinese or the Hebrew, which use complex formulas to insert "leap months" into the year, giving some years 13 months instead of 12).
Okay, so I'm a bit of a calendrical geek.
Ask me sometime why 60 minutes in an hour or 7 days in a week...
When would weekends be then?
The most constant time cycle in the universe would be a "Planck second". A quantum of Planck time is the combination of the three fundamental constants of the universe- Plancks quantum of action, the speed of light and the gravitational constant (hG/c^5)^1/2 = 0.54 x 10E-44 seconds.k t)
(http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?eqpl
I'd decimalize this times 10E45 to define a "Planck second" as 0.54 standard seconds,
and astronomical day as 160,000 Planck seconds,
an astronomical years as 58438752 Plank seconds and so on.
I thought daylight savings time purpose was to
steal daylight hours from the morning and move them to the evening where they're more appreciated. Depends on the person I guess.
In Canada, not all provinces observe DST.
I sorta like it. Which would you choose at Summer Solstice ?:
5am-11pm MST
6am-12am MDT (I'm at 52 degrees latitude).
Cheers.
I mean, I usually miss out on that day anyway, and it seems to be no great loss.
So they'll end up having to re-release Office Space with the script changed to "Sounds like somebody's got a case of the Tuesdays.
It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. --Aristotle
And the seven days of the week would simply be named after numbers -- Oneday for Monday, Twoday for Tuesday,
:-)
In portuguese, the days are already numbers. Segunda-feira to Seixta-feira are monday through friday. Saturday and sunday are still related to the judaic and christian calendars, Sabado and Domingo.
It took me a while to get used to calling monday "second-day", but now that I what I think of it in english as well.
In countries where taxes are not taken out of your paycheck, payrolls often work on a 13 month system, so you get 2 months of pay the month the taxes are due. If you are smart, you put aside one fourth of your salary so you aren't scrambling on tax day, but not many people are smart. So many companies give you some help.
the AC
ObDisclaimer: My portuguese is from a very rusty and not recently used memory, impaired by going out drinking all night with some marketing bastards on expense
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Jah Love, Man.
Vik :v)
Stardates from Star Trek!! If we're gonna change our calendar and time system, we may as well wait and do it all at once when we have real motivation to, other than some nutcase who wanted to see his name in papers next to the words "nut-case."
He's dead, Jim. You grab his wallet, I'll grab his tri-corder.
(I'm not one of those hundreds of millions.)
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.
Please. The true calendar is the Federation "Stardate" calendar.
Any sufficiently well-organized community is indistinguishable from Government.
Maybe I'm not a mathematical savant, but doesn't "See you next Onesday" sound totally stupid? It would be a lot easier if everyone had numbers instead of names, GPS unique implants to identify ourselves, and track where we go... The reason this will never catch on is simply, we're humans, and it's a human calander. It's a culture, not a mathematical error. The guy who's proposing this obviously has quite an ego (callig Bill Gates personally?) and is blind to the fact that first, there is no need for his calander, and second it's perfect to a point of inanity.
O to be a dragon, of silkworm size, or immense!
actually if i remember right isn't there something like 23 hrs 56 mins in a day...
Actually, it is the opposite. The Earth's rotation is slowing down. This is a known fact, and it is due to the tidal forces caused by the moon. Due to the Earth's rotation, the tidle buldge caused by the moon actually is ahead of the moon's orbit, and therefore a small component the moon's gravity acting on the earth pulls this tidal bulge back in the direction opposite the Earth's orbit. Conversely, the Earth's gravity is pulling the moon ahead in its orbit, causing the moon's orbit to drift outward. Eventually, we will lose the moon. This particular effect is has been measured with lasers (no, not giant "la-sers" on the moon, just ordinary ones here on Earth).
They are able to prove that days have been getting progressively longer through the fossil records. The rate is something like a few seconds per century or so. I do not know exactly how they can determine this by looking at fossils though. Perhaps they are able to determine the average amount of sunlight the animal was exposed to or something. I believe the solar eclipse records also confirm this.
Eventually the Earth's rotation would slow down to the point that it is no longer rotating with respect to the moon, so the moon's orbit would be synchronized with the Earth's rotation and the moon would only be visible from one side of the Earth. The Earth would still rotate with respect to the sun, but the days will be much longer, something like 50 times (IIRC) as long as they currently are. But this won't happen until something like 50 billion years in the future, by which point the Earth will have been consumed by the Sun anyway.
And one would wonder what Cobol programmers would come up with after the Y2K craze, only to make some bucks.
--
Marcelo Vanzin
Marcelo Vanzin
"If you were born on a Saturday and I was born on a Wednesday, I'd never get to get pissed on my birthday! THAT'S COMMUNISM!!!"
(or words to that effect).
Everything's been downhill since the TRS-80
Actually, "One second is 9192631770 periods of a certain vibration of the atom Cs^{133}".
:-).
But yes, our archaic sun and earth rotation based calendar should be replaced with something rational. At least dump daylight saving time, leap seconds, leap years and all those kludges designed to keep it with the rotations. I don't care if the sun isn't at the same position at the same time every day. I'm never awake when it is light anyway
everytime someone mentions changing our time system to decimel or watever, i have to put in my suggestion for the reverse:
chage our counting / numbering system to base 12why? 12 makes more sense.
why?
well, 10 is divisible by 2 and by 5; while 12 is divible by 2 and 3 (and 4, and 6...).
dividing stuff into halves is great. dividing into 5ths? what for? Dividing into halves, thirds and quarters is so much more double plus better.
then we can leave our time system more or less like it is.
i mean, if we are going to make drastic changes, why not go all the way and do it right. rething the whole thing from the bottom up. of course, this will never happen, nor will changing time or even the calendar. hell, the US has been refusing for like 10 billion years to change to the decimel system (you know, like "centimeters" and other strange stuff like that...)so what if we have 10 fingers. do you still count with your fingers?
adrien cater
boring.ch
Point and Grunt
Okay, that's a nice rant about the metric system.
If you read mine again, you'll note that it uses the same 12 you like as the ratio of the inch to the foot.
That lends itself well to creating "good for everyday human use" units that are simple integer ratios to all the other scientific units, by making the human unit twice (1/6), thrice (1/4), four times (1/3), or six times (1/2) the smaller (larger) scientific unit.
And since the ultimately fundamental units are universal constants, it's actually a better system for science than the metric system, if the scientist can let go of their irrational preference for using base 10 in favor of the far more logical base 12.
(In short, yes, I am joking.)
There's no "we" in team, only "me"
should do like the egyptians and have a 5 days long new years celebration before the months start counting...
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Our calendar actually started as a decimal calendar, before the Julius Caeser added some new months named after himself and Augustus. This link explains the original roman calendar. If you look at the names of the latter months (December for example) you can see that they are named according to the original latin numbering system.
Julius Caeser's changes gave us the 12 month calendar, Pope Gregory's (13th) reforms gave us leap years. Interestingly, Augustus Caeser later stole a day from February to make his month more impressive than Julius's (July).
dropped it later tho
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Heh. I wonder if it's intentional that the link to "people who take this idea seriously" (http://www.dbeat.com/28/serious.htm) leads to an empty page?
Brant
Five day weeks? Where have our weekeneds gone? We'll have to work NON-STOP! Death to the new calender! DEATH!
I am a bad speler. Please ignore speling meestakes in me poast.
George Eastman did indeed do this - and the Eastman Kodak factory in Rochester NY ran on this schedule until the early 80's, according to information in the George Eastman house.
a 52 month calender where we abolish weeks. We'd get our pay checks on the sixth of every month. We'd also get to come up with lots of cool names for months. Maybe we can name a month "Clint" after President Clinton.
Personal log, stardate -323967.97.. We should all be using Stardates. It's bound to happen. You'd be wise to convert now. http://steve.pugh.net/fleet/stardate.html Live long and prosper.
Any calendar reform which ignores the seven day cycle of the week by, for example, adding special days that are not part of the week, is doomed to failure. There are many people who follow religions that attach special significance to certain days of the week. What happens when the new calendar says that it is Wednesday, but your religious beliefs say that it is the Sabbath?
What happens when the sabbath occurs on Wednesday? You let the people celebrate their sabbath, its still there. I'm jewish, and i have to deal with my sabbath occurring fri night through sat night, while much of the world is at work and play, and i get by. I dont think the world would collapse if we actually kept things open sunday morning.
And for that matter, i dont understand why things can't be open 24 hours a day. Think of the productivity that we'd increase as a civilization. You just need some portion of the population to be doing things at a different time that others. Think about it, you could have your choice of 8am school, 3pm school or 10pm school. As long as you get your sleep in there somewhere, who cares?
2000.356 = the 356th day of 2000. Screw "weeks", "months" and other crap based on Lunar phenomenon.
I don't want to sound like one of those "people who laughed" at a genius of the time, but...
No matter how good an idea it is, why is it even worth a try when the USA still has not gone metric? Do that first.
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Vidi, Vici, Veni
...we could handle this.
A simple date rollover to 2000 causes people to by 500 pounds of dried beans and enough shotgun shells to kill every computer geek on earth. That was going from a 1, to a 2. Another 3 years of doomsday prophecy is not in my future.
Tag, your it!
Our archaic time/date system should switch over to metric. 10 months. 10 hours per day. 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.
