I think humanity is stuck with the Babylonian 12 based system for the coming centuries. As a programmer, I kindly ask you not to mess with time and date definitions, ever, unless you decide to turn the year into 360 days and remove DST while you’re at it. Keeping up with leap seconds is bad enough already, we don’t need more confusion.
Historically speaking, a thirteenth month isn’t that weird, it even existed, though for a different reason. The Romans used a calendar with ten months of 30 or 31 days, which ended up with only 355 days in total. As necessary, a thirteenth month was inserted to catch up the leap days that had been skipped. The last month, December (decem meaning 10), wasn’t the last month as we use it, as the year started in March when spring came around.
There are actually lunar calendars still in use today, most importantly the religious Islamic calendar. Several special Christian dates (easter, passover, and such) differ each year because they are defined based on the moon, basing dates on rules like “moons since 21 March” to fix calendar issues at the time.
Computer time itself depends on whether or not you use astronomical time or not (leap seconds and such), but users enter time, and you need to extrapolate what the user wants. That means interpreting and displaying local time. Unix time also sucks for planned events like “every Tuesday at 2” because there’s no stable offset for that (if you assume there is, DST may happen, and it’s Tuesday at 1/3 all of the sudden! Or worse, if it’s Tuesday at 2AM, the event may happen twice on the same day! Or it’ll be skipped!).
Times are already terrible. Timezones are the worst part. Repeated seconds in local time are probably the second worst. Countries switching between sides of the date line are pretty annoying too. 2k38 is going to be hell so I plan on taking a few years off when that comes around.
Our libraries can now deal with time, as long as countries inform the programmers more than a few weeks before skipping the DST switchover this year (this has happened of course). The system is already convoluted enough, though, so let’s just stop messing with it, we can only make it worse.
2038 is only a problem for systems with 32 bit Unix time timekeeping. Right now that’s only a few embedded systems, in fifteen years there will be even fewer
This isn’t even remotely as bad as Y2K where many systems used two digits to store years and rolled over unpredictably when tested. We considered one system in my workplace “good enough” as it rolled over to 100 so the calculations still worked. Others crashed, for example clobbering something in RAM when adding 99 + 1 and storing the results in two bytes
I’ve heard that Augustus wanted “his own month just like Julius” and that’s how they took 2 days from february for july and august. That way we ended having less months with 30 days. Never did look it up if it’s true.
I believe it was something like that, that’s why these months are in the middle of the year and have a number of days that doesn’t match (and why February has 28¼).
12 months of 28-31 is a better fit than the Roman calendar, though, especially because Romans tended to skip a leap month every now and then.
I don’t like the idea of my birthday being on the same day of the week every year. Based on the IFC Calendar, mine would be on a Tuesday every year and that would suck.
So I was curious about this and realized that your birthday will need to be converted for the year you were born to align with the date on the International Foxed Calendar. You just need to convert it once and use the new date from then on.
For example, say you were born on 31 Jan Gregorian. That would mean that your new birthday will be on 3 Feb in the new calendar. This would work for most dates except those between the periods of 28 Feb and 18 Jun (not inclusive) on the Gregorian calendar. Your birthday would depend on whether you were born in a leap year or not. For instance 1 May Gregorian would be 9 May IFC if you were born in a common year or 10 May IFC for a leap year. From then on you would celebrate that as you birthday. This could lead to a lot of people not sharing a birthday anymore if they were born in different years and one was a leap year. Also, if you were born on 29 Feb Gregorian, you’d now always have your birthday on 1 Mar, but if you were born on 17 Jun in a leap year, your birthday is Leap Day and outside of the calendar. All the best getting a venue for your party since it’s a public holiday.
Interestingly, anyone born in the period 18 Jun to 15 Jul Gregorian would now celebrate their birthday in the new month of Sol. Congratulations!
The rest of the year would be pretty standard. For example, anyone born on 1 Aug would now celebrate their birthday on 17 July irrespective of whether they were born in a leap year or not.
30 Dec Gregorian would now be 28 Dec IFC and 31 Dec is Year Day! Hope you found that venue for Leap Day, coz your friend now needs it for their birthday.
It sounds complicated at first, but once we started recording people’s birthdays on the new calendar as they were born, it would effectively be the same.
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.
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.
Martius - 31 Days
Aprilis - 30 Days
Maius - 31 Days
Iunius - 30 Days
Quintilis - 31 Days
Sextilis - 30 Days
September - 30 Days
October - 31 Days
November - 30 Days
December - 30 Days
I think humanity is stuck with the Babylonian 12 based system for the coming centuries. As a programmer, I kindly ask you not to mess with time and date definitions, ever, unless you decide to turn the year into 360 days and remove DST while you’re at it. Keeping up with leap seconds is bad enough already, we don’t need more confusion.
