13 Month Calendar? 383
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.
Re:The Fascinating Story Behind the Calendar (Score:2)
It'd be a pisser if the universe ended every 400 years.
Re:Customizable MOnths and Days... (Score:2)
tyr's day...
---------------------------------------------
Re:Well the Jewish calendar works fairly well (Score:3)
A great (Unix) Hebrew calendar program is Hebcal [walrus.com]. More info about the Hebrew calendar can be found at this site [geocities.com]
--
Re:The French did in 1992 (or so) (Score:3)
Which tells me if you want a chance in hell of convincing people to change the number of days in a work week, make the number >, such as 5 days a week. (Meaning we only have to work 3 days before getting a two day weekend...)
Re:Ugh (Score:3)
Then your time zones are defined by physical phenomena, and "daylight savings" happens automatically all the time.
Re:Planck time (Score:2)
Doing an actual measurement on an quantum-level, easily-measurable oscillating phenomena which is generally resistant to external influences (like they do in atomic clocks) is probably the best way to have a time standard.
Customizable MOnths and Days... (Score:5)
Heh, and this plan will be enacted on "HellHathFrozenOverDay" in the month of "Never"...
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:2)
But with no clocks around, why did they all "program themselves" to a longer cycle, unless they were natrually inclined to do so? They could have just as easilly forced themselves into shorter days by turning the lights down earlier.
If you wanted to really nitpick, I suppose you could give them persistant low light that does not change... but living in perpetual dusk would screw with their heads far more than artificial lighting.
Oh yeah?! (Score:5)
http://www.dbeat.com/28/ [dbeat.com]
Mantle
Re:Gregorian fixed problems. What doe this fix? (Score:2)
Futher, the switch to the Gregorian Calendar from the Julian was not uniform: while divised in 1582, it took almost three to four hundred years for all the countries of the world to switch. (Most predominately Catholic european nations switched in the 1580's-1600's; Protestant countries switched in the 1750's, and some countries, such as Afganistan, waited as late as the 1920's. (!).
In today's world, switching from one calendrical system to another would be virtually impossible, given how highly dependant we have become around the world on a unform date/time counting system for shipping and communications. In most areas of the world (such as in the Middle East) where other calendrical systems are used, the Gregorian calendar is also used as a sort of calendrical "lingua franca".
So I agree--why fix what isn't broken? The only major change that will be needed with the Gregorian calender may be an adjustment to the leap year rules in order to prevent drift going out tens of thousands of years. And I suspect we'll be long forgotten before there is enough accumulated drift to cause people to tinker with the leap year rules.
Re:MORE MONTHS? (Score:2)
You are backwards, that is how the metre is defined. The second is based around the vibration of a cesium atom.
This is the best way to do it, as we are starting at a unit which is useful to people, and then defining it terms of scientific constants.
Re:This is not Flansburg's idea... (Score:2)
Funny you should mention that. The name of our months are out of whack. September should be the 7th month, October the 8th, November, the 9th, December the 10. One wonders how it ever came to be the way it is currently.
Shouldn't *nix handle it fine? (Score:2)
Re:Why do we need months? Today is 2000.356 (Score:5)
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...
Planck time (Score:2)
(http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/cuu/Value?eqpl
I'd decimalize this times 10E45 to define a "Planck second" as 0.54 standard seconds,
and astronomical day as 160,000 Planck seconds,
an astronomical years as 58438752 Plank seconds and so on.
Portuguese (Score:2)
In portuguese, the days are already numbers. Segunda-feira to Seixta-feira are monday through friday. Saturday and sunday are still related to the judaic and christian calendars, Sabado and Domingo.
It took me a while to get used to calling monday "second-day", but now that I what I think of it in english as well.
In countries where taxes are not taken out of your paycheck, payrolls often work on a 13 month system, so you get 2 months of pay the month the taxes are due. If you are smart, you put aside one fourth of your salary so you aren't scrambling on tax day, but not many people are smart. So many companies give you some help.
the AC
ObDisclaimer: My portuguese is from a very rusty and not recently used memory, impaired by going out drinking all night with some marketing bastards on expense
Re:Earth's rotation (Score:5)
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.
