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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.
So now every software developer will have another calendar to have to convert back and forth between...
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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.
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.