Comment /sigh (Score 4, Interesting) 224
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?
- There is no integer number or integer ratio of days (mean solar or otherwise) in a tropical year
- There is no integer number or integer ratio of days (mean solar or otherwise) in a synodic month
- There is no integer number or integer ratio of months (synodic or otherwise) in a tropical year
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.