Re:MORE MONTHS? (Score:2)
If you read mine again, you'll note that it uses the same 12 you like as the ratio of the inch to the foot.
That lends itself well to creating "good for everyday human use" units that are simple integer ratios to all the other scientific units, by making the human unit twice (1/6), thrice (1/4), four times (1/3), or six times (1/2) the smaller (larger) scientific unit.
And since the ultimately fundamental units are universal constants, it's actually a better system for science than the metric system, if the scientist can let go of their irrational preference for using base 10 in favor of the far more logical base 12.
(In short, yes, I am joking.)
Roman Calendar (Score:2)
Our calendar actually started as a decimal calendar, before the Julius Caeser added some new months named after himself and Augustus. This link [ancientsites.com] explains the original roman calendar. If you look at the names of the latter months (December for example) you can see that they are named according to the original latin numbering system.
Julius Caeser's changes gave us the 12 month calendar, Pope Gregory's (13th) reforms gave us leap years. Interestingly, Augustus Caeser later stole a day from February to make his month more impressive than Julius's (July).
take it one step at a time (Score:2)
No matter how good an idea it is, why is it even worth a try when the USA still has not gone metric? Do that first.
-------
LESS HOURS? (Score:2)
I thought about that, too.
Since seconds are the base unit of time here, you're talking about a day that is 8.64 "hours" long, if you keep it the same number of seconds as our 24 hour day. Well that's too strange, so let's round it to 9 "hours" a day. But that doesn't jive with the rest of the metric system, so let's stretch it again to 10 hours in a day.
Now you're talking about a day that is 100,000 seconds long, or 27.78 traditional hours. Amazingly, there is already a plan out there to support "28-hour" days [dbeat.com]!
Let's merge the two ideas together, right?!
Well no. If you work out the math, I think the problem with this idea is there are two extremes you're dealing with which probably cannot be changed. The length of time of a second, and the length of time of a "year" (or four seasons). You can't possibly change those two things. Therefore I don't think it's possible to divide minutes/hours/days/weeks/months evenly in a metric style system.
-thomas
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:2)
Human and pre-human evolution has generally taken place well outside of the Artic Circle. Nonetheless, the length of daylight probably isn't a factor for most people. An exception would be people with SAD, or Seasonal Affective Disorder, who tend to get depressed when days are shortest. I've read that in at least some cases moving closer to the equator has helped such folks. So individuals differ, but our ability to synchronize is generally pretty robust; most people recover from trans-hemispheric jet-lag in just a few days, for example.
19 month, 19 day calendar (Score:2)
Sqrt(365) is 19.1, which would amount to 19 months with 19 days each, totaling 361 days. We could then have either 4 or 5 days at the end of the year (non-leapyear/leapyear), which would be perfect for holiday vacations.
This is almost exactly what the Mayans used. They had 18 months of 20 days each (much nicer for subdividing than 19) and a 19th 'month' that held the 5 extra days. these were 'days out of time' where people could do whatever they wanted, as they didn't have consequence on the 'terrestrial' calendar.
Mayans also clustered years into groups of 20 (a 'Katun') and those into groups of 20 more (400 years, or a 'Baktun'). It seems that this makes more sense when looking at history. A century is either too long a cognitive unit of measure, and a decade too short.
Okay, now I'm just rambling, but considering almost no system has any hope of being approved because it would make Y2K look like a walk in the park, but if you could rebuild from scratch, what would you make? Metric time? Swatch 'beats'? What particularly bugs me is the lack of correlation between days of the week and the rest of the calendar. Each could exist entirely seperately from the other...
Kevin Fox
Literary reference (Score:2)
Anyway, they're good books, and he's a damn fine author.
-J
Re:Planck time (Score:2)
Plank's Constant (h-bar) = 1
Speed of Light (c) = 1
Time and distance are measured in the same units (1 s = 300,000 km). Things like electric charge are just counted (after all, the smallest unit of charge is just 1/3). Energy becomes just inverse distance. The strength of the electric field is the just fine structure constant, etc, etc, etc.
Then, all we need to do is define ONE unit. The Plank Second sounds good to me.
