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Introducing a Calendar System For the Information Age
First time accepted submitter chimeraha (3594169) writes "Synchronized with the northern winter solstice and the UNIX Epoch, the terran computational calendar contains 13 identical months of 28 days each in addition to a short Month Zero containing only new year's day and a single leap year day every four years (with the exception of every 128 years). The beginning of this zero-based numbering calendar, denoted as 0.0.0.0.0.0 TC, is on the solstice, exactly 10 days before the UNIX Epoch (effectively, December 22nd, 1969 00:00:00 UTC in the Gregorian Calendar). It's "terran" inception and unit durations reflect the human biological clock and align with astronomical cycles and epochs. Its "computational" notation, start date, and algorithm are tailored towards the mathematicians & scientists tasked with calendrical programming and precise time calculation.
There's a lot more information at terrancalendar.com including a date conversion form and a handfull of code-snipits & apps for implementing the terran computational calendar."
There's a lot more information at terrancalendar.com including a date conversion form and a handfull of code-snipits & apps for implementing the terran computational calendar."
We can't even get people to agree on daylight savings time. This will never happen. Anyone using this probably is going to type an angry reply on their DVORAK keyboard from a location directly in the center of their own little fake reality.
I thought this was called the Human Calendar.
"I have never let my schooling interfere with my education." - Mark Twain
So now every software developer will have another calendar to have to convert back and forth between...
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
Might make sense to start the year at Earth's perihelion, and hence reference it to the orbit, and not to the axial tilt.
Perihelion is, coincidentally, also very close to when the current year starts (Jan 4, this year).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
https://xkcd.com/927/
What the hell guys, if you're going to try and design something to replaced an entrenched convention, you might as well go whole hog. Oh wait, no, I know... their website isn't in Esperanto because such projects always fail.
This really takes me back to the olden days of the web, when people used simple html-based sites to spread their ideas for an artificial language, or an improvement on the metric system.
Are we going to have to use Swatch Time with this calendar?
All kidding aside, they mention:
(and for those who complain that UTC shouldn't have leap seconds ... I say go and use TAI or GPS, but don't change UTC because you don't want to deal with the complexity)
Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
Standards
I have created 4 simultaneous Worlds with 4 simultaneous days within a single rotation of Earth and have created 4 simultaneous years in a single orbit of the Earth around the Sun and I have created 4 corner stages of 'human metamorphosis'.
There have been various alternative calendars proposed, and some of them have the property that there's a special day in the yearly calendar which doesn't count as part of the regular seven-day-per-week cycle (such as the "month zero" proposed here).
A significant objection is that some religions require that every seventh day be kept as a holy day. If the calendar contains a day which isn't part of the regular week, then there are sometimes more than seven days between one weekly holy day and the next.
It's not a consideration for me personally. However, I'm sure that this feature would lead to significant resistance to the adoption of such a calendar.
Will I still get cake on my birthday?
Hope is the currency of fools
They want his calendaring system back.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
The conversion to this system would make all the Y2K mitigation costs seem like peanuts. Oh yeah, and a beer to go with the peanuts.
you realize that you were born BEFORE the epoch.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
As far as calendars go, this is not a bad effort. I don't think I would personally use it, but I've seen (and created) far, far worse. It is very regular; the rules have few exceptions, and the exceptions are well-defined. There aren't too many decisions in it that stand out as glaringly unjustified or confusing, other than of course by definition, when you create a new calendar, the very decision to do so stands out as glaringly unjustified. :)
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
As long as the months are named after Jesus and the twelve disciples.
... but I predict that the US will switch to SI units for everyday measurements before this new calendar is adopted. :)
13 identical months of 28 days each
365 is semiprime and neither of those factors is either 13 or 28.
in addition to a short Month Zero containing only new year's day
Epagomenal days wreak havoc on "monthly" billing cycles (see: Coptic calendar, Mayan calendar, et al.). This is why the Julian and Gregorian bissextile day is explicitly a part of February.
and a single leap year day every four years (with the exception of every 128 years).
The Gregorian calendar design explicitly rejected more precise intercalation cycles in favor of numbers that were easier to remember (i.e. more user friendly). Hell, the quadrennial bissextile cycle introduced by the Julian calendar got screwed up in Augustus Caesar's own lifetime. Never underestimate the need for simplicity.
The beginning of this zero-based numbering calendar, denoted as 0.0.0.0.0.0 TC
We can't even get all programming languages to start their arrays at 0. What makes you think it'll be easier for non-programmers to accept this?
is on the solstice, exactly 10 days before the UNIX Epoch (effectively, December 22nd, 1969 00:00:00 UTC in the Gregorian Calendar).
The solstice is an instant; the date it occurs on depends entirely on your meridian/time zone (e.g. the Chinese calendar explicitly specifies Beijing time). So "exactly ten days" is a meaningless descriptor.
Besides, since you're adopting a quadrennial intercalation cycle, that instant will drift back about six hours every year, further screwing up your "exactness."