I thought about that, too.
Since seconds are the base unit of time here, you're talking about a day that is 8.64 "hours" long, if you keep it the same number of seconds as our 24 hour day. Well that's too strange, so let's round it to 9 "hours" a day. But that doesn't jive with the rest of the metric system, so let's stretch it again to 10 hours in a day.
Now you're talking about a day that is 100,000 seconds long, or 27.78 traditional hours. Amazingly, there is already a plan out there to support "28-hour" days!
Let's merge the two ideas together, right?!
Well no. If you work out the math, I think the problem with this idea is there are two extremes you're dealing with which probably cannot be changed. The length of time of a second, and the length of time of a "year" (or four seasons). You can't possibly change those two things. Therefore I don't think it's possible to divide minutes/hours/days/weeks/months evenly in a metric style system.
-thomas
"And like that
I think it's safe to predict that everyone will have a Tivo way before timezones get eliminated.
Marko Karppinen
This has so been done. All the stinking "wiccans" I know follow this. 28-days is the period of the cycles of the moon and also a woman's estruous cycle.
How about using Tolkien's calendar of 12 months of 30 days, with five no-month days? I'd totally dig that.
12 by 30 day months, each of 5 by 6 day weeks (4 days on 2 days off), with a 5 day (6 days on leap years) 'Bacchanalia' at the change over between years
MrCreosote Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump!Meow!Thump! "You're right! There isn't enough room to swing a cat in here!"
For example, today is Prickle-Prickle, The Aftermath 62, 3166 YOLD.
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
13 isn't a very human number. It seems like it would be great if there were the same number of months in a year as days in a month.
Sqrt(365) is 19.1, which would amount to 19 months with 19 days each, totaling 361 days. We could then have either 4 or 5 days at the end of the year (non-leapyear/leapyear), which would be perfect for holiday vacations.
This is almost exactly what the Mayans used. They had 18 months of 20 days each (much nicer for subdividing than 19) and a 19th 'month' that held the 5 extra days. these were 'days out of time' where people could do whatever they wanted, as they didn't have consequence on the 'terrestrial' calendar.
Mayans also clustered years into groups of 20 (a 'Katun') and those into groups of 20 more (400 years, or a 'Baktun'). It seems that this makes more sense when looking at history. A century is either too long a cognitive unit of measure, and a decade too short.
Okay, now I'm just rambling, but considering almost no system has any hope of being approved because it would make Y2K look like a walk in the park, but if you could rebuild from scratch, what would you make? Metric time? Swatch 'beats'? What particularly bugs me is the lack of correlation between days of the week and the rest of the calendar. Each could exist entirely seperately from the other...
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
but... if god never rested on the seventh day... would all the little things we so enjoy ever have happened? i mean original sin and all
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
The 13 Month calendar will never be allowed. There is a force so powerful that it would stop the rotation of the earth if such a calendar had even the slightest chance of being adopted.
The IRS requires quarterly payments and you cannot divide 13 by 4 evenly.
this calendar has seven days per week. read the article!
Hmm... see The Conquerors' Saga by Timothy Zahn. The alien culture artfully portrayed therein uses an a very base-ten system. A second is a "beat," a minute a "hun-beat," etc. There are also cute names for larger temporal increments, but they escpae me at the moment.
;)
Anyway, they're good books, and he's a damn fine author.
-J
Karma: T-rexcellent.
And the Japanese named the das of the week after the (classical) planets, as in the European languages.
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
has this guy considered how much of a pain it would be for everyone to recalculate their birthdays and aniverseries... i mean people have enough troubl;e remebering them now
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Okay, with base 60 numbering, you can divide by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10. Pretty freaking cool!
And if we're renaming the days of the week - let's go back to the original names. Moon's Day, Tiw's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Freya's Day, Satyr's Day, and Sun's Day. At least, I _think_ that's where they came from.
Back when I ran a BBS (see also: the 'olden days'), I customized my BBS software to use those day names on the messages. Pretty neat, especially for a Paganism-oriented BBS.
But back to reality - I'd just be happy if the U.S. switched over to a 24 hour clock and the metric system, and made daylight savings time the standard time, especially this far north (Seattle) - we need all the daylight we can get during the winter! (it gets dark here around 4pm in the winter - ugh)
Oh yeah, and no more sugar substitutes!
And slow our orbit down so we get 1000 days a year, or speed it up to get 100 days a year? Or do we stick with a nice non-metric number of 36.525 days a month?
Edward Burr
Edward Burr
Having a smoking section in a restaurant is like having a peeing section in a swimming pool.
Will we all have to recalculate our birthdays!? What if they fall on a naff day, will we all be *moving* our birthdays to the weekend??
:)
PA, Chaos! I tell u CHAOS!!
About eight years ago, Viz magazine sold a calendar with a big splash on the front: Extra Month Free! The extra month was called Irrelevembuary, and featured Roger Irrelevant. It came between August and September and had 28 days so as not to mess up the days of the week for the rest of the year. It had special days such as Kipper Feeding Day and St. Herbert of the Cheese Counter's Day. Or something like that.
You end up with two problems. If the hour hand points to 8, is it 0800 or 2000? Not so good with the 12 hr clocks that seem to be so common.
The other problem is wrap. With this system, lots of people will get nailed by the midnight wrap problem. What what day is midnight? Now it won't matter since most people in a region are sleeping then. Make it so most of the worlds population is awake on a day change and watch out for the resulting mess.
And what does that mean?
In USA people serve the economy and in Europe the economy serves the people?
Being "on the Riviera" for a month sounds like fun.
Each of us has only about 70-80 years. They can end up all being about the same. Or you could have some fun.
Cheerio,
Link.
I don't think that guys idea is worth considering seriously. Sure it's a nice idea. But even though he thinks that things will fall on the same days, they won't in other parts of the world- because for example the muslim calendar has 12 months of about 28 days (they follow the moon). So the muslim holidays will still keep advancing a month per year. And in many places the muslims _really_ have to see the first sliver of moon before they declare it's time (esp for Ramadan - their fasting month, which incidentally ending soon). If they don't see the moon, then the event is the next day.
The chinese calendar is also moon based (not as strict), but every few years or so there's an extra month. Similar thing with jewish calendar- stuff jumping about.
So why bother? It only solves some of the messiness. Too much effort for too little gain.
All the various peoples are already used to having their own calendar for their culture. Most of them have already agreed to use the Gregorian calendar for business reasons.
So why bother adding yet another calendar? Waste of time and resources I'd say. Yet another calendar for databases to support etc.
Cheerio,
Link.
Godsday? Would you be refering to Sunday, used by Christians that won't use the Sabbath, sundown Friday to sundown Saturday, which was chosen by God and is still observed by Hebrews and some Christians? Perhaps you mean Friday, observed by Muslims. There are numerous religions that have their own idea of the proper dates of worship, and have no allegiance to the God recognized by Abraham.
Attempting to create a universal calendar based on one person's limited knowledge and ideas is doomed to failure. Old and proud cultures will dismiss the project as the ravings of a spoiled brat who is uneducated in the ways of the world.
Defeating all other cultures, then forcing your ideas on everyone might seem like a good idea, but Alexander, Caeser, and Hitler are among those that tried and failed. Save time and effort by using the calendar we have. It works, and those that do not agree with it have adapted to it anyway.
No no.. they've got it all wrong..
Our archaic time/date system should switch over to metric. 10 months. 10 hours per day. 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.
It only makes sense..
Rolls Royce (Aerospace) used to and may still pay in 13 "accounting period" cycles. The 13th was then normally used for all that expenditure at Christmas.
Actually I think this is how Chinese years are recorded for historical purposes. It's usally recorded as the Nth year of a Dynasty/Emperor/Revolution. They also have 12 year cycles with the animals and some sort of 60 year cylce.
I still can't get pass the idea of leap months... and the 19 year cycle where "Chinese New Year" can occur anywhere between January 23 to February 20-something of the 'normal calendar'. And strangely enough there are plenty of other Chinese "holidays" that fall on same solar days every year, but on different days of the Chinese Calendar year. Examples are Spring Equinox ("Ching-Ming") and the Winter Solstices ("Dong-Zi"), etc... Well, I guess not strange, since most cultures celebrate the equinox and solstices [{what's the plural of these?}]
BTW, January 25th, 2001 is the new year of the Snake. Lawyers take note.
Can you imagine the lines of code that would have to be changed to handle this? Sure it would make things simpler once it was in place. Maybe this is a good way to keep all of those COBOL programmers employed a while longer.
THIS SPACE FOR RENT
My Current employer pays on a two week cycle. so I get 26 paychecks a year which is equivalent to a 13 month cyle if a month is 4 weeks long. Whats the big deal. There is no practical reason for changing the calander when the US can't even switch to the Metric system. Highway signs used to have both KM per hour and Miles per hour on them. I don't think they do anymore.
Somehow I'm reminded of this idea that came up in the German hacker movie '23' and got me interested... why not change weeks to contain 6 days 28 hrs each instead of 7 days 24 hrs each? It would surely fit _my_ biological clock (and that of probably quite a number of hackers living a kind of 'nocturnal' lifestyle...)
swatch stupid time (aka Internet beat) is based on local time in switzerland. Nothing like figuring out what time it is in a different time zone and guessing what happens with their daylight savings time.