Many, many conversions just go away!
P.S. I could be wrong on some of the details, but the concept is valid.
no way - base 60! (Score:2)
And if we're renaming the days of the week - let's go back to the original names. Moon's Day, Tiw's Day, Woden's Day, Thor's Day, Freya's Day, Satyr's Day, and Sun's Day. At least, I _think_ that's where they came from.
Back when I ran a BBS (see also: the 'olden days'), I customized my BBS software to use those day names on the messages. Pretty neat, especially for a Paganism-oriented BBS.
But back to reality - I'd just be happy if the U.S. switched over to a 24 hour clock and the metric system, and made daylight savings time the standard time, especially this far north (Seattle) - we need all the daylight we can get during the winter! (it gets dark here around 4pm in the winter - ugh)
Oh yeah, and no more sugar substitutes!
Tough for computers... (Score:2)
Re:Portuguese (Score:2)
Sunday = Yom Rishon (first day)
Monday = Yom Sheini (Second day)
...
Friday = Yom Shishi (sixth day)
Saturday = Yom Shabbat (Shabbat or Sabbath day).
MORE MONTHS? (Score:4)
Our archaic time/date system should switch over to metric. 10 months. 10 hours per day. 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.
It only makes sense..
Any you thought Y2K was a computer nightmare (Score:4)
Why the 7 day week? (Score:2)
--
Actully, he's right. (Score:3)
Actually he's right; what's happening is that angular momentum is being transferred from the Earth (Earth's spin) to the moon (moon's tangential velocity). This is called "tidal drag". It may end with the moon gaining enough tangential velocity to escape, or it may end with the Earth's rotation synchronizing to the moon's orbit; which case occurs depends on whether the kinetic energy bound up in the earth's rotation is greater than the orbital binding energy of the moon at its present distance.
When the moon formed, it was much closer to Earth than it now is. Tidal drag moved it to its present distance.
Implementation problems (Score:2)
A lot of computer software needs to be rewritten to handle the new calendar, just like Y2K all over again.
Business such as banks, landlords and anyone else that accepts monthly payments for services will gouge their customers by not reducing their charges.
Thirteen is a prime number, so the year cannot be easily divided up into roughly equal parts. With 12 months, we can divide the year into two, three, four or six easily according to our needs.
Leap years cannot yet be handled by this system. For ideas on fixing this, I recommend that the creator of this calendar read "Lord of the Rings" and examine the Shire calendar. Leap years were handled by making the leap-day a special day of celebration (Overlithe).
Renaming the months will make a lot of our folklore based on month-names obsolete, and will therefore destroy a part of our culture. Such things as Armistice Day (the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month), One day in September (Grand Final Day in Australia), April Showers (song alluding to Northern hemisphere spring weather), and so on will all need to be converted.
Similarly, celebrating anniversaries of historical events could be difficult.
While the current calendar is difficult, reforming it will have to overcome so much social inertia that I don't believe it is possible. For the same reason, we still have Babylonian time units, despite many efforts to reform time with various metric innovations.
--
Homer Simpson quote.... (Score:4)
Re:And while he's at it.. (Score:2)
Interesting that you should mention trains. When I took the trans-Siberian express some years ago (China-Moscow via Mongolia) the trains ran on Moscow time while crossing 8 timezones. So when we got on the train in the east, breakfast was served at 3pm, lunch at 8pm, dinner at 2am or so.
What we got over time as we went west was some of the worst continuing "jet" lag I've experienced. Not knowing when, how, if to be hungry...
We solved the problem by a simple discovery: Every hour is vodka hour.
Re:Why do we need months? Today is 2000.356 (Score:2)
Don't forget that there are 12 signs in the zodiac (western). I think that this would have also have a very large affect on the reason for 12 months in a year. The sun lies in a new sign every month.
I think that this is also one reason why we have 24 hrs in one day, a new star sign rises every 2 hrs.
But hey, I probably don't know what I'm talking about :)
What the hell, while we're at it.... (Score:2)
The Julian Date (Score:3)
This human calculator guy made an interesting note that astrophysicists use a system that counts days from Jan 1, 1900.
