I've been a proponent of this reform for a while. Strangely on my way into work this morning I was trying to figure out why a week is 7 days and not some other division. I thought maybe it was religious, but I now think it has more to do with lunar cycles being close to 28 days and that predating any religious foundation.
12 months has the benefit of dividing the seasons into 3 month quarters. However having an uneven number of days per month and with the solstices and equinoxes falling somewhat haphazardly on the calendar, this doesn't seem like a good reason to stick with the current system.
As long as we're redesigning the calendar system, I think the solstice and the equinox should fall in the middle of a season with the Winter Solstice effectively marking the start of the calendar year as a holiday. The leap day could be the day that proceeds that, effectively being used as a day to mark the end of the year. Seasons would then define periods of similar daylight.
The only reasons not to adopt this sort of calendar are ceremonial. Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides.
I have no idea how to promote widespread adoption of a new calendar, but it is something I've thought about a lot.
In general, I can't imagine what month reform could be done that would be worth the pain of switching. Computers are doing all the hard calculations now. While calendars throw programmers for a loop sometimes, what really nails programmers (and therefore computers) are timezones and all the screwy things we do with seconds. Changing calendars is orthogonal to those problems, and the possibility of real reform on that front is more likely, since the costs/benefits work out more pleasingly.
The current system was built for agriculture - "quarters" matching periods of different agricultural activities. It just does not make any sense in post-agricultural societies. This was clearly recognised at the beginning of the XX century, then abandoned as anglo-european elites slowly retreated into cultural traditionalism (as a defensive reaction against the rise of socialism).
Saying that it doesn't matter because computers do it for us is just hiding dirt under the carpet. I agree that timezone and second adjustments are more problematic, but having a more rational overall approach would also help there: you would have a "hack zone" where to dump all the madness (the special 1-day/2-days period), making it easier to deal with any adjustment. Currently, you are inserting most changes on 1 January and / or 31 December, but then also hacking February for no particular reason, all the while not being able to use the week as a meaningful unit.
Throughout history, we experienced periods when people would not shy away from bold cultural and rational changes in order to improve life for future generations. Holding the (adjusted) Gregorian calendar as an ultimate taboo is just sad.
> I was trying to figure out why a week is 7 days and not some other division.
The first chapter of Daniel Boorstin's The Discovers has an interesting history of calendars and time-keeping. For the question of Why a seven-day week, start on page 13:
tl;dr The week varied among cultures, and the seven-day week was in use by the Romans by the third century. Each day of the week honored one of the seven "planets" (in the ancient use of the word, a wanderer in the sky): Sun Moon Mars Venus Mars Mercury Jupiter Venus and Saturn. Derivations of those words are still in use today.
> Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides.
It seems like that would complicate the business practice of dividing your fiscal year into quarters. I guess each quarter would be 3 months + 1 week but then you don't have quarters starting/ending evenly with months.
Not really. You have 13 months, but you have 4 weeks each month. The first quarter is 3 months and 1 week. Then 6 and 2, and 9 and 3. The final quarter ends at the end of the year.
Today if you pay a monthly fee for something, the daily cost varies month-to-month. Why should things cost the most in February? While it may be true that fiscal quarters won't be aligned with month boundaries, they are more evenly spaced.
Think big. Let's decrease the speed of Earth's rotation so that a day is 20 (old) minutes 58 (old) seconds longer. Then we get to sleep in a little, and 1 day = 1°.
I understand this is a bit of fun trying to rethink a very old thing, but the benefits are really bare even when looking past all the damage of a potential transition.
Basically, you're consolidating the unevenness between years/months/days of the week to one special 1 or 2 day period. Ok, that's alright, but it still requires a bit of extra help. You still have to think through calendars understanding "Oh! I have to add a day for the epagomenal. Oh, it's a leap year, so it will be 2 actually."