Swatch could have pulled this off but they were too damn arrogant to do it in a way that others would have accepted like using midnight utc.
Since this scheme is so keen on changing things, why keep the entirely arbitary 7 day week? 5 goes into 365 rather neatly for example; why not do that? Sure, working patterns would change, but it's no more of a wrench that anything else proposed.
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Here is a comparison of alternate calendars (including Tolkein's).
The inclusion of days that are not part of any week will probably upset some religious observances.
Idiot Savant I'd say.
Actually, I'd love the idea. Perhaps I shall go be a hermit so I can live it.
People who quote themselves bug the crap out of me -- Me.
Wow, this guy has single-handedly re-invented the manufacturing calendar.
-Peter
We're not going to lose the moon. All that'll happen is the moon's orbit around the earth will be synchronized with the earth's rotation.
Actually he's right; what's happening is that angular momentum is being transferred from the Earth (Earth's spin) to the moon (moon's tangential velocity). This is called "tidal drag". It may end with the moon gaining enough tangential velocity to escape, or it may end with the Earth's rotation synchronizing to the moon's orbit; which case occurs depends on whether the kinetic energy bound up in the earth's rotation is greater than the orbital binding energy of the moon at its present distance.
When the moon formed, it was much closer to Earth than it now is. Tidal drag moved it to its present distance.
Your sabbath is on a weekend. Try it on Tue/Wed and see how hard it would be.
We won't change the calendar for the same reason we won't make the clocks Metric.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Theres already 'Internet Beat Time' or something. It's got 1000 'beats' a day, and '000' is 12:00 UTC+1. There are watches that have it, and web pages that have it (ever seen a @436 as a Timestamp somewhere? it's IBT).
It was designed so you could organise things on the internet where TZ's do/don't matter (depending on how you look at it)
Its unfortunate that he hasn't figured out how to add leap days yet. He should have figured it out before announcing it.
No data, no cry
We're not going to lose the moon. All that'll happen is the moon's orbit around the earth will be synchronized with the earth's rotation. And I don't think the moon appreciates your kind of fear-mongering, no sir.
Read the rest of this comment...
By the way, nobody would ever implement a 13 month calendar to make human time/biological cycles more synchronous. The only thing that matters is how much it will help industry. This is the same reason America still has almost no paid vacation time compared to the rest of the world.
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seumas.com
>> The only drawback I see to this calendar is that every month will have a Friday the 13th
if we used this system we wouldn't call it "friday." it would be "fiveday" or another similarly dumb-sounding alternative name.
but i guess we could just change the names of the numbers, so that 1 means mon and 2 means tues, and 5 means fri, then we could have fridays the wednesteeth... wait, that doesn't work so well, does it?
There will be many problems with implementing this calendar.
A lot of computer software needs to be rewritten to handle the new calendar, just like Y2K all over again.
Business such as banks, landlords and anyone else that accepts monthly payments for services will gouge their customers by not reducing their charges.
Thirteen is a prime number, so the year cannot be easily divided up into roughly equal parts. With 12 months, we can divide the year into two, three, four or six easily according to our needs.
Leap years cannot yet be handled by this system. For ideas on fixing this, I recommend that the creator of this calendar read "Lord of the Rings" and examine the Shire calendar. Leap years were handled by making the leap-day a special day of celebration (Overlithe).
Renaming the months will make a lot of our folklore based on month-names obsolete, and will therefore destroy a part of our culture. Such things as Armistice Day (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), One day in September (Grand Final Day in Australia), April Showers (song alluding to Northern hemisphere spring weather), and so on will all need to be converted.
Similarly, celebrating anniversaries of historical events could be difficult.
While the current calendar is difficult, reforming it will have to overcome so much social inertia that I don't believe it is possible. For the same reason, we still have Babylonian time units, despite many efforts to reform time with various metric innovations.
--
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. - Edmund Burke
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
Lousy Smarch Weather!
woops
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
Ugh what a horrible idea about the timezones!
I would hate to watch the sunrise at 10pm. Or conversely have it set at 10am. But hey, thats just me.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
Oddly enough, though, a 13-month year would be perfect in this respect, since 364 = 13 x 28, and 28 = 7 x 4. In a 13-month year, each month would be just four weeks long and, of course, twenty-eight days long.
According to the publishing date, this was originally printed in 1972 by Mercury Press. A very good book with some interesting theories...
I donate all spillover Karma to the charity of my choice... Ada was still a babe despite what people may say...
Yeah, I just love how this calculator nerd proposes a calendar totally changes what has been in use by most of the world for over four centuries and says we should start using the new system on January 1, yet he hasn't quite bothered to figure out how leap years will work.
Leap years just strike me as one of those minor issues that should be hammered out *before* you propose a drastic change to the calendar system if you expect to be taken seriously...
Interesting that you should mention trains. When I took the trans-Siberian express some years ago (China-Moscow via Mongolia) the trains ran on Moscow time while crossing 8 timezones. So when we got on the train in the east, breakfast was served at 3pm, lunch at 8pm, dinner at 2am or so.
What we got over time as we went west was some of the worst continuing "jet" lag I've experienced. Not knowing when, how, if to be hungry...
We solved the problem by a simple discovery: Every hour is vodka hour.
Timezones are a good thing, because they take into account the solar position of a location. They also confirm without any doubt what part of the day a gizen country is currently living.
By contrast, that crappy SwatchTime completely blurs any Timezone distinction, which prevents people from knowing if now is a decent time to call someone at the other end of the globe. Besides, metric has its limits and Swatch just exceeded one, making the whole Swiss clock industry look like morons at the same time!
IMHO, instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, Swatch should start implementing GPS-based NTP into their watches, so that those bloody bus drivers don't show up early or late at your block's bus stop!
However, I totally agree that daylight savings should go; keep the same offset to UTC all year long and never loose an hour of sleep! ;-)
--
Software is not supposed to be about how to work around a useability issue. - Ken Barber
having 1 godsday will be trouble. therefore this proposal:
- God-day: make christians happy
- Allah-day: make muslims happy
- jhwh-day (pronounced simply 'day'): make jews happy
- buddha-day: a day of reflection
- L. Ron Hubbard day: or they'll sue
- godless-day: for the atheist
- All other gods' day: seven days just isn't enough to name each and every god, or appease all religions
BTW.. Friday.. always though that was dedicated to the Goddess Freya (nature goddess I think, but I could be a long way off)
//rdj
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I had come up with the idea of an 8 day week. The eighth day would be on the weekend. Thusly, we would still have a 5 day work week, but every weekend would be three days. This would certainly keep programmers busy.
I named the day "Boonday". Under the Boonday calendar, every month had 4 weeks (32 days). There would be 11 months. This comes to 352 days. The last 13 (or 14 in leap year) days of the year are a national holiday where you can celebrate the winter holiday of you choice (or choose not to celebrate).
It was all a big joke. I guess I should have written it up and promoted it back then.
-JD
Oneday for Monday, Twoday for Tuesday, and so on. Flansburg suggested Sunday be Godsday
Shouldn't it be Zeroday? And what about a countdown? Monday should be Minus-Sixday, Tuesday Minus-Fiveday, and so on.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
It's not calendar geeks, it's maths geeks. Or more correctly, anyone with a simple understanding of maths who knows what fence-post errors are.
Your 'correct' doesn't need quoting. The start of the millennium isn't open to debate, it's a simple mathematical definition.
Regards,
Tim.
Godsday. Why does that sound like some corny "Christian rock" band?
Steven
Software Wars
Nevermind the religious implications, it just sounds silly!
...Time zones started in the US to regulate train schedules. Now that we have global communication and intercontinental travel measured in hours instead of weeks, why even *bother* with time zones anymore? Everybody go on Greenwich Mean Time. If that means the sun's rising at 1730 and setting at 0430 the next calendar day, well, that's just how things happen to work where you are.
"How many light bulbs does it take to change a person?" --BMcC-->
This human calculator guy made an interesting note that astrophysicists use a system that counts days from Jan 1, 1900.
In my current job (USAF Avionics repair), we fill out LOTS of paperwork, almost every single sheet requiring a date. Many forms are still handwritten, so they require a date to be in a particular format. Some of these forms actually require the same date in different formats. (Reasons differ, but none are for the sake of redundancy.) Here are the two most common examples.
1) You have the classic Julian date. The Julian date is my personal favourite, one that I use for all kinds of personal stuff as well. You have a single number that begins with 001 at the beginning of the year. Likewise, 356 is the last day of the year unless you've got a leap year. (That is, unless I've reversed my leap-year definition again.) In the event that you need to specify the year, you just prepend the year. For example, today would be 00355 or 2000355 depending on the scope of the date. It's even Y2K friendly!
2) The regular old YYYYMMDD format too. Another good computer-friendly format.
3) When actually *writing* dates down, I usually do DDMMMYY, where the month is an abbreviation. Today, for example, would be 20DEC00. It's not easy to goof up and transpose the YY and DD when reading or writing as long as you keep in mind that the day goes first. Which, mind you, was not a problem from 1932 to 2000, but next year, it is conceivable some could mistake the "01" for the first day of the given month.
Isaac Asimov had some essay proposing a decimal time system for the space mankind. It all revolved around the day, because of our internal rythms.