In my current job (USAF Avionics repair), we fill out LOTS of paperwork, almost every single sheet requiring a date. Many forms are still handwritten, so they require a date to be in a particular format. Some of these forms actually require the same date in different formats. (Reasons differ, but none are for the sake of redundancy.) Here are the two most common examples.
1) You have the classic Julian date. The Julian date is my personal favourite, one that I use for all kinds of personal stuff as well. You have a single number that begins with 001 at the beginning of the year. Likewise, 356 is the last day of the year unless you've got a leap year. (That is, unless I've reversed my leap-year definition again.) In the event that you need to specify the year, you just prepend the year. For example, today would be 00355 or 2000355 depending on the scope of the date. It's even Y2K friendly!
2) The regular old YYYYMMDD format too. Another good computer-friendly format.
3) When actually *writing* dates down, I usually do DDMMMYY, where the month is an abbreviation. Today, for example, would be 20DEC00. It's not easy to goof up and transpose the YY and DD when reading or writing as long as you keep in mind that the day goes first. Which, mind you, was not a problem from 1932 to 2000, but next year, it is conceivable some could mistake the "01" for the first day of the given month.
Asimov (Score:2)
And then there is the ten-hour clock in Fritz Lang's Metropolis.
__
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:4)
All those experiments mean is that humans, in the absense of cues, tend to have a slightly longer biological cycle than they do when time cues are present. That doesn't mean that a longer cycle is natural, any more than living in an environment without exposure to outside stimuli is natural.
I'll use an engineering example (skip to next paragraph if your eyes glaze over): if you are trying to synchronize a relaxation oscilator to a particular frequency, you design it to free-run at a slightly lower frequency (i.e. longer period) and then apply a pulse or some other excitation at the desired rate. Biological systems (in particular the nervous and endocrine systems) seem to exploit relaxation processes quite frequently, so a relaxation oscilator is likely to be a particularly strong analogy to what is happening here.
Day/night cues have been very strong for human life throughout its existence. Even people living in caves probably spent a good fraction of their time outside the cave during the day. Putting someone in an envronment without time cues is a bit like putting them in a sensory isolation tank -- normal people start to hallucinate after an hour or two in the later case. Those experiments are looking at artifacts of exposure to an unusual environment, and have little bearing on what is "normal."
Fascinating . . . (Score:5)
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.
Re:LESS HOURS? (Score:2)
Remember y2k? (Score:2)
Now he wants to change the whole calander?
Hell, that's about as likely as getting people to accept Unix time as the official world standard.
We're too stupid to use something this SIMPLE ! (Score:2)
Daylight savings time is a good example. Why the !@#$% can't we just keep the same bloody time the WHOLE year throughout.
The leap year bullshit is another good example. We just couldn't pick a nice EASY TO REMEMBER system, now could we !. *sarcasm on - It MUST be accurate down to the nanosecond! sarcasm off* I realy don't give a !@#$ that the year has 365 and 1/4 days. The astronomers should pick their own bloody accurate calender - and for the rest of society give us a calendar that is USER FRIENDLY.
*rant off*
Re:The Julian Date (Score:2)
I use dd MMMM yyyy in most of my written correspondence (without abbreviating) or dd-MMM-yy (with abbreviating), but preferring to use the letter version of the month. My previous job was at a firm located in the United States with the corporate headquarters in Europe. Since the american date format is mm/dd/yy (which I dislike because it is not in decreasing order) and the european format is dd/mm/yy, I needed some way to be sure that however far my correspondence might be forwarded, everyone would understand the date the same way. (One of my nightmare jobs was checking over schedule spreadsheets that had been communally edited by persons from different countries - 11/07? was that 11 Jul or 07 Nov? auuugh!)
For naming of computer files I use yyyymmdd because that way things sort properly without my having to add any extra sort parameters. Call me lazy, but it works.
Why fear? (Score:2)
Oh yeah, that's _really_ helpful... (Score:2)
--brian
Re:Doomed to Failure (Score:2)
For the mathematically challenged, 13 months of 28 days plus New Years Day equals 365, 365 modulo 7 equals 1. That means for the day of week to be a constant for any specified date, one day must be designated as a special day, that isn't a normal day of the week, sometimes referred to as a "blank day" in other calendars.
