Anyone that's able to do math and that takes 30 seconds to look at our calendars can come up with the same reflection, nothing special with the "human calculator".
"The simple idea of a 13-month perennial calendar has been around since at least the middle of the 18th century. Versions of the idea differ mainly on how the months are named, and the treatment of the extra day in leap year."
Kodak used to operate on this 13 month calendar. When I asked someone who used to work there, she was shocked that I knew about it and said that it was the best thing about working there. The original plan that this calendar is based on called for a liminal day between years for New Year's Day with 2 days for leap years
I work for a company which used to have 13 financial periods. It was great. Then they switched to 12 and we now have a couple of 5 week periods thrown in to balance the year out. I don't know why they decided that but it's not as good now.
I'm surprised they successfully attempted that and that it resulted to be taken positively. It seems as every out-of-the-norm scheduling idea is so frowned upon that even in small companies you can steer them to anything but the same ole.
I've used iso-weeks for this purpose. I don't really care for dates if I don't absolutely have to. It's nice to refer to "week 44 five years ago" in my journals. Truth be told, no one else around me uses the weeks and the only mention to it I've heard was not positive.
13 period financial calendars don't break down into quarters that easily. One reporting quarter will always have an extra period.
5-4-4 creates even quarters except it requires either one extra day every year or one extra week every five to six years. It's most beneficial for companies that either experience high seasonality or high consistency, such as retail and manufacturing.
Most other companies just use calendar month since it's simple, easy to determine, and allows for rather consistent year-over-year comparison.
There is a choice between having an extra day in the holiday season and counting up the extra days plus leap days, and inserting an extra week every several years
Adding the extra day annoys people who value weeks continuing as they have since ancient times
Using a leap week rule makes the calendar track the seasons a little worse. Solstices and equinoxes will move by about a week over several years
Not a calendarologist, but I'm pretty sure lunar calendars were tried and rejected for a reason. Other than the places that still use them for traditional reasons.
Of course, maybe they just didn't have the concept of leap days?
It only comes out to 364 days so you'll still need to handle that 1.25 extra days in a year otherwise it'll drift. You could just add December 29th as a special day past Saturday, but then you lose sync with the moon, eg.if New moon was on Sunday the first in the previous year, New moon would be on December 29th instead of on Jan 1st the next year and all new moons would be on the 28th.
You can keep your calendar in sync with the moon or the sun but not both.
As someone who has proposed this system myself, I feel the need to point out that the meme is glossing over a couple key points:
First and foremost, 13*28 is 364 days, so to avoid slippage you'd need an extra day appended to every year, either as part of a month, which breaks symmetry, or on it's own. You'd also still need leap years.
And in order for the days of the week to be immutably aligned with dates, these extra days would also have to not be part of any week. Which is a big problem if you want to get anyone who practices an Abrahamic faith on board with the plan.
What exactly would be so troublesome with having a "special day" outside of the usual week/month cycle? You can still go worship on whatever day of the week applicable to your faith. Just make the last day of the year its own thing. We can call it "New Years Eve" and party together.
Watch out for places (like gyms) that bill biweekly instead of monthly. You may think it lines up with months, but over the course of a year you pay an additional 8.6% more.
You'd need to redefine the derived SI Units, or take new measurements for newly derived units. Newtons, joules, pascals, hertz, coulombs, watts, volts, ohms, farads, siemens, webers, teslas, henrys, becquerels, grays, sieverts, and katals.
Also not to mention motion and heat.
You could say there's a large amount of pressure to not change, or that it's a high "bar"...
I hope you smiled, because that is one joke I will not be making again.
Though I like the idea a lot, 60 has the great advantage that you can devide it by 2,3,4,5 and 6 which is a very useful property... The real power move would be to use the 60-system for everything... Like the Babylonians did, or so I heared
It's useful. But when was the last time you used it? You usually don't say a twelves or a third or a sixth of an hour, you say 5, 20 or 10 minutes. Half and quarter are available the same in decimal time.
It's more a matter of habbit. You know what a second, a minute and an hour are because you had all your life to precisely learn it.
If you take rhe same 24 hour day, and convert it to 10 metric hours, or mours, and split that to 100 metric minutes, or cenutes, and then 100 meconds, one cenute is 1.44 minutes, and one mecond is 0.86 seconds. The practical difference would be almost imperceptible. A mour would be significantly longer than an hour, 2.4 times, but you'd have the metric system attour disposal to break it into decimals.
That's not to say we should switch, but it wouldn't be that different.
The Jews recognized this and their calendar runs akin to it (https://www.timeanddate.com/date/jewish-leap-year.html), but with 7 "leap months" occurring over the course of 19 years. Of course, then they fuck it up with extra or fewer days to keep certain holidays from falling on certain days of the week. You win some, you lose some.