And then there is the ten-hour clock in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
No forgive Slashdot.. people submit "Slime grows in fridge" 8 thousand times it eventually gets posted.. Fox News has no such problem.
First shame on the jernalist who covered this story... Slock news? Gezzz and on Fox News for going with it. Ug.
Ok somebody dreammed up yet annother calander... Is that what it takes to make headlines?
Yeah it's man bites dog but gezz... accually no it's not man bites dog.. People are allways trying to reinvent socity.. 28 hour day.. 13 month year.. New speak.. and of course those who want the garbage and mail handled at night so it'll seem like magic.. (dosn't work BTW.. garbage trucks are loud and noisy.. wake everyone up.. every now and then a garbage company TRYS this and it NEVER works.. Can't blame them it seems like a good idea on paper. The post office just won't send people out in the dark.. to many potental problems).
I don't actually exist.
I just had to,
lousy smarch wheather.
hehehe
If we don't make light of everything, we are just stumbling in the dark - Blank
And back then, there weren't entire industries based around the calendar, so the change only effected the literate minority. Today, the majority of business requires a consistent calendar.
I'll chalk this up with Napolean's 10-hour day and calendar geeks being upset that the world isn't having a giant bash for the 'correct' beginning of the new millennium.
This is not the way to build a lasting empire.
Actually, a friend of mine has a hormone problem which prevents him from being "forced by the sun" to a 24-hour day. He lives according to his own day, and can only sleep when it's night for him. So, on a random day of the year, his midnight might be at any given hour of the day. Often he goes for days without sleep since he has to be up in business hours, which just happens to be when he needs to sleep.
Poor guy. Ain't biology weird?
(For a tiny minority of slashdot readers, yes, it's Andy).
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
I disagree. While a base-10 counting system makes sense for distances, it makes less sense for months of the year, since a year repeats itself over and over. A 13-month, 52-week calendar works with the period given, whereas a 10-month calendar would results in a fractional week.
Beware typoes.
This is not anything new they have been trying to implement a metric calendar for years. Here is a description of how it would work. I would much rather have a calendar that eliminated leap year all together
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Do you know how much it would cost?
Here in Australia you can go buy things like shelves and they will be some multiple of 30cm. The real problem is if you go buy two different 60cm shelves, they won't be the same length. At least in the US when you buy a 2 foot shelf its the same length as other 2 foot shelves.
The windows in my house are exactly 1 foot by 3 feet. Sure the glass shop can deal with metric but if I give them a measurement in old english units they know its right because the entire building industry is based on the foot. A ceiling tile isn't eactly 2x4 feet because its a bit smaller so it can go in a 2x4 grid. In the US they are called 4 foot tiles, in Australia they are 120cm long (unless you measure them). For Australia to export building products to the US, they have to be standard US sizes which happen to be based on building thigns to old english sizes.
The metric system has lots going for it but its not good for human measurements. Its odd to hear Aussie be able to tell how tall someone is in feet and inches and not know how many inches are in a foot.
For what its worth SI seems to be on the way out. It looks like there is push to drop all the compound units and simply replace them with grams, seconds, meters so that things like 1 bar becomes 1 Kg/m*s^2.
There is also some talk about what to do with the leap seconds that keep showing up. It looks like it has gotten to the point were 3 or 4 will be added this year or next and that starts to cause problems. One proposed solution is just to make a second a small bit longer.
This is amazing - I also came up with a similar concept ages ago but alas, haven't disclosed it to anybody for fear of ridicule. 4 quarters, 91 days each with 1/2 days marking the end of the year (2 days for leap year). 31+30+30. Public holidays would be the same the world over.
Revolution = Evolution
This guy obviously has forgotten all the crap the world went through to change two digit dates to four digit dates...
Now he wants to change the whole calander?
Hell, that's about as likely as getting people to accept Unix time as the official world standard.
When will Windows be ready for the desktop?
Since the year has 12 months, and no month has more than 31 days, you can store a date into a number in the form N = Y*372+M*31+D-32-C, where C is a constant. You can store 89 years into a single signed number, and if you fiddle with negatives, you can get 178 yr, 2 month into a 16-bit number.
If we put packed_date=Y*365+M*31+D-32-C, then we can get Y=(packed_date+C)mod 365, etc. This scheme works because each date has a unique number, although not all numbers correspond to days.
Another trick for the calendar is to start the year on 1 Mar, making the leap year the last day of the year. This makes the length of the month equal to 31-((M-1)mod 5 mod 2).
Also, any proposal that puts days outside the month, eg New year's day not in any month, etc are going to run afoul of the programs that expect days to be in months.
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
Why do humans allways overcomplicate things!?
Daylight savings time is a good example. Why the !@#$% can't we just keep the same bloody time the WHOLE year throughout.
The leap year bullshit is another good example. We just couldn't pick a nice EASY TO REMEMBER system, now could we !. *sarcasm on - It MUST be accurate down to the nanosecond! sarcasm off* I realy don't give a !@#$ that the year has 365 and 1/4 days. The astronomers should pick their own bloody accurate calender - and for the rest of society give us a calendar that is USER FRIENDLY.
*rant off*
If he really wants to push for a reform in time-keeping that improves people's lives, then let's talk about banning the dated and useless concept of Daylight Saving Time!
You think DST was a bad idea? Here in Newfoundland a few years ago, they introduced DDST (Double Daylight Savings Time)... Talk about a BAD IDEA! Going to school in complete darkness... fun...
Yours ect.
Yours ect.
Fuser
(Warning: this part is serious - People who are pregnant, nursing, or could become pregnant should not read this!) Frankly, it's just not feasible. The calendar makes more sense than the one that Gregory guy came up with, and if it were 1900, we'd be able to pull it off. I would really like to see it happen, but as was said at the top, it won't. DAMN!
It's all about the Karma Points, baybee...
Moderators: Read from the bottom up!
SIG: HUP
These people who always want to come in and rip out a fundamental pillar of society always talk about society's 'fear of change' as if it is some irrational psychiatric condition. It is not. In fact, it is not really fear in the sense that I don't fear that a hot stove will burn my hand...I KNOW the stove will burn my hand and I don't want to suffer the pain. Ripping out and replacing a fundamental part of any society, especially ones as ingrained as common measurements, is disruptive, confusing and painful. Sometimes 'good-enough' beats the pain of change, especially when everyone has become so comfortable working around the staus quo that they don't even realize that they are doing it.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
--brian
I think people need to get over themselves.
13 is a fine number and never did anything to anyone.
D- who was born on the 13th
Yep, that's an excellent way of going about it, because they affect a much smaller proportion of the population, and impact international trade disproportionately.
Has anyone calculated how much metrication would save in the long term, once the transition costs were dealt with?
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
For the mathematically challenged, 13 months of 28 days plus New Years Day equals 365, 365 modulo 7 equals 1. That means for the day of week to be a constant for any specified date, one day must be designated as a special day, that isn't a normal day of the week, sometimes referred to as a "blank day" in other calendars.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Of course you can avoid all that if you don't want the months to match the seasons, just have 100 day years!
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In my earlier life as a classical physicist I learned exactly one thing about complicated systems: you don't want to drive them at resonance if you want predictable results.
Now, the economy has a natural resonance over one year: people buy more heating oil in the winter, gifts at christmas, run the AC in the summer, etc. So what do governments do? They run their tax and spend cycles on the fiscal year. The interaction of these two may well cause the economy to be less stable than otherwise.
If stability is what is desired, it would be good to have a budget cycle relatively prime to the year. I suggest 13 months. I wonder if any economists listening could simulate this on some fancy economic model. I'd love to do a paper on it.
This is, of course, assuming that 13 months isn't exactly one year long, as proposed in the article.
I agree; Daylight Savings Time isn't really a useful thing any more. In fact, it's just annoying. Serves no good purpose. I wish it would go away.
:)
:)
However with time zones, it's a little trickier. I agree that it meets my penchant for consistency to say that I wish there were no time zones.
Here's a problem with that, though. Let's say we all run on UTC instead. All clocks and watches are set to UTC. This means that sunrise in Los Angeles, instead of being at maybe 0600, occurs at 1400. This is fine, people would get used to it.
But unless people change their schedules to no longer be diurnal (active during daylight), problems occur. Let's say we have no time zones, but everything else stays the same. What time is "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on? People want to watch it after work. If it's always on at the same time (let's say, 0400 UTC), well, some people are working at 0400 UTC, or already asleep. Right now, TV shows aren't all shown at the same time. Buffy is on at 8 pm, which means that it gets shown for four consecutive hours in the USA. 0100 UTC on the East Coast, 0200 in Central, 0300 in Mountain, and 0400 in Pacific.
Now keep in mind, my goal here is to find a solution to situations like this. I'm not saying you're wrong, I think that between us we should be able to come up with an answer to "how do we deal with things that happen at certain times of day?" Another example: fireworks celebrations. Those can't happen during the day, cause they look like crap. They have to happen when it's dark. So they can't all happen at the same time, it has to be specific to the area of the planet. I can't think of any other examples right now but I'm sure there must be some
So what do you think? Is this a tractable problem? I sure hope so
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
So what happens to the quaterly system that all of the worlds financial markets depend on?
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
It takes some kind of "human calculator" to come up with this? I pointed it out to friends and family over 15 freaking years ago that we could have 13 28-day months w/ one day left over.