Re:MORE MONTHS? (Score:2)
No, let's use truly basic units. The Planck interval for time, the Planck length for distance, an electron volt for electrical charge, an electron mass for mass, etc. In base-12 for the convenient evenly-divisibility by 2, 3, and 4.
Re:And while he's at it.. (Score:2)
However with time zones, it's a little trickier. I agree that it meets my penchant for consistency to say that I wish there were no time zones.
Here's a problem with that, though. Let's say we all run on UTC instead. All clocks and watches are set to UTC. This means that sunrise in Los Angeles, instead of being at maybe 0600, occurs at 1400. This is fine, people would get used to it.
But unless people change their schedules to no longer be diurnal (active during daylight), problems occur. Let's say we have no time zones, but everything else stays the same. What time is "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" on? People want to watch it after work. If it's always on at the same time (let's say, 0400 UTC), well, some people are working at 0400 UTC, or already asleep. Right now, TV shows aren't all shown at the same time. Buffy is on at 8 pm, which means that it gets shown for four consecutive hours in the USA. 0100 UTC on the East Coast, 0200 in Central, 0300 in Mountain, and 0400 in Pacific.
Now keep in mind, my goal here is to find a solution to situations like this. I'm not saying you're wrong, I think that between us we should be able to come up with an answer to "how do we deal with things that happen at certain times of day?" Another example: fireworks celebrations. Those can't happen during the day, cause they look like crap. They have to happen when it's dark. So they can't all happen at the same time, it has to be specific to the area of the planet. I can't think of any other examples right now but I'm sure there must be some
So what do you think? Is this a tractable problem? I sure hope so
Big Deal . . . (Score:2)
Sometimes I think the world's going to hell in a handbasket, and these kind of "grand proclamations" just confirm it. Christ, for anyone who knows anything about the lunar cycle, it should be a no-brainer.
--
Re:And while he's at it.. (Score:2)
Sure, no problem - I'm sure after a few years we'll all get used to sending our kids out to school 4 hours after the sun sets so that the huge percentage of people who must coordinate communication across continents will have an easy time of it!
>what happens in a hundred or so years when people aren't even living on earth and they don't HAVE a sunrise?
I don't know. I'm sure we'll think of something. Maybe like having lights programmed to go on and off at something approximating a healthy sleep-wake cycle?
(I'm not usually this much of a sarcastic SOB, that just make me laugh. Nice Troll)
Re:LESS HOURS? (Score:2)
There's really no reason they can't change that number to...say, 15,000,000,000 cycles of the cesium atom other than tradition. However, it's not some bozo deciding to divide by 24 then divide again by 3600 (hence the 1/86,4000).
BTW, my info comes from encyclopedia britannica.
Re:LESS HOURS? (Score:2)
--
Re:The four-quarter plan (Score:2)
According to the NPL leap second [npl.co.uk] web page, there has never been a need to add more than one leap second per year, although the current scheme would permit two seconds to be added or subtracted per year.
In an old National Bureau of Standards (now NIST) publication, they mentioned the use of a rubber second to keep atomic time synchronized with GMT. This required a periodic redefinition of the duration of a second. It seems that this caused more problems than it solved, leading to the current system of a fixed TAI time scale, and a UTC time scale that is offset from TAI by an integral number of seconds, via leap seconds, to compensate for variations in the Earth's rotation.
the pres. of Kodak proposed something similar... (Score:2)
--
Doomed to Failure (Score:2)
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:2)
Does anybody rememer the Seinfeld (sp?) where Kramer was doing a few minutes of sleep every couple of hours? Take that, combine it with the 28 hour day and the 13 month calendar and then you can really have some fun watching your body and mind go, "WHAT THE *$%&^# ARE YOU TRYING TO DO?!?"
Re:MORE MONTHS? (Score:2)
--
We tried changing the calendar in France... (Score:2)
We used it for one decade, then Napoleon dropped it, since it was associated, in the minds of the people, to the most extremist revolutionaries. Too bad, it could have been fun (who cares about Jesus's birth anyway?).