Last but not least: the solstice is a fundamentally difficult astronomical phenomena to measure. The instant it occurs is somewhere in the window where the sun's north-south motion is too small to measure. Equinoxes have historically been measured with far greater precision.
It's "terran" inception and unit durations reflect the human biological clock
Then where the heck are your 28-day months coming from? The billions of people who live under a lunar or luni-solar calendar already know that the average synodic month is about 29.5 days, and that's the "month" that affects tides and human fertility cycles.
and align with astronomical cycles and epochs.
Really?
Days, months and years have nothing to do with each other; there is nothing to "align" to.
Its "computational" notation, start date, and algorithm are tailored towards the mathematicians & scientists tasked with calendrical programming and precise time calculation.
Days, months and years aren't SI units, and the one true SI unit of time has jack shit to do with any of them.
We already have a calendar system "For the Information Age": the second counter. Actually, of course, we have a whole series of them, but they differ only in the zero "epoch" second, so translation between them is trivial. The most widely-used such counter is the unix/POSIX time() value, perhaps augmented with a decimal point and a fractional second value.
This "calendar system" has a property that all the others lack: simple arithmetic operations work with it. And once you have the second for some event, there are library routines that can translate it to a human-readable form in any other calendar that you like.
So feel free to invent other interesting calendars; we software types won't be offended. We'll just ask you to be very precise in how you define your calendar, so we can write the routines to produce your calendar from ours. Of course, we'll expect you to pay us for this unnecessary labor, but it only has to be done once for each calendar. And maybe one of your calendars can be the human-readable calendar that supplants the silly Christian calendar, relegating it to use in scheduling your religious holidays.
Just don't ask us to use your calendar (or any other that's not a single number that can be used to any precision) inside our OSs or libraries. The "Information Age" needs a calendar system that works using ordinary real numbers, and aside from the question of when the zero was, we have that already.
(Actually, there's also the slowly-growing problem of different clock speeds caused by relativistic effects, but that's probably a discussion for a much more technical forum than this one. ;-)
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Just as long as they don't mess up the next Y2K programming bonanza when 0x7fffffff gets here. You can change the wall calendar, but please don't screw up, or fix, the UNIX Epoch until a year after it ends. :P
People should switch to metric religion. The sabbaths are every ten days, there are ten super-holy days per year (each with one special rite and ten minor cultural flavorings) which are always guaranteed to never also land on a sabbath so you get an extra day off from work, there are ten gods, the tenth son of a tenth son gets a magic power (among a choice of ten possibe powers, and balanced by one of ten disadvantages), each priest gets immunity from prosecution for one of ten different crimes (yes, rape is one of the choices, but they don't all have to choose rape!), the holy book that you're expected to be familiar with is only a hundred pages long and contains ten myths, and the kilochurches (there are no "megachurches") are only allowed to have one thousand members apiece before they're required to fission into hectochurches, so there's plenty of parking and they don't antagonize their surrounding community so much, thereby limiting the amount that you're hated and loathed in residential areas.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Based on the birth of UNIX is at least agreed upon. The birth of Jesus is up for debate and an odd choice to try and promote as a global "Year Zero". We need to devote our resources to determining the exact moment of the big bang and start counting from there. At least writing the date would give people some idea of perspective. "Wow - I can't believe it's 13.805.624.212.04.27.14.21.12 already... Seems like just yesterday it was just 13.805.624.211.04.27.14.21.12!" "Lord... It's only 13.805.624.212.04.27.14.21.12... I don't get off work until 13.805.624.212.04.27.15.30.00 today. I've been here since 13.805.624.212.04.27.06.05.33!"
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
It's all seconds, or fractions of a second to your heart's desire, for calculations and deltas.
The rest is human-usable representation, a "pretty print". Making the pretty print be more useful to computers rather than people is less than helpful.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
So, the months are 28 days long ... ... try to get that.
How many days is it from 0:00 at 28th of month one till 24:00 1st of month two?
Wow it is not two days? Just because you idiot decided the first day is named ZERO?
There is no 0st element in anything, there is a first, a last and an n'th and if you want your 'thing' may contain zero elements and be empty!
There is no zero'th wheel on your car, nor is the first beer you drink in the evening your zero'th beer, it is the first
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
EST (Earth Standard Time)
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Right now, here in western Washington state, it's day 27 of month 2 in the year 114.
Hey it's exactly 6 months until Wall-mas!
#DeleteChrome
You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform. Your idea will not work. Here is why:
Standard Reply Form for Your New Calendar System Idea
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It's a common misconception that the U.S. uses Imperial Units. Sure, we use the same unit names as Imperial, but really, ours are just a bit off, except for liquid measures, which are off by a fairly large amount.
Modern U.S. standard units are also set to be fixed values of the metric system:
1 pound-mass = 0.45359237 kg (exactly)
1 inch (US Standard)= 2.54 cm (exactly)
1 gallon (US liquid) = 231 cubic inches (exactly) = 3.785 L (approx.)
