Yay for The Human Calculator Calendar. Boo for not crediting sources. A missed opportunity to replace Jesse’s name with, “Scott.”
Double boo for not explaining the extra day every year, not to mention leap year. (364 / 28 = 13.)
Final boo for conflating the real world ~29.5 day imprecise lunar month with the 28 day English common law lunar month.
“not crediting sources”
Anyone that’s able to do math and that takes 30 seconds to look at our calendars can come up with the same reflection, nothing special with the “human calculator”.
“The simple idea of a 13-month perennial calendar has been around since at least the middle of the 18th century. Versions of the idea differ mainly on how the months are named, and the treatment of the extra day in leap year.”
treatment of the extra day in leap year
Duh, that’s the purge day.
I propose we call the 13th month “Nut November”.
I had no clue. Thanks for letting me know. :)
See also: Metric time.
10hrs in a day. 100min in a hour. 100 sec in a min.
Hmn…
You’d need to redefine the derived SI Units, or take new measurements for newly derived units. Newtons, joules, pascals, hertz, coulombs, watts, volts, ohms, farads, siemens, webers, teslas, henrys, becquerels, grays, sieverts, and katals.
Also not to mention motion and heat.
You could say there’s a large amount of pressure to not change, or that it’s a high “bar”…
I hope you smiled, because that is one joke I will not be making again.
You don’t need to redefine any of them if you don’t change the length of a second though, right? Because the SI unit for time is the second?
As long as you just change the definition for non-SI units, sure kilometers or miles per hour changes, but that’s not SI, so nobody cares.
There are (roughly) 86400 seconds in a day. This metric time describes a day with 100000 seconds. If you don’t redefine the second, then I guess we’ll just redefine the day, right?
100 seconds to a minute, 96 minutes to an hour, 9 hours in a day?? Metric with rounding.
Though I like the idea a lot, 60 has the great advantage that you can devide it by 2,3,4,5 and 6 which is a very useful property… The real power move would be to use the 60-system for everything… Like the Babylonians did, or so I heared
Base 12.
Nah, base 12 number system with the same logic as metric. But it’s probably too late to switch to a different number system.
Nah. Can’t devide by ape fingers
It’s useful. But when was the last time you used it? You usually don’t say a twelves or a third or a sixth of an hour, you say 5, 20 or 10 minutes. Half and quarter are available the same in decimal time.
It’s more a matter of habbit. You know what a second, a minute and an hour are because you had all your life to precisely learn it.
But then we will change either seconds or days.
If you take rhe same 24 hour day, and convert it to 10 metric hours, or mours, and split that to 100 metric minutes, or cenutes, and then 100 meconds, one cenute is 1.44 minutes, and one mecond is 0.86 seconds. The practical difference would be almost imperceptible. A mour would be significantly longer than an hour, 2.4 times, but you’d have the metric system attour disposal to break it into decimals.
That’s not to say we should switch, but it wouldn’t be that different.
I always thought that the argument is that metric time sounds nice but it’s actually worse than traditional time because 24 and 60 have much more factors that are more convenient in every day use. You can split them in half, in quarters, in thirds, in sixths.
You can make that same argument for Imperial units like inches and feet and cups and ounces. That’s why imperial units are still popular, because decimals are great for science and conversions, but 100 doesn’t have many divisors.
Also 10 days in a week. And 3 weeks in a month. Still 12 months, and 5 free days at the end. I like free days.
Fuck it. No-one is this thread can seem to agree, so I’m making a unilateral declaration that from here on out, all units of time except for the second are abolished, and we just use unix time for everything. You have until 1699217619s to make the switch.
We’ll call it “Longpork’s Law”
you can omit the unit now
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But what if we decimalised time?
No. Base 12 and base 60 are significantly better for things that are commonly divided into halves, thirds, fourths and so on.
A “day” is 86400 seconds. Changing the length of a second is a non starter, so you’d end up saying a day doesn’t line up with a day night cycle, or something weird like “a day is 8.64 hours long”, which doesn’t feel better than 24.
There’s absolutely no reason why days couldn’t be divided in 10 hours of 1000 seconds, we’d just need to change the definition of a second. The 24 * 60 system is based on a numbering system of a civilisation that’s long gone and it’s as arbitrary as metric or imperial measurements.
The problem is that we have a lot of definitions for “events per second” so redefining all those would be very annoying and costly. Then again, most countries switched to metric and did all those things, so it definitely can be done.
We could change the definition of a second, but we’d be changing the si unit of time to mesh up with things that don’t currently have si equivalents. We’d have to redo a significant number of units.
The meter is defined in terms of the second, which is then used to define the kilogram.