Ugh (Score:2)
If you really wanted to introduce logic to the calendar, why not eliminate the whole concept of months? Get rid of the whole mm/dd concept and replace it with a single 3-digit number for the date. (Instead of 02/14/2001; the next Valentine's Day would be 45-2001.)
The way I see it, the current calendar is really not so much of a burden to anybody. If he really wants to push for a reform in time-keeping that improves people's lives, then let's talk about banning the dated and useless concept of Daylight Saving Time!
We already have one (Score:2)
And it's very human---it lasts as long as an individual person needs it to last. This year had the shortest Checkuary on record, but in 1999 I was writing 1998 on checks as late as mid-February.
--
Re:Druid Calendar == 28-days x 13 months (Score:2)
Re:And while he's at it.. (Score:2)
Well the Jewish calendar works fairly well (Score:5)
Re:All Hail Discordia! (#2) (Score:2)
And what about when it's 30 past the hour? Are you just being inspecific?
--
Great... (Score:2)
is this guy in the accountants union? (Score:3)
I'm waiting for when we get to Mars. Most likely, we'll adopt some more reasonable system when we get there ( like, number the days of the year, no months ). Of course, we'll need some method to keep in sync with earth as well, so we'll have to adopt a reasonable time keeping system that isn't tied to how long any given planet takes to rotate (how provincial).
It's interesting if you read Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky. He makes some reference to keeping time in seconds from a date about the time we first got to the moon, but more exactly a few months later, just because that's the date that happened to be used in a certain early operating system.
Re:Why do we need months? Today is 2000.356 (Score:2)
The Babylonians considered 60 a sacred number. They also gave us 360 degrees in a circle (as there are roughly 360 days in a year), and 24 hours in a day (because they split the day into 12 equal parts, and the night into 12 equal parts, one for each sign of the zodiac). They also gave us 12 zodiac signs, as there are approximately 12 lunar months in a solar year.
Of course the Babylonians knew it was closer to 365.24 days in a year and more like 12 7/19(?) lunar months in a solar year. But they had this thing for rounding the numbers into more even ones for religious reasons.
The Babylonians also originated many of the stories which appear (in mutated form) in Genesis. The 7 days in a week is Babylonian, as they considered 7 sacred. (Because it's approximately 1/4th of a Lunar month. That is, 7 days because it's 7 days from new moon to first quarter, first quater to full moon, etc.)
They also originated a story of creation which evolved into the 7 day story of Genesis, in order to fit the length of their week. So (at least this is my understanding) it took God 6 days to create the universe and one day to rest in order to fit the length of a sacred Babylonian week, and not the other way around.
Okay, so I'm being a real calendrical geek. Sorry.
Nothing new here (Score:2)
Incidentally, when the metric system was introduced after the French revolution, they tried to implement decimal time as well. It failed because of religious objections, and didn't catch on until Battlestar Galactica.
I'll take the opportunity to plug my KDE Jewish calendar software [leeta.net] here.
Re:Today is Heisei Juu, Nijuuichigatsu Hatsuka. (Score:2)
The Gregorian calendar is used throughout the world as a sort of calendrical lingua franca because it was one of the first calendrical systems to be spread throughout the world and gain universal acceptance. And, like English becoming the dominant language of the Internet, the Gregorial calender's dominance occured largely out of coincidence: it became the dominant calendrical system at a time when a universal calendrical system was needed throughout the world.
In many ways it's immaterial that the year 2000 refers to the birth of Christ in the Christian theological systems (but is apparently 4 years off); it beats setting the zero year to an arbitrary event such as the birth of a particular Japanese Emperior, and having to change all of the records because he died and was replaced by a new Emperior. All that matters is that a constant zero is used. And that we use the zero of the birth of the Christian Massiah is as good a zero as using the biblical creation of the Universe (Hebrew), the founding of the Roman Empire (old Roman or old Julian), or the start of the fourth (and final) cycle of creation of the Universe in Hindu chronology.
It just happens to be the commonly accepted zero that was in use when electronic communications made world-wide time syncronization important.
And while he's at it.. (Score:4)
IIRC, daylight savings is a carryover from one of the world wars, and timezones are some kludge pushed on us by the railroads as they spread across the world.