Historically speaking, a thirteenth month isn’t that weird, it even existed, though for a different reason. The Romans used a calendar with ten months of 30 or 31 days, which ended up with only 355 days in total. As necessary, a thirteenth month was inserted to catch up the leap days that had been skipped. The last month, December (decem meaning 10), wasn’t the last month as we use it, as the year started in March when spring came around.
There are actually lunar calendars still in use today, most importantly the religious Islamic calendar. Several special Christian dates (easter, passover, and such) differ each year because they are defined based on the moon, basing dates on rules like “moons since 21 March” to fix calendar issues at the time.
I can tell you’re a programmer, you autocorrected to sprint instead of spring lol
Must not be a Java dev!
My phone decided that Roman sprints took all year. Can’t imagine how long those sprint meetings must’ve taken!
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Aren’t the definitions just a client side issue these days? When times are compared it’s unix or unix msec.
Computer time itself depends on whether or not you use astronomical time or not (leap seconds and such), but users enter time, and you need to extrapolate what the user wants. That means interpreting and displaying local time. Unix time also sucks for planned events like “every Tuesday at 2” because there’s no stable offset for that (if you assume there is, DST may happen, and it’s Tuesday at 1/3 all of the sudden! Or worse, if it’s Tuesday at 2AM, the event may happen twice on the same day! Or it’ll be skipped!).
Times are already terrible. Timezones are the worst part. Repeated seconds in local time are probably the second worst. Countries switching between sides of the date line are pretty annoying too. 2k38 is going to be hell so I plan on taking a few years off when that comes around.
Our libraries can now deal with time, as long as countries inform the programmers more than a few weeks before skipping the DST switchover this year (this has happened of course). The system is already convoluted enough, though, so let’s just stop messing with it, we can only make it worse.
2038 is only a problem for systems with 32 bit Unix time timekeeping. Right now that’s only a few embedded systems, in fifteen years there will be even fewer
This isn’t even remotely as bad as Y2K where many systems used two digits to store years and rolled over unpredictably when tested. We considered one system in my workplace “good enough” as it rolled over to 100 so the calculations still worked. Others crashed, for example clobbering something in RAM when adding 99 + 1 and storing the results in two bytes
Not everything can be done client side. Sending notifications or emails: server side. Basically anything that’s automated.
I’ve heard that Augustus wanted “his own month just like Julius” and that’s how they took 2 days from february for july and august. That way we ended having less months with 30 days. Never did look it up if it’s true.
I believe it was something like that, that’s why these months are in the middle of the year and have a number of days that doesn’t match (and why February has 28¼).
12 months of 28-31 is a better fit than the Roman calendar, though, especially because Romans tended to skip a leap month every now and then.
I don’t like the idea of my birthday being on the same day of the week every year. Based on the IFC Calendar, mine would be on a Tuesday every year and that would suck.
So track your birthday on the old calendar. Religious folks will be using old calendars to track important days
Which day of the week your birthday would fall on in the new calendar would depend on which year the new calendar came in.
My birthday is the 31st day of its month, it’s erased by all the 4 week month calendars
So I was curious about this and realized that your birthday will need to be converted for the year you were born to align with the date on the International Foxed Calendar. You just need to convert it once and use the new date from then on.
For example, say you were born on 31 Jan Gregorian. That would mean that your new birthday will be on 3 Feb in the new calendar. This would work for most dates except those between the periods of 28 Feb and 18 Jun (not inclusive) on the Gregorian calendar. Your birthday would depend on whether you were born in a leap year or not. For instance 1 May Gregorian would be 9 May IFC if you were born in a common year or 10 May IFC for a leap year. From then on you would celebrate that as you birthday. This could lead to a lot of people not sharing a birthday anymore if they were born in different years and one was a leap year. Also, if you were born on 29 Feb Gregorian, you’d now always have your birthday on 1 Mar, but if you were born on 17 Jun in a leap year, your birthday is Leap Day and outside of the calendar. All the best getting a venue for your party since it’s a public holiday.
Interestingly, anyone born in the period 18 Jun to 15 Jul Gregorian would now celebrate their birthday in the new month of Sol. Congratulations!
The rest of the year would be pretty standard. For example, anyone born on 1 Aug would now celebrate their birthday on 17 July irrespective of whether they were born in a leap year or not.
30 Dec Gregorian would now be 28 Dec IFC and 31 Dec is Year Day! Hope you found that venue for Leap Day, coz your friend now needs it for their birthday.
It sounds complicated at first, but once we started recording people’s birthdays on the new calendar as they were born, it would effectively be the same.
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
Yeah. Specifically so they could disconnect from the sabbath
December was the last month. January and February were added later.
Calendar of King Romulus:
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