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. |