To me, in today's world where "instant communications" makes timezones a major PITA, it seems like we should all function on a 24 hour clock, where it's 00:00 at the exact sime time, everywhere in the world.
That way, when you tell your buddy in New York that you'll be there at 14:00 in two days, you know that'll be early morning for you (coming from the pacific coast) and he'll know it's somewhere in the afternoon for him.
Sure it seems unnatural now, but after a few weeks, I wager people would get used to "morning" being, say, 12:00. Or wherever dawn actually happens to fall. It just seems to me that having our measure of time bound to when the sun rises is silly; what happens in a hundred or so years when people aren't even living on earth and they don't HAVE a sunrise?
It all winds down to the same reasons Americans aren't using the metric system yet and we all bang around on QWERTY keyboards; folks are just too resistant to change.
Re:73, not 60 (Score:2)
void FindDiscordianDate(short *day, short *month, short *year)
{
*day = 79 * rand();
*month = 5 * rand();
*year = 5000 * rand();
}
:-)
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:2)
Heck, take a typical, unattached, advanced/expert programmer, tell him he doesn't have to come in at 8 o'clock every day anymore, and watch his personal schedule loosen waaay up.
I think you nailed the operative factor in your experiment description: give him "plenty of stuff to amuse himself with". That's why his "day" drags on -- the desire to extend play time. I'd theorize you could get a reverse effect if you changed the experiment such that he had an endless pipeline of generally unenjoyable goals to complete (to do, say, before sleeping, etc.) and I bet his behavioral period (en macro) would shrink up pretty good.
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:2)
I've got a sleep disorder, or rather, a sleep timing disorder (I sleep fine, no apnea or anything). My sleep cycle wasn't linked to the sun so I found myself following roughly a 26-30 hour day, I'd guess it's 28 +/- 2 hours based on how interested I was in whatever I was doing at the time.
Anyways, my sleep rolled around, to where I'd have visited all ends of the pattern in a week or so.
I was never overly tired (beyond normal for a geek who skips sleep every few 'nights' etc) or sick, so I'd say that my body didn't rely on the 28 hour cycle.
I've had friends who didn't work get off the 24 hour cycle and they seemed just fine. It just meant that they stayed out of bright sunlight for a while and didn't try to sleep on regular cues. They were just fine when they were on a longer cycle, and when they put effort into it (got jobs, or girlfriends) they were able to adjust fairly easily.
My sleep disorder prevented me from changing cycles as easily, but I think my experience was similar to theirs while on that schedule - I felt just fine and was able to live a regular healthy life.
(It's a good thing that I could do contracting work from home.)
Re:Body wants a longer day (Score:2)
Bright lights, melatonin, and excessive alarm clocks couldn't lock me to a regular schedule, I tended to keep a 26-30 hour day. Except when I stayed up a very long time, as you say, because I had to interact with the 24h world one day.
Some further thoughts (Score:2)
The Royal Navy used to pay on a 28-day cycle, giving its sailors thirteen paydays per year. They also used to use a 7-watch system, five watches of four hours and two "dog watches" of two hours apiece in the mid-afternoon, to ensure that a ship's divisions took a fair share of the night watches (the "bells" were rung on the half-hour, so a watch changed at eight bells) due to the odd number.
The big advantage of our current dating system is its incumbency: most of the world's economy by value uses it, and those who don't generally have to use it in a business context. Islam and the Jews may keep their ritual year to other calendars, but they still do business on our particular line of heritage from the common roots in Egypt and Babylon that all three systems share.
The french tried a root-and-branch reform of the calendar after the revolution. It failed utterly almost immediately, despite legislative efforts to the contrary: any frenchman who wanted to do business outside the country was forced to work on the gregorian calendar, and the rest didn't want to spend time and effort re-tooling. The metric system of measurement caught on, though.
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:2)
Re:Portuguese (Score:2)
I don't see why a ordering has to be assigned to the seven days of the week at all. Look at the current arguments over whether Sunday or Monday is the first day of the week. (My preferred choice: Monday is day 1, Tuesday is 2... but Sunday is 0.) It would be better to say that the seven days always repeat in the same order, but there is no 'beginning' or 'end' to the cycle. Unless you can date the creation of the world to the nearest day.
