Berkeley CSUA MOTD:Entry 35922
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2005/1/26 [Computer/SW/Unix] UID:35922 Activity:high
1/26    We know there are approximately 364.25 days in a year. Our ancestors
        didn't know better and had to keep adjusting the # of days in a month
        just to keep in sync, and now we have this unintuitive way of
        counting number of days in a month, the leap year, etc and it's
        somewhat of a hastle to teach children and to program it into the
        computers. Suppose you were to design a completely new calender, one
        that fewer rules and exceptions to remember, one that can be scaled
        to the next few million years to account for earth's precession, and
        one that perhaps could be extended to other planets. How would you
        design and partition your calendar? It's an open question, there are
        no right/wrong answers.
        \_ If you're interested in time and clocks and calendars, I highly
           recommend the books "longitude" and "splitting the second".
        \_ I'm sure the perfect system would involve centons, centars,
           sectons, sectars, and yahren.
        \_ Everything the same except the last, "partial day" is irregular and
           ignored once per year. Well, I guess we could try to fix the months.
           There needs to be 13 months of 28 days. The 13th month will be
           inserted as sexember, before september, and July/August renamed
           Georgy/Bush.
           \_ our society is heavily based on weeks (Sun/Sat) and quarters
              (esp in the financial field). I'm not so sure that changing
              the week system is a good idea. So as a compromise, I'd
              probably get rid of the months and just keep the weeks, so that
              we'd say that we're week 1-week 52. I'd keep the last day of
              week 52 as a "flexible day" to account for earth's precession,
              kind of like what the Romans did. This idea is simple and
              most importantly, it is backward compatible.
              \_ Wut? I kept 7 day weeks. Sure the 13 months don't divide
                 evenly by 4 but so what. Seasons don't fit neatly on the
                 ends of months as it is. In my system the flexible day
                 falls outside any week (worldwide party day! replaces
                 Jan 1st hangover.)
                 \_ sure it work but how do you get superstitious people to
                    adapt to it?
                    \_ We have the 13th days of months, why not 13th month?
                       13/13/2013 would be a fun day! Man I really want this
                       system now. I never thought about this before.
        \_ Make sure you define which year.  365.24218967d = 1 mean tropical
           365.2425 days = the average year length in Gregorian calendar
         \_ Make everything multiples of 10 (or 8).  100 seconds in a
            minute.  100 minutes in an hour and 10 minutes in a day.
            Obviously, this implies redefining minutes and seconds.
        \_ Here's another idea, 364 = 2*2*13*7, so...
           How about having 26 days in a month with 14 months (364 days).
           Each week will have 13 days.