Sometimes I think the world's going to hell in a handbasket, and these kind of "grand proclamations" just confirm it. Christ, for anyone who knows anything about the lunar cycle, it should be a no-brainer.
--
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." --H.L. Mencken
Because we find the task of coordinating time, events, facilities, and people FAR too easy given the current calendar system. We want another de jure standard that everyone acknowledges, alters, and customizes. That way, we can create more work in unifying warring sects into common tribes.
Then we can certify Candar Engineers. If we name the Calendar Institution correctly, we can save certain computer engineers from changing their business cards!
Maybe you could have split all this information you have into ten posts, instead of just 2, and whore yourself even more karma...
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These things have been proposed off and on for years. One of the biggest roadblocks to adopting these is religion; Judeo-Christian doctrine holds that the sabbath repeats every 7 days, but if new year's day becomes "stateless" then you have 8 days between Sunday (or Saturday, or any other day) once per year, which throws everything off; even if the Churches said OK to this plan and kept their own calendar for religous purposes, you suddenly start having the sabbath in the middle of the week.
>having our measure of time bound to when the sun rises is silly
Sure, no problem - I'm sure after a few years we'll all get used to sending our kids out to school 4 hours after the sun sets so that the huge percentage of people who must coordinate communication across continents will have an easy time of it!
>what happens in a hundred or so years when people aren't even living on earth and they don't HAVE a sunrise?
I don't know. I'm sure we'll think of something. Maybe like having lights programmed to go on and off at something approximating a healthy sleep-wake cycle?
(I'm not usually this much of a sarcastic SOB, that just make me laugh. Nice Troll)
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
so you want to use chrons, do you?
Some people are just as crazy, except they call their chrons tims.
Tetris on drugs, NES music, and GNOME vs. KDE Bingo.
Will I retire or break 10K?
---
Henri Poincare proposed such a calendar more than a century ago. (13 months of 28 days, and the free day when you change years). Guess what? No one took it.
Before 'inventing' such things, I guess that guy should first search and read what was done before, and why it failed. And give credit when he steals such concepts.
Personally, I want the day to change more than I want the calander to.
I've discovered that a 42 hour day is almost ideal. 20 hours of sleep, and 22 hours awake. This gives you a 4 day week (if you fit it into a normal week.)
I'd taken these numbers from "Chaos: Making a new Science" (really good book.) When scientists started to test people on how long they would stay awake and how long they would sleep if deprived of light cycles (and timepieces) the numbers they came up with were similar to the ones I mentioned.
When I do manage to (very infrequently, due to work) take advantage of a 42 hour day, I feel a lot better overall. Better rested, better state of mind, and happier in the "evening."
Steve
[ approaching AI ]
Umm...who do you think the days are named for now?
Saturday-Saturn (OK, he was a titan, but they're divine...)
Wednesday-Woden (who, if I remember right, was also known as Odin)
I think we ought to name the days for the virtues off of the demotivators calendars.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
According to the NPL leap second web page, there has never been a need to add more than one leap second per year, although the current scheme would permit two seconds to be added or subtracted per year.
In an old National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) publication, they mentioned the use of a rubber second to keep atomic time synchronized with GMT. This required a periodic redefinition of the duration of a second. It seems that this caused more problems than it solved, leading to the current system of a fixed TAI time scale, and a UTC time scale that is offset from TAI by an integral number of seconds, via leap seconds, to compensate for variations in the Earth's rotation.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Forseen problem:
Boss: "I would like to meet the first twoday of threemonth at twentyhour-and-a-half to go over this information again. Is everyone available at that time?"
Joe: "I'm sorry, I can't make it. My daughter plays kickball every twoday at twentyhour-and-a-half."
IIRC some crazy roman emperors decided they should be honored as the gods they thought they we're by having months named after them. Augustus and Juno are to blame :)
But then again, I talk non-sensical things lots of times so it could very well be something else :)
(some quasi-intellectual thought)
i hate those "frikken lasers"
...way back in 1926. See his essay. I think Kodak even used this calendar for accounting purposes for a while, but eventually gave up on it.
--
send all spam to theotherwhitemeat@ropine.com
The 13 day system calender could solve many problems and could be strictly a business calender. Some people are talking of the religious implications of this. In a country like India, for instance, there are at least 8 religions hindu, muslim, christian, sikh, zoroastrian, buddhism, jainism, judiasm etc each following their own date system. Only christians follow the generally accepted Gregorian system which is used for business purposes. Fairly the christians also should follow a religious system and make way for a system used for business. The year should start on 21st March of each year (summer solstice) not Jan 1. The reasons are
Note that if the months are named starting from 1 to 13 then the seventh month (sapta in sanskrit, septa in Latin) and so on (ashta or octo (8), navam or novem (9), and dasham or decem (10) would coincide nearly with september, october, november and december respectively would be easy to relate in any indo-european language (hence the sanskrit numbers along with Latin). If the new year (and leap) are in a month of their own, they should be in the zeroeth month.
A year with 13 months could be unlucky, some would say. Imagine if Sunday was the first day of the 28 day month, There would be a friday 13th every month.
(If a leap year day were added like the new year day, some one would find use of it (like the olympics))
This is an excellent example of how we as humans are rooted in our own definition of time. What other things could we not change if there was a clear better alternative?
Any calendar reform which ignores the seven day cycle of the week by, for example, adding special days that are not part of the week, is doomed to failure. There are many people who follow religions that attach special significance to certain days of the week. What happens when the new calendar says that it is Wednesday, but your religious beliefs say that it is the Sabbath?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Some time around this time last year, I remember seeing on the Daily Show an old man advocating a calendar in which every month had 30 days except February which had 35. That seems much more sensible than this 13 month thingy. Of course I always thought that it would be cool to make the yeap day a free day where it wasn't given a name and no one had to work. It's only every 4 years, why not celebrate?
http://www.popularculturegaming.com -- my blog about the culture of videogame players
I think I may get one...
Hooptie
"Heavens, it appears that my weewee has been stricken with rigor mortis!" -- Stewie Griffin
"loans would be spread through 13 months so people would be saving on principle"
So the 00 month (New Years) you'd have to pay a full month's (28 days) worth of interest when the month was only a day long?
Just after the Revolution, during this anti-religious and "let's modernise everything" period (this was also when the metric system was launched). Months were called Vendemiaire, Thermidor -the 9th was Robespierre's fall-, Brumiaire -the 18th was Napoleon's coup-, etc.... Year 1 was 1792.
We used it for one decade, then Napoleon dropped it, since it was associated, in the minds of the people, to the most extremist revolutionaries. Too bad, it could have been fun (who cares about Jesus's birth anyway?).
If you really wanted to introduce logic to the calendar, why not eliminate the whole concept of months? Get rid of the whole mm/dd concept and replace it with a single 3-digit number for the date. (Instead of 02/14/2001; the next Valentine's Day would be 45-2001.)
The way I see it, the current calendar is really not so much of a burden to anybody. If he really wants to push for a reform in time-keeping that improves people's lives, then let's talk about banning the dated and useless concept of Daylight Saving Time!
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
a calendar with 26 months of 14 days each. for one thing, we could kiss april the 15th goodbye.
.. in a game I wrote:
s .h tml
http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game
It really makes life nicer.
And it's very human---it lasts as long as an individual person needs it to last. This year had the shortest Checkuary on record, but in 1999 I was writing 1998 on checks as late as mid-February.
--
This is not my sandwich.
I'm afraid you're incorrect. Sure the epoch date - or zero date of the Jewish Calendar is 3760BC, but it wasn't actually introduced until the 10th Century AD.
The Julian Calender (Epoch Date - Birth of Christ) was introduced in the 6th Century AD. All dates prior to that (pre 6th century) would have been measured using the Roman calender (Epoch Date - Founding of Rome).
Thus people would have switched from using 1288 Roman straight to 525AD.
Sure the epoch date - or zero date of the Jewish Calendar is 3760BC, but it wasn't actually introduced until the 10th Century AD. So it's only worked for 1000 years, less than the Julian / Gregorian system in fact.
The Julian Calender (Epoch Date - Birth of Christ) was introduced in the 6th Century AD. All dates prior to that (pre 6th century) would have been measured using the Roman calender (Epoch Date - Founding of Rome).
Thus people would have switched from using 1288 Roman straight to 525AD.
boxen /bok'sn/ pl.n.
[very common; by analogy with VAXen] Fanciful plural of box often encountered in the phrase `Unix boxen', used to describe commodity Unix hardware. The connotation is that any two Unix boxen are interchangeable.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
Will someone please explain to me how a major societal event will bring such a trivial matter to the fore front of news?
In general, I consider myself a fairly liberal person. But in this case, I have to say it, its just plain not worth it!
--Alex the Fishman
the only way that I can think of to 'overcome this minor hurdle' of leap year would be to add in another whole week or change the length of days. If you added in another whole week, that would have to once every 28 years? that doesn't really sound like it is going to work. I think that changing the length of the days, would just screw up the whole daylight timing. If he could seriously come up with a feasible solution to Leap Year, then and only then would he be able to get people to listen
-toup
Doesn't anyone read Asimov anymore? In an essay disecting timekeeping and the evolution of calendars (The Tragedy of the Moon, Abelard-Schuman,1973) he proposes a static calender that repeated four times throughout the year, making it seasonal based, and used "solar" and "leap" days to soak up the extra day that throws off a repeating sequence. Lots of usefull implications in his calendar. (see http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Larry_Fre eman/calendar.htm#Weeks
http://www.space.com/sciencefiction/asimov_y2k_991 230.html
Shannon
A comment overheard in a corn field `If you have better ideas, lets hear them. I am all ears.'