Who needs a calendar? (Score:2)
Not really a new concept. (Score:2)
Great synchronicity - the Despair Calendar ad.... (Score:2)
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Re:Fascinating . . . (Score:2)
Ta Da
Subjectivity will always win out.
Re:Fascinating . . . (Score:2)
In our obsession to make everything fit neatly we tend to miss the fact Nature has an order we'll never fully understand.
Crackpot? (Score:2)
Seriously, he's got some good ideas, but it's like trying to stop the sun from shining. Yes, he's got a lot of positives, but you're talking about changing the entire fucking calendar! Talk about everything you know is wrong ... it's no wonder no one will return his calls.
Chalk this up to the "Neat, but too bad we'll never use it" category.
On a purely coincidental note, it doesn't take a human calculator to figure this out. A buddy of mine once suggested that we just throw away New Years and go with a 13 month calendar. Then he said something about pipe dreams and walked away.
Re:And while he's at it.. (Score:2)
But what's so great about the metric system? It's based on the size of the Earth, which is great, provided _everyone_ lives on the Earth.. which means in another 2000 years or so it'll be just as provincial and outdated as the Standard system is today..
What about a new measurement, that works on something _truely_ universal.. like say, the decay of a subatomic particle.. as I recall the decay of a free neutron takes somewhere around 11 minutes, rain or shine.. use that as the cornerstone of your time measurement, and use the distance light travels in that amount of time as your measure of distance.. (breaking it up by 10s of course)
But then again, even that would only be relevant provided you live in this universe..
The four-quarter plan (Score:2)
Calendar reform, simplified spelling, and international languages were a hot topic in the 1920s, but you don't see much of them today. The US can't even get onto the metric system.
Reagan killed the last serious metrication proposal. I think the way to do it next time is to finish "hard metrication" (fasterners, connectors, etc.) first. Much of that has already happened; DoD and the US auto industry went metric years ago. The rest of the world hates getting US non-metric products; nobody has the tools for them.
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:3)
This experiment has been done before, and is easy to repeat... just put a guy in a cave with plenty of stuff to amuse himself with for a few years, let him eat and sleep whenever he wants, and see what happends. (Alternatively, look at the lifestyle of a telecommuting programmer who's boss never calls.)
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:2)
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
Re:Oh yeah?! (Score:2)
The point being that if you put somebody in an empty room for that long, it becomes an experiment in isolation and sensory deprivation, making the results completely invalid from a sleep-pattern study perspective.
If you give them a way to keep busy, the results are much more useful.
Also, it is not about wanting to stay up longer. The time spent sleeping also gets longer. (Most people would sleep 9-10 hours a day, if their lifestyle permitted it. I know I would.)
Re:Might be a probelm with "Godsday" (Score:2)
Maybe it oughta be "SlackerDay." A day we can all celebrate.
Monday Is a Casualtiy (Score:2)
a Binary Calendar? (Score:2)
The only problem is the years, if you insist on calibrating it to the seasons. 256 days plus 109 = 365. I am not sure how you would do this
But if you where in a space craft, then who would care? and you could calibrate the days to whatever length you needed for maximum comfort.
I remember crossing the atlantic from europe to america on a ship. The captain was cool enough to set the ship's clock back one hour late at night (vs during the work day) (you set the clock back one hour for each time zone)
I never felt so well rested and relaxed as after a week of 25 hour days with an extra full hour of sleep every night. it was wonderful.
Decimal calendar during French Revolution (Score:2)
At least we ended up with decimal money,
and most countries with decimal measures.
an easy solution (Score:3)
Re:Real programmers use 64-bit time_t (Score:2)
Oh great, just what I need... (Score:2)
Re:And while he's at it.. (Score:2)
Semetic (Babylonian) not Jewish (Score:2)
All Hail Discordia! (#2) (Score:3)
If you ask a Discordian what time it is, they will reply "Five O'Clock" - because somewhere, it is.
This is basically done in protest to timezones and Standard Time. (They feel pretty much the same way you do about it..)