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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.
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
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Friends don't let friends misuse the subjunctive.
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...)
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.
Heh, and this plan will be enacted on "HellHathFrozenOverDay" in the month of "Never"...
http://www.dbeat.com/28/
Mantle
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...
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.
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..
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
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.
Lousy Smarch Weather!
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.
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.
Lunar, 28 day months, add a month every 17 few years. It's worked for 5761 years
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.
..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.
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..
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..)