We teach people that midnight is the first instant of each day. Midnight in 24-hour format is 00:00. Considering that the time goes 00:00, 00:01, ... 23:58, 23:59, and there is no 24:00, then 00:00 is the beginning of each day. It would take a little effort, but people would (presumably) get used to it. I figured out the concept myself (someone asked, what day does midnight fall on? and I thought about it for about 5 seconds) and I'm sure most people would understand it. Especially if you just told them with authoritah, "Midnight is the first instant of the day."
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
Lunar, 28 day months, add a month every 17 few years. It's worked for 5761 years
working out the conversion of birthdays and other events yet?
Is it just me, or is that incredibly stupid sounding? Now, this may just be because I'm used to what we have now, but I can't imagine being able to ask someone if they'd like to do something next "Sixday" and keep a straight face.
The entire thing, however well thought-out, strikes me as being incredibly impersonal.
Also...
Individual nations would decide what to name each month, under Flansburg's plan.
Wouldn't it be better if each language had different names, not each nation? AFAIK, anyone who speaks English will know what I mean by "January". If each nation made up it's own names, that wouldn't hold true.
One last thought...
Flansburg's calendar has 13 months of 28 days each, adding up to 364 days. Making New Year's Day a monthless day, designated "00" brings the tally to the regular 365.
This calendar is supposed to be nice and logical, right? Then what in the world is this "monthless day" nonsense about? It seems to me that Mr. Smart Math Guy came up with some bright idea for a calendar, figured it all out, and then--whoops. One day short.
"Well, we'll just stick another day in there... can't put it in a month, though, as each month has to have the same number of days. Oh, I know! It doesn't have to be in a month! *whew* Thought for a second there that I'd have to lengthen the measurement for a day and try and implement it with the calendar."
--Psi
Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.
AFAICR The Jewish Calendar was thirteen days and it came into existence about 5 to 6 thousand years ago....
The MyTh - I am a figment of the Imagination - [Im Probably even not here]
Well actually, during daylight savings time, there's a two hour jump between timezones that observe it and those that don't. So, theoretically, there could be a point in time where it isn't 5 o'clock anywhere.
And what about when it's 30 past the hour? Are you just being inspecific?
--
...now I wont get my PlayStation 2 until the 28th day of the 13th month of the 2nd year.
If they're using the Mayan calendar, they're not looking from very far into the future ;)
The Mayan calendar says the world ends in 2012, AFAIK.
In post-9/11 America, the CIA interrogates YOU!
And then there comes the holiday bit... ALL OUR HOLIDAYS ARE GONE. Well, most. Birthdays will never be the same, There will only be one fourth Thursday in November, and it will always be the same day under this plan, and Memorial Day can no longer be the weekend of May 29-31, since the month ends with May 28. Not to mention, the idea of a birthday is which day of the year you were born on. If you reconfigure the calendar, your birthday will no longer be on the same day. For instance, my birthday is July 18. Under this plan, it would move to mid-June (being roughly the 200th day of the year) or it would just be four weeks later (after waiting on July to come around a couple weeks late).
In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII established a calendar for the sake of conforming the world to one idea of time, thus eliminating that confusion. At the current day and time, every computer in the world (almost) is based on that calendar. Changing now is only asking for chaos. I say, if you want that calendar, you go ahead and separate yourself from society and start using it. If you're like me, however, you'll stick with the old calendar ... I mean com'on! It's a calendar! I think we know how to use it...
Granted, there are ALOT of reasons to stick with what we have now, but that doesn't mean to totally disregard a new idea. If you look at the human calendar, you'll notice it is actually alot easier to use, once you get the hang of it. the whole point of it is to have a more precise calendar, which is exactly what the H-cal is. with the exception of holidays, the 9-5ers can rest easy knowing that they will always have the 6th, 7th, 13th, 14th, 20th, 21st, 27th, and the 28th of EVERY month off. Also, when you know that X-day always occurs on X-dates, it tends to streamline the whole process.The only thing i don't like about the calendar is the naming system. i think that we should still keep our day names. It just wouldn't be the same trying to say that "it is a beautiful threeday".
I can't believe this guy promotes more frequent paychecks and bills payments as a benefit. I know I often find myself saying, "man, I wish I had the priveledge of dealing with bills thirteen times a year rather than twelve". Same with paychecks -- I've worked places that pay once a month, twice a month (1st and 15th), and every two weeks. Are the accountants saying, we'd really like to pay you more frequently, but we just can't figure out how to work things if we pay you on the 1st, 11th, and 21st of each month.
I'm waiting for when we get to Mars. Most likely, we'll adopt some more reasonable system when we get there ( like, number the days of the year, no months ). Of course, we'll need some method to keep in sync with earth as well, so we'll have to adopt a reasonable time keeping system that isn't tied to how long any given planet takes to rotate (how provincial).
It's interesting if you read Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. He makes some reference to keeping time in seconds from a date about the time we first got to the moon, but more exactly a few months later, just because that's the date that happened to be used in a certain early operating system.
Thirteen months, New Year's day and leap day not in any month or week... I came up with that much after seeing "13th Warrior." (They mention 13 months in the year.) I guess it took a math genius to rename all the days and months after numbers.
Another would be to have each day divided into 400 basic units of time, because the Earth will then rotate 1km in the time unit. Problem is that no self-respecting American would ever have that because it's "metric". Oh, well, another good idea hits the dust.
No "summer-time", no "time zones" ever again. Yippee! Both are totally un-natural and a pain.
Leap year in the calender is simply another day ( Number 01 ) in the no month period. Licence for a extra holiday every 4 years. Won't the bosses hate it.
Incidentally, when the metric system was introduced after the French revolution, they tried to implement decimal time as well. It failed because of religious objections, and didn't catch on until Battlestar Galactica.
I'll take the opportunity to plug my KDE Jewish calendar software here.
There is a site trying to get people to use "Internet Time" which uses 360 degrees for the day (a degree = 4 minutes). It would be standard all over the globe, so there would be one time for all places. It's completely useless in my opinion, as is any time system which doesn't accomodate all the different locations around the world...
Why bother make yet another time standard? we already have proven, well-working, Y2K-whatever-compliant method to time; UTC.
I'm writing this at 977388265. just remember
that a day is about 0x15k, you're set.
The calendar was changed to Julian from Gregorian back in September of 1752. Use the cal 1752 command on UNIX and look at the month of September. It skips the 3rd through 13th to accomodate the change.
--Jon
Try telling a shipper in Iran to expect their package to land in the shipping port on 2 Teveth 5761. Or that the moon shot must launch precisely on 13 Dhu al-Qa'da calibrated by the muslem sect living in northern Iraq. Or that today is the day of Izzat of the month of Masail of the year Vav of the 9th Vahid of the 1st Kull-i-Shay.
The Gregorian calendar is used throughout the world as a sort of calendrical lingua franca because it was one of the first calendrical systems to be spread throughout the world and gain universal acceptance. And, like English becoming the dominant language of the Internet, the Gregorial calender's dominance occured largely out of coincidence: it became the dominant calendrical system at a time when a universal calendrical system was needed throughout the world.
In many ways it's immaterial that the year 2000 refers to the birth of Christ in the Christian theological systems (but is apparently 4 years off); it beats setting the zero year to an arbitrary event such as the birth of a particular Japanese Emperior, and having to change all of the records because he died and was replaced by a new Emperior. All that matters is that a constant zero is used. And that we use the zero of the birth of the Christian Massiah is as good a zero as using the biblical creation of the Universe (Hebrew), the founding of the Roman Empire (old Roman or old Julian), or the start of the fourth (and final) cycle of creation of the Universe in Hindu chronology.
It just happens to be the commonly accepted zero that was in use when electronic communications made world-wide time syncronization important.
"Hallmark won't return my calls. Bill Gates won't return my calls."
This guy must be an idiot savant to be in the GBOWW as a human calculator but come up with something this stupid. Smart people need to realize they are not smart about everything. E.g., Einstein may have been a good physicist but his philosophic views on peace are embarrassing.
Eventually the Earth's rotation would slow down to the point that it is no longer rotating with respect to the moon, so the moon's orbit would be synchronized with the Earth's rotation and the moon would only be visible from one side of the Earth. The Earth would still rotate with respect to the sun, but the days will be much longer, something like 50 times (IIRC) as long as they currently are. But this won't happen until something like 50 billion years in the future, by which point the Earth will have been consumed by the Sun anyway.
Uhm, the other factor is the sun itself. It's gravity is also slowing down the Earth's rotation and, given enough time, the Earth will stop rotating in relation to the sun as well. It happens to any pair of bodies in space where one orbits the other and has a rotation that is not the same length as the orbit, they eventually will sync.
-- Grey d'Miyu, not just another pretty color.
His claim was that Nostradamus was not referring to "the end of time" in this "King of Terror" stanza, but an end to the way time is thought of. His theory was that people have such trouble with Math and time because it is so difficult to determine which day of the week a day in history was on. But, his necessity of finding an easy way to do this definitely drove this new calendar. It seems that he believes that people will achieve a higher state of thought if this is accomplished.