Fuck it. No-one is this thread can seem to agree, so I'm making a unilateral declaration that from here on out, all units of time except for the second are abolished, and we just use unix time for everything. You have until 1699217619s to make the switch.
So? I don't care if it's hot in December or not and presumably we can figure out a more sciency way to time crop planting. Not like the almanac is worth fuckall in a changing climate anyhow.
Make New Years Day it's own thing, not counted in a month (or just make the new 13th month 29 days long), and continue tacking on leap days to the end of February using the currently established rules.
The length of the year doesn't change and no seasonal regression. It has so many fewer exceptions than our current system that you'd wonder how we ever ended up with a 12 month calendar.
I've never been a fan of this idea, it doesn't go far enough and further makes things less symmetric/divisible. I say we use 6-day weeks, 5 weeks per month, 12 months per year, and an inter-calary holiday week of 5-6 days. A six day week means 4 days working, 2 days rest, and that can be staggered more easily/equitably assuming work needs full coverage in a week. We start the new year on the Spring Equinox because it's generally more pleasant.
For bonus points, we switch to base-12 (or dozenal) in our numbering system because after the transition it's a much easier system to deal with as far as division and multiplication is concerned (e.g. 1/4 would be .3 instead of .25, 1/3 is .4 instead of .333..., 1/2 is .6, etc.).
Octember it will be after October. The names will be just as incorrect as they have been for way too long but if anyone wanted the names and order to correspond to their own meaning it would have been fixed by now.
If we change the number of months, the names of the off-by-two months (September through December) are getting fixed too. It's better to fix all of the technical debt at the same time.
at the risk of sounding like a weirdo, does anyone else remember a book called the First of Octember? it was written and illustrated as though it was a Dr Suess story, but apparbely it wasnt
Not personally but I have heard a friend mention it and another deny it's existence. I wonder if it might be one of those Bernstein/berenstain bears things. Or as I like to call it, the choice of Berensteins gate.
There were ten months. Notice that September, October, November, and December all start with number prefixes ending at 10?
Well a few Roman bad boys decided to insert themselves in the middle of the year (July and August) and blew that idea to shit and we've never adjusted since.
And the reason for only 10 months before that - the earlier Romans didn't even bother to keep count during the winter. From the end of December it was just 'i dunno?' until the head priest decided it was time for a new year.
Before we get too crazy, let's consider for a second the importance of 12 in units of measure. It shows up in time: minute, second, length (imperial ft), and I'm sure many other places.
The benefit is it's evenly divisible by 2, 3, and 4. How would we define seasons with 13 months?
I don't see the problem, really. Base twelve is neat and all, but we're not directly going to do a lot of math with the number of months in a year, are we? And who says all seasons have to be equally long, or be defined in terms of whole months in the first place? Most people I know don't define seasons directly on the months, since they vary from year to year.
Personally I think you're looking at the wrong direction, it's hard to keep mental track of because the calendar doesn't reflect the time of seasonal change in most places where that matters. Doesn't have to be the exact equinox but roughly saying "the first day of the year marks spring" and "October 1st means the start of fall" would probably help folks remember seasons more easily.
Do you understand how many computer programs will crash when you try to introduce a "month" consisting of a single day for this New Year holiday, or alternatively a day which does not have a corresponding month?
Is your Netflix subscription going to renew in December, and then next in January, or is there a troll of a month sitting in between where you're charged for a day?
How many schedulers have rules like the second Tuesday of the month, or the last Friday of the month, and those days don't even exist!
Is this special holiday even assigned a weekday? If it is, do we repeat the same weekday twice to keep the 28 day months on the same weekday schedule?
Since the 12th month is December, a 13th month should obviously be called Undecember (the undec- prefix meaning 11 in Latin).
Better yet, just stick the new month in the middle of the calendar, but don't rename the months that have numbers in their name. It already worked once (thanks, Romans).
After the revolution, the French came up with some poetic and meaningful (if you live north of the Tropic of Cancer) names for months. We could use those.
I mean, for the most part. You would have 13 months of 28 days with 1 leftover. Make that one new year or something. Leap years would just have another straggler day, lump that in with new year I guess.
The moon thing is wrong though. The moon does not operate on a 28 day cycle.
As for Monday being the 1st and Sunday the 28th, that wouldn't matter at all. Any day could be the start of the month.
Starting the week on a Monday is psych warfare on the working class and pretty fucked up to begin with. Starting it on Sunday was the Church's idea... Start every week for the future of humanity on a Saturday and get your dessert first.
Weeks don't really have first and end days. It's just how you arrange a calendar. Case in point, I view weeks as beginning on Monday but prefer the layout with Sunday on the left.
Downvote all you want. The global default "work" week starts on Monday, and 99.99% of every modern calendar shows Sunday in the leftmost column of every single month. Read a damn book, kids.