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13 Month Calendar?

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the something-to-think-about dept.

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.

6 of 383 comments (clear)

  1. Customizable MOnths and Days... by Katya · · Score: 5
    "Individual nations would decide what to name each month, under Flansburg's plan. And the seven days of the week would simply be named after numbers -- Oneday for Monday, Twoday for Tuesday, and so on. Flansburg suggested Sunday be Godsday, and each month be named after a virtue. "

    Heh, and this plan will be enacted on "HellHathFrozenOverDay" in the month of "Never"...

  2. Oh yeah?! by Mantle · · Score: 5
    Here's the 28 hour day! Beat that!

    http://www.dbeat.com/28/

    Mantle

  3. Re:Why do we need months? Today is 2000.356 by w3woody · · Score: 5

    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... :-)

  4. Re:Earth's rotation by lars · · Score: 5

    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.

  5. Fascinating . . . by Luminous · · Score: 5
    But it will never fly. Too many basic human conventions are based around our current calendar, no matter how annoying it is. Something like this would go into effect only if there was an overriding authority in control, like the Catholic Church or the Roman Empire of the olden days.

    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.
  6. Well the Jewish calendar works fairly well by gelfling · · Score: 5

    Lunar, 28 day months, add a month every 17 few years. It's worked for 5761 years