He did mention that the Mayan Calendar has the end of time in 2012, and he believes that this higher state will be achieved during this year.
My question is how does this calendar take into account the slowing of Earth's rotation and fluctuations in revolution? To me, it seems like an attempt to bring order to a chaotic system, which will always be inaccurate to some degree.
dinkmaster
for a massive party at the end. Of course we should probably start using the metric system before we worry about re-doing our calendar.
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
When the french did their First revolution, they invented the metrics (meter kilometer etc ....).
At the same time, they made every month last 30 days, each week lasting ten days. Day would last 10 hours and each our would last 100 minutes.
That calendar was used for 10 years before going back to the "normal" latin Calendar.
none Yet.
don't sweat the petty things and don't pet the sweaty things
..why not get rid of timezones and daylight savings, too?
IIRC, daylight savings is a carryover from one of the world wars, and timezones are some kludge pushed on us by the railroads as they spread across the world.
To me, in today's world where "instant communications" makes timezones a major PITA, it seems like we should all function on a 24 hour clock, where it's 00:00 at the exact sime time, everywhere in the world.
That way, when you tell your buddy in New York that you'll be there at 14:00 in two days, you know that'll be early morning for you (coming from the pacific coast) and he'll know it's somewhere in the afternoon for him.
Sure it seems unnatural now, but after a few weeks, I wager people would get used to "morning" being, say, 12:00. Or wherever dawn actually happens to fall. It just seems to me that having our measure of time bound to when the sun rises is silly; what happens in a hundred or so years when people aren't even living on earth and they don't HAVE a sunrise?
It all winds down to the same reasons Americans aren't using the metric system yet and we all bang around on QWERTY keyboards; folks are just too resistant to change.
If I was born on a monday, my birthday wold allways be on a monday. That sucks!
Go here
the 60 years cycle brings us back the the 5 elements... 5*12= 60.. that's why we have metal pigs and fire snakes
speaking of year of the snake i find it ironic that i am a pig and 3 out of 4 of my favorite youngish human female aquaintences are snakes.. go figure.. maybe i'm just a masochist
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Unfortunately savants are often known as such because their one area of their total knowledge is "measured" as exceptional. This calendar proposal has some merit, but ignores/discourages other issues. One of my favorite "secrets" was the discovery of the meaning behind the names of our days - Sun day, Moon day, Tyr's day, Wodin's day, Thor's day, Freyia's day and (sorry, Saturday escapes me). This heritage, to me, represents a well-deserved slap in the face to present-day Christian moralists and is a key to a better understanding of who we are/where we come from. Our day names stem from a time when there was one group from which many of today's nationalities sprang, thus uniting us in the past. Time and again we see that issues with concrete measurements (be it time, money, efficiency) triumph over valuable intangibles. It would be a shame to lose such a valuable key to knowledge just in the name of efficiency.
I also remember doing almost the exact thing this guy is doing when I was creating a world for AD&D (again, way back), only I didn't count from zero. I like the monthless day 00. This guy makes a lot of sense, but standing against convention takes more than a good idea, it takes a paradigm shift.
So what if we all followed this 13 month system and used "internet time" of 000-999? Would people in the future look back and think "they finally got their act together and rationalized the measurment of time"? Or will they be using the Mayan calendar?
The Royal Navy used to pay on a 28-day cycle, giving its sailors thirteen paydays per year. They also used to use a 7-watch system, five watches of four hours and two "dog watches" of two hours apiece in the mid-afternoon, to ensure that a ship's divisions took a fair share of the night watches (the "bells" were rung on the half-hour, so a watch changed at eight bells) due to the odd number.
The big advantage of our current dating system is its incumbency: most of the world's economy by value uses it, and those who don't generally have to use it in a business context. Islam and the Jews may keep their ritual year to other calendars, but they still do business on our particular line of heritage from the common roots in Egypt and Babylon that all three systems share.
The french tried a root-and-branch reform of the calendar after the revolution. It failed utterly almost immediately, despite legislative efforts to the contrary: any frenchman who wanted to do business outside the country was forced to work on the gregorian calendar, and the rest didn't want to spend time and effort re-tooling. The metric system of measurement caught on, though.
-- AndrewD
A Maze of Twisty Little Laws, All Different.
Flansburg hasn't figured out how to handle leap years -- yet. But that's only a minor hurdle.
What's up with that??? Do you try to start something on Jan 1, which is like 10 days away, that you haven't yourself figured out? What about leap years?? Oh, nevermind, that's just a minor hurdle. What kind of approach is that?
I admit, the idea is nice, in theory, but think of how much money would be spend on supporting all that, who will rewrite all the software? And that would be another major headache for poor programmers. Damn!
http://dtum.livejournal.com
what an article! I must say, that sure wrecked my paradigm of the perfect month.
On paper it sounds pretty good. In fact it might even be a good system if it was enabled, but I think it's got a snowballs chance in hell if we can't even adopt the metric system.
By the way, where'd you get that stuff about the motives of the French gov for abandoning the decimal system?
I bragged about my Karma at a job interview but I didn't get the job.
I don't know if anyone has noticed but the calendar as it is is a Western invention. Some asian nations (and probably others) already deal with both their traditional calendars and the Gregorian one.
Open your eyes people.
Can you imagine? There's more than one of these people out there!
--brian
Uhmmm... no? Why do I see a BIG problem here? What would you do? Introduce som 6 hour slack at the end of the year? Making new years eve last 30 hous? Hell, I couldn't stand having days being "right" only once in four years!
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Of course, virtually everybody I know gets paid bi-weekly. For me it's every second Wednesday. I don't know how anyone manages to budget for a whole month! :-)
Not too long ago, my wife and I were paid on alternate Wednesdays, very nice arrangement.
Let's just count time in jiffies using an unsigned long. The calendar will rollover every 497 days. At the point of rollover, we'll just reboot all our Linux boxen and celebrate our "new year" with some beers while the machine boots.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
There are many more efficient calendars than the one proposed here. I've been analyzing alternative calendars for years. Even programmed more than a few of them, to check for accuracy. Some are clunkers, but many stand the test of time, so to speak. You're correct in saying they'll never be implemented. We're stuck with it, much like out current keyboard layout.
Max, in America, it's customary to drive on the right.
...showed up when I clicked to this page. Coincidence? I think not...
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Where
100 seconds is a minute,
100 minutes is an hour,
10 hours in a day
10 days in a week,
10 weeks in a month,
10 months in a year.
Simple.
Anyone remember the decaday, from SNL (back when it didn't suck)? SNL had a series of sketches mocking the metric system, like promoting the decabet (10 letters in the alphabet). The decaday is a 100-hour day. You'd spend thirty hours working, then sleep for twenty hours, and so on.
- Have a picture
the above is not a troll.....not everyone thinks there is a this omnipotent being that rules over everything
If we're going to start indexing months at 0, then by golly the language should index its arrays at 0 too! =)
This system will make it easier for C programmers to think of time.
"It's simple: I just think of it as an multi-dimensional array."
Tommorrow is tommorrow is tommorrow no matter what we call it.
I for one think it's a very neat idea, leap years could just have an extra day at the start, another 0 if you like, sort of like hogmanay.
It would make all the maths easier for pay/vacation etc.
Decimal days another good idea, why not combine the two. While we're at it lets standardize on a universal time, no more time zones.
Of course this will never work because of all the nay sayers "Makes perfect sense, but eveybody else will object" when they should be saying "I'll never accept anything as radical as this".
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perl -e'$_=shift;die eval' '"$^X $0\047\$_=shift;die eval\047 \047$_\047"' at -e line 1.
...as long as it's not New Years Day. How would database software and the like account for a day that is not in any week or month? It's Naughtday, the 0th day of the 0th month? And you'd have to have two of the damn things every fourth year. If it were ancient times, and I were a god-emporer of my country, I might adopt such a system, and declare Naughtday to be devoted to alcoholic celebration or some such, but implementing this sort of thing today? Makes y2k look like a missing semicolon.
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. -Carl Sagan
According to the Home Page for Calendar Reform, the 13-month calendar was devised by Auguste Comte in 1849.
The original idea didn't fly because Comte gave the months "superfluous" names. When the idea was later revived, it became popular in the United States. But the problem was the same then as it is now: fear of change.Seriously, he's got some good ideas, but it's like trying to stop the sun from shining. Yes, he's got a lot of positives, but you're talking about changing the entire fucking calendar! Talk about everything you know is wrong ... it's no wonder no one will return his calls.
Chalk this up to the "Neat, but too bad we'll never use it" category.
On a purely coincidental note, it doesn't take a human calculator to figure this out. A buddy of mine once suggested that we just throw away New Years and go with a 13 month calendar. Then he said something about pipe dreams and walked away.
The Calendar Faq here has tons of cool information about calendars.
- Have a picture
Isn't this like the Islamic calendar? 28 days calcuated by the moon. Which also plays a role in women's menstruation cycle and other stuff. (Tides and so on).
Trust the source!
