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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Nostalgia ain't what it used to be.
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.
The actual perihelion point isn't a good choice because the earth wobbles a bit in it's orbit due both the gravitation of the other planets and especially our own moon, making for slightly inconsistent times between perihelions.
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.
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.
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?
Here in Phoenix its ALWAYS 10 minutes to Wal-Mart.
scentipeed
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