It’s a base unit that all the others are built on. This wouldn’t be a tweak, it would be rebuilding the metric system. So that there would be ten hours in a day, which we would keep having to tweak because the earths rotation isn’t constant, which is why “day” isn’t an si unit in the first place.Yeah, the civilization that decided they like base 60 is long gone, but the reason they liked it is still relevant, which is why we keep using it. Highly composite numbers are really convenient, and ten is a pretty shitty number beyond being the base we often count in.
Didn’t the French try that after the revolution?
Yep, base 10, base 10 everywhere.
Chad ancestors splited 1 year of 10 months of 3 décades of 10 days of 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds and so on. With 5 or 6 “sans-culotides” to handle leap years.
Also each unit of a decade is related to a fixed name: for example, “primedi” (first day of decade) is the 1st, 11th and 21th days of any month, “duodi” 2nd, 12th and 22th, “tridi” 3rd, 13th, 23th and so on until décadi fot 10th,20th and 30th and last day of the décade.
Jesse would approve that
Let this mofo cook.
How is no one in here talking about the International Fixed Calendar? It was exactly this, and Kodak used it for 60 years. It does work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
Huh, so this + Human Era dating is now my new favorite calender (there’s a sentence lol)
Kodak used to operate on this 13 month calendar. When I asked someone who used to work there, she was shocked that I knew about it and said that it was the best thing about working there. The original plan that this calendar is based on called for a liminal day between years for New Year’s Day with 2 days for leap years
There is a choice between having an extra day in the holiday season and counting up the extra days plus leap days, and inserting an extra week every several years
Adding the extra day annoys people who value weeks continuing as they have since ancient times
Using a leap week rule makes the calendar track the seasons a little worse. Solstices and equinoxes will move by about a week over several years
I work for a company which used to have 13 financial periods. It was great. Then they switched to 12 and we now have a couple of 5 week periods thrown in to balance the year out. I don’t know why they decided that but it’s not as good now.
Pretty sure this is what the Mayans used.
Really? I don’t see it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar
Lousy Smarch weather.
No no no. Let him talk. He’s making sense.
As someone who has proposed this system myself, I feel the need to point out that the meme is glossing over a couple key points:
First and foremost, 13*28 is 364 days, so to avoid slippage you’d need an extra day appended to every year, either as part of a month, which breaks symmetry, or on it’s own. You’d also still need leap years.
And in order for the days of the week to be immutably aligned with dates, these extra days would also have to not be part of any week. Which is a big problem if you want to get anyone who practices an Abrahamic faith on board with the plan.
What exactly would be so troublesome with having a “special day” outside of the usual week/month cycle? You can still go worship on whatever day of the week applicable to your faith. Just make the last day of the year its own thing. We can call it “New Years Eve” and party together.
It makes the calendar less than compatible with the commandment to keep the Sabbath by not working on every seventh day.
Which is not insurmountable in practice (e.g. by keeping a separate ecumenical calendar) but you can bet it would be a significant source of opposition.
But you’d be resting on the extra day, too (if you want, I for one will be partying). So you’d never go more than seven days without rest.
If that still doesn’t fly, I suggest we combine the extra day and the previous day into a mega-day that is 48 hrs long. Then everyone except programmers will be happy (we’re never happy with datetime conventions anyway, so what’s one more if-else statement between friends).
Not a calendarologist, but I’m pretty sure lunar calendars were tried and rejected for a reason. Other than the places that still use them for traditional reasons.
Of course, maybe they just didn’t have the concept of leap days?
Octember it will be after October. The names will be just as incorrect as they have been for way too long but if anyone wanted the names and order to correspond to their own meaning it would have been fixed by now.
If we change the number of months, the names of the off-by-two months (September through December) are getting fixed too. It’s better to fix all of the technical debt at the same time.
Found the software engineer
at the risk of sounding like a weirdo, does anyone else remember a book called the First of Octember? it was written and illustrated as though it was a Dr Suess story, but apparbely it wasnt
Not personally but I have heard a friend mention it and another deny it’s existence. I wonder if it might be one of those Bernstein/berenstain bears things. Or as I like to call it, the choice of Berensteins gate.
interesting. i was 100% sure it was a suess book until i asked mum about it and she was like what are you talking about thats not dr suess. wonder if she still has it
edit: wait a minute… https://www.amazon.com.au/Please-Try-Remember-First-Octember/dp/0394835638
it IS suess
Let’s make each month 73 days.
5 months. We can figure out a season for each one!
And pay less than half as much rent!
lo hicieron asi para que no les hagan la rima, solo es eso
Bro forgot to account for Earth’s precession
Every birthday you have, for your entire life, being on a Wednesday.
Sounds great.