The 13-month, or lunar calendar is a very old system. The problem with that system is, the moon is dead. The sun is the deity in this solar system, and the 12 constellations reflect the angle of nutrino bombardment which gave the ancients plenty of fodder to invent astrology.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Calendar reform, simplified spelling, and international languages were a hot topic in the 1920s, but you don't see much of them today. The US can't even get onto the metric system.
Reagan killed the last serious metrication proposal. I think the way to do it next time is to finish "hard metrication" (fasterners, connectors, etc.) first. Much of that has already happened; DoD and the US auto industry went metric years ago. The rest of the world hates getting US non-metric products; nobody has the tools for them.
I want to know what he is smoking and where to get it. It must be really neat gear. This is better than some of the things coming out of France atm.
I love stacking my barbecues in the shed at the end of summer - you can't beat a bit of grill on grill action.
12 is very useful because it's divisible by 2, 3, and 4 -- the most common number of pieces you might want to cut a year into. (Same reason it's better to cut pizzas into 12 than 8 or 16...)
If you want a better calendar, make weeks six days long, months five weeks long, and throw a slush week of five or six days (depending on leap year) over christmas vacation. Then the number of months is divisible by 2, 3, and 4, and the number of weeks (not counting the slush week) by 2, 3, 4, and 5! And the number of days in a week would be divisible by 2 and 3, as opposed to our current 7 which is an annoyingly prime.
The obvious day to cut is Wednesday:
Mon = one
Tue = two
Thu = three
Fri = four
Coincidence?
And if you really want to confuse the world for the better, add two more digits to our vocabulary between nine and ten so we do all our math in base twelve. Wouldn't it be handy if ten were evenly divisible by 2, 3, and 4?
The second is not "based" on the 9,192,631,770 cycles of cesium-133 radiation, they just took the second that existed and tried to find a good match in the radiation of various isotopes, then said, "the second will be adjusted a smidgen to match this, and now it's the standard second." The actual "base" of the second is in fact the arbitrary division of days into 24/60/60.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Now you're limiting yourself to one planet and one dimension. Somewhere, it's got to be 5 0'clock.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
At my workplace, the year is divided into 13 periods already.
All kings is mostly rapscallions. -Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Five seasons (Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy, The Aftermath), seventy-three days each. Five days in a week. With two days set aside as the weekend, it's a three day work week. No potentially offensive 'Godsday', either. Just Sweetmorn, Boomtime, Pungenday, Prickle-Prickle, and Setting Orange. There's a day called Prickle-Prickle. What more could you want? And, with St. Tib's day, even Leap Years are covered... Every Christmas is Prickle-Prickle, the 67th day of the Aftermath. Every New Years day is Sweetmorn, the 1st day of Chaos. I like this plan much better. Have a happy 3167! :)
Umm... doesn't mean that your birthday would fall on the same day of the week every year? That would suck for about 5/7 of the population :)
Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
Abstainer: a weak person who yields to the temptation of denying himself a pleasure.
--Ambrose Bierce
Ah, by why limit yourself to an English interpretation of "5 O'Clock?" In some language out there from another planet and/or dimension, it's 5 O'Clock right here.
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Many of the claims are just BS. It is still a 7 day week. He has only arraged the months as exactly 4 weeks, but that has nothing to do with how all religious holidays are calculated. Many are based on the phases of the moon which has a cycle of 29.54 days more or less.
And the first day of the week should be "zeroday", not "oneday".
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Funny...the day that is gone in the 28/6 week is Monday. Highly predjudical if you ask me....
Notice the trend? Where do you see that in your post? Nothing is based on increments of 10 in your post!
It's all about the Karma Points, baybee...
Moderators: Read from the bottom up!
SIG: HUP
Godsday? The Incas worshiped the Sun, and we already have Sunday so...too late.
Some children were brought up on Jesus and the Bible. I was brought up on Darwin and the Discovery Channel.
Homer: "Brrrr...Ooh, lousy Smarch weather!"
-- From my Best Friend (Written to me over ICQ): "i was gonna go to a party...but i had to reinstall windows"
The only problem is the years, if you insist on calibrating it to the seasons. 256 days plus 109 = 365. I am not sure how you would do this
But if you where in a space craft, then who would care? and you could calibrate the days to whatever length you needed for maximum comfort.
I remember crossing the atlantic from europe to america on a ship. The captain was cool enough to set the ship's clock back one hour late at night (vs during the work day) (you set the clock back one hour for each time zone)
I never felt so well rested and relaxed as after a week of 25 hour days with an extra full hour of sleep every night. it was wonderful.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
is to get off this mudball and stop basing time off of the rotations of some pebbles in space. ;)
Really.
People didn't like it, so Napoleon ended it.
At least we ended up with decimal money,
and most countries with decimal measures.
In Portuguese the days of the week are already named after numbers, except for Sunday and Saturday. The only bit of confusion is that Monday (segunda-feira) is Day Two, which means that Sunday (domingo) should be Day One (primeira-feira) but that would sound awful, so starting with two makes sense after all.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Why don't you just write an adapter class, so that you can use 13 or 12-month years depending on your .conf file options, and ... oh wait, this is the real world, never mind..
Real programmers use 32-bit time_t, for job security purposes: it guarantees extra work for them to do when January 19, 2038 rolls around (or should I say rolls over).
... thirteen mortgage payments a year.
-- Alastair
Well, we could do it like the Discordians do it - make it a holiday!
In the Discordian calendar, there is a holiday that occurs once every four years - it's called "St. Tibbs' Day", and it (miraculously?) falls on the same day as "February 29th"..
Now, the cool thing about St. Tibbs' Day is this: it doesn't exist on the calendar.. in the Discordian Calendar, there are five seasons ("months"), and St. Tibbs' Day is inserted between the 59th and 60th days of the Season of Chaos (The first season..) so the days go "Chaos 59, St. Tibbs Day, Chaos 60..." Your day-of the week doesn't change (Chaos 60 is still "Setting Orange" - or the 5th day of the week)
Now, since we're throwing convention to the wind and revamping the calendar anyway, I see no reason why we couldn't implement something similar..
Although if we're gonna change everything, I'd rather we just move over to the Discordian calendar and be done with it.. it's probably the most sensible approach to date-keeping I've ever seen...
One thing that is easily forgotten is that cardinal time systems are backwards-looking, where ordinals are forward-looking.
In a cardinal system, the elapsed time is given, eg 2000.0000 years. But the point this starts is at the very start of the era, and any point in that 2xxx.xxxx refers to 2000.0000.
In an ordinal system, the elements are named on the part completed one, and so the ends of the era are named, that is, a future point is named. So when we refer to `the third millenium', we refer to `3000', and all dates from the previous millenium point to this, ie '2001-3000'.
The issue here is not so much that `the third millenium starts on 1 jan', but that `if we use a cardinal system, we are harking for the dark past, not the deep future'.
My view on the millenium start is that centuries and higher should carry ordinal names (20 th c, 21th C, 3rd mill), whereas decades and lesser carry ordinal names (eg 1970s, 1963). Moreover, the centuries and millenia align with the decade-starts (so that 21th c runs from 2000.000 to 2099.999).
As to calendar reform, the system is not all that difficult to deal with, and the added variety of the movable feasts and so forth adds a measure of unpredictibility to the calendar. Over here, the late Easter of 2000 ran straight into Anzac day, so we had a five day weekend :) :) :)
There is considerably more to the changing of the calendar than the measurements, since people more often observe the passage of similar numbers in the calendar, than in the linear system. (You do not observe passages of 1 mile or 100 miles after anywhere as often as 1 year or 1 month after).
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
They took their ideas from Bablylonian seven day week and lunar/solar calendar.
And the seven days of the week would simply be named after numbers...
What the heck? What exactly is the point of changing the names of the days of the week to numbers? I suppose it's just so that it's easier to calculate distances between days, but that, to me, isn't much of a benefit.
It might be fine for the "human calculator," but the rest of us mere mortals aren't quite as proficient at using base seven arithmetic (with no zero digit, to boot!).
Where is the "human" in this part of the "human calendar?"
--
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Flansburg no doubt owns Flansburg's Y2K Emporium and is sitting on $10,000,000 of unsold goods. This is his bid to take another crack at producing a crisis in order to move that crap out of his warehouse. At least, that seems a much more plausible reason than the twaddle he's spouting in the article.
"If I have seen further than other men, it is by stepping on their glasses." - Michael Swaine
Isaac Asimov proposed the same thing about 40 years ago. I think his essay was called "Days of Our Years."
Oh my god! Subsidized time is coming true!
David Foster Wallace is a friggin genius.
"America, I smoke marijuana every chance I get."
Once something becomes part of our lives and history, changing it is very, very and I mean very difficult.
Believe it or not, making the people of earth (lets ignore other planets for now shall we) to believe and use ONE religious is much more simpler than adopting the 13 month calendar.
Karma stuck at 50? Add 2-5 inches.. err.. 2-5x Karmas Count to your pen1es.. err.. Karma all naturally and private
Discordians already do this..
If you ask a Discordian what time it is, they will reply "Five O'Clock" - because somewhere, it is.
This is basically done in protest to timezones and Standard Time. (They feel pretty much the same way you do about it..)
Calendars are based on repeated cycles.
Some of the cycles come from astronomical events-
day, lunar month, and year. The second may have
been tuned to the heartbeat.
Weeks and hours are human contrivances.
See Boorstin's "The Discovers" for a good summary
of time systems.