But, compare:
1 gallon (UK "Imperial") = 4.54609 L (exactly)
There's also the quirk that, for land surveys, the older definition of 1 foot = (1200/3937) meter is still used. The difference between the standard foot and the survey foot is at the fifth decimal place, so most of the time, it's an insignificant difference.
We already got one
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I do remember reading a similar proposal in one of Isaac Asimov's non-fiction books.
His proposal included having January 1 start on a Sunday. This meant there were 13 months each with a Friday the 13th. He considered this appropriate, as I recall.
The birth of Jesus is "year one", not "year zero". We go from 1BC (or BCE if you prefer) to 1AD (or CE) with no year zero.
We do know for a fact that we got year one wrong in our calculations. The Bible says Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod, and King Herod died in 4BC.
The Ethiopian calendar has 12 months of 30 days plus a thirteenth month of five or six days (leap year every four years).
Their national travel motto is "Thirteen months of sunshine".
They also start their clock at (our) 6am which can be a bit confusing when making appointments to meet people (our 10am is their 4am).
They also missed the Gregorian calendar correction so it's now 2006!
From Wikipedia:
Like the Coptic calendar, the Ethiopic or Ge'ez calendar has twelve months of exactly 30 days each plus five or six pagome days, which comprise a thirteenth month. The Ethiopian months begin on the same days as those of the Coptic calendar, but their names are in Ge'ez. The sixth epagomenal day is added every four years without exception on August 29 of the Julian calendar, six months before the Julian leap day. Thus the first day of the Ethiopian year, 1 Mäskäräm, for years between 1901 and 2099 (inclusive), is usually September 11 (Gregorian). It, however, falls on September 12 in years before the Gregorian leap year.
The current year according to the Ethiopian calendar is 2006, which began on September 11, 2013 AD of the Gregorian calendar.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
They screw everything up.
Ignoring leap seconds just pushes the problem to our great-geat grandchilren. By the time that they have to deal with it the problem will be even worse. Far better to fix your program to cope with leap seconds than leave future generations a problem as your legacy. Don't be lazy.
...that no one has even considered how this stacks-up to the Time Cube.
Here I was hoping this was going to be about a calendar system to replace davical + lightning, Outlook or Google Calendar.
Not so, it seems...
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
I guess April Fools came early with the new calendar. Or is the timing of the announcement off?
http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/webmon...
Perl Programmer for hire
Unless Joda Time supports it ... I'm not interested!
goes around the world
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
scentipeed
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Try this solution on for size (also something that will never be implemented, but...):
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Is the parenthesis part of the emoticon?!!! or is your EMOTICON MOUTHLESS?!?!?!
Heh. I've noticed that both are quite common, and depending on aesthetic ideals about such things, one or the other is likely to offend most readers. So I try to use both of them, preferably close together.
In any case, the ";-)" one isn't mouthless, since if you lean your head to the left, you can clearly see that the paren is the mouth. Adding the left paren not only gives balanced parens, but also gives the emoticon a forehead. Apparently it's bald, but what can ya do?
One fun part of all this agonizing is that if you include both parens (perhaps in a misguided sense to satisfy picky editing software ;-), the rendering software often converts the ";-)" to an image, but leaves the "(" as is, producing an unclosed open paren.
Ya can't win at such games; the only winning move is to refuse to play. Or maybe to throw a monkey wrench into both attitudes.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
About
-kgj
What advantage does this offer over traditional Julian Day numbering. where each day is sequentially numbered and their number is divisible by 7 on Mondays? As long as it is necessary to refer to civil or traditional time that can be easily converted.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
Which means it's up for debate. All we really know is that it's "not too far off" and likely in the wrong season.
Anyway it was meant mostly facetiously in case that wasn't apparent from the post. All I was trying to get across is that the calendar start time is arbitrary. Even if the gods descend and tell us the exact place, time, and date of the birth, that doesn't mean we have to change the year, or Christmas, or anything else. We've been rolling with it this long, why lift the whole train onto an identical set of parallel tracks? For the sake of accuracy? My guesstimate of the big bang wasn't far off from accepted theory. And, as a calendar start date, my big bang guess is as useful as the commonly used year 1 or Unix epoch or really any other metric.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
Reminds me of the Tranquility calendar published in Omni magazine back in July 1989. http://www.mithrandir.com/Tran...
*It's not what you can do for the Dark Side but what the Dark Side can do for you!*
"You know you've stayed too long when you start using the customer's calendar system." - Qeng Ho proverb
That's decimal, not metric.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
13 month calendars go back to the 18th century at least. So pre-date LSD.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
The next calendar system is as boring and irrelevant as the next programming language. Time is defined and measured by the passing of base unit (say a second) which can be counted. A calendar system is a surface on top of that unit. Make your pick but please do not bother others with your *better* new system.
How about we start by making UTC a thing? Seriously last summer there was an online live stream advertised in PST and GMT. This is while the UK was on BST. So, did they mean UK local time (BST) or GMT (which is one hour behind)?
> First time accepted submitter chimeraha (3594169)
Wayne?