That might be preferable to having to think through 31 or 30 or 28 or 29 days, but not by that much. Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good thing? I suppose it's easier to determine what day Thanksgiving is every year, but otherwise, it seems like a minute benefit. On the other hand, I wonder if there are some benefits of that not happening. The only one that comes to mind is it would suck for your Birthday to be on a Monday every year, but I suspect there might be other reasons where enforcing a day to occur on the same place in the week could be harmful.
"The origin of the seven-day week is the religious significance that was placed on the seventh day by ancient cultures, including the Babylonian and Jewish civilisations."
"Some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic groups have been historically opposed to the calendar because their tradition of worshiping every seventh day would result in either the day of the week of worship changing from year to year or eight days passing when Year Day or Leap Day occurs.[11] Others have contended that Year Day and Leap Day could be counted as additional days of worship."
"Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal."
The seven-day week, yes, the rest of it is Roman in origin: the solar nature, the months, their names, their order, etc.
One of the weird ones is our (English) weekday names: Sunday, Monday, etc. Those are apparently from German, but after their contact with the Romans, and after the Romans adopted the 7-day week. Which means it is after the Christianization of Rome, but before the Christianization of the Germanic tribes. They took the Roman week and put their gods' names in place instead.
Even more peculiarly, anglo-saxon names actually do not reflect full Christianization of Rome itself: Saturday is still the day of Saturn rather than the Shabbath, and Sunday is still the day of "Triumphant Sun" rather than the "Dominicus" (belonging to the Lord). Which means they originated before the end of IV century AD, when Rome officially introduced these two Christian references in its weekday names (all others were maintained intact).
It has to be said also that Roman calendars were actually "pillaged" from Greek culture and then tweaked until right - a pragmatic approach they followed in so many different cultural and scientific areas when interacting with foreign civilisations. Unfortunately, they didn't go as far as trying to align the 7-day week (of Middle-Eastern origin) with their Greek-ish months, and their legacy ended up being managed by a Church that valued immutability over everything else. So here we are, 1600 years later, still celebrating the months of Julius (Caesar) and Augustus when the weather is the best around the Mediterranean Sea, the month of war-god Mars in the best period to start military campaigns in the same region, and with four months named by numerical positions they've long since changed... and still completely mismatched with 7-day weeks.
It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I wish we could have a wrapper or something.
You know, the French tried to make a reform with the French Revolutionary Calendar. Having managed to kill off the monarchy and completely reshape the face of Western civilization, not even the French revolutionaries could change the calendar. (And if you want to talk about an "enlightened" age for science and rationality, the era that we refer to today as "The Enlightenment" is a much better candidate than this sorry era!)
Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).
Two units totally unrelated, one of which is basically random in progression (30 / 28 / 31 spread unevenly across the year) and the other matches only one of the other three (and is also non-humane to track). Adding to the problem, you are forced to use at least one of these weird units, because nobody knows which day of the year it is - it's either "day of month" or "day of week".
How often do you really need to know what day of the week a specific date in 40 years will fall on?
The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough.
Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days. That is another hack that would probably end up doing more harm than good. How would you model that extra day (or two)? You wouldn't have (13) 4 week months. You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
>The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough.
Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad.
>Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days.
I think we'd all be relieved to have a separate classification space for leap days (29 February is an abomination) and other adjustments we might have to add here and there. We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and religious celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or something. It's a very subjective judgement anyway, one way or the other.
>You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
> Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad.
And yet, not bad enough to @deprecate.
> Still much more elegant that the current mess
I'd argue that it's just as much of a hack... if there was something that was obviously better, I'd be all for it, but this is just a different mess. I'd rather deal with the devil I know...
We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and religious celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or something.
I can't tell if that's a serious suggestion, but if it is, I don't think that'd be very helpful. I'm trying to imagine which religion is standing around waiting for some benevolent calendar dictator to free up a couple new days in the year so they can implement a new tradition. :-D
Religions will stick their holy days on the calendar quite apart from your classification of them as holy. Provided you're not removing any capability for them to continue celebrating their current holidays, I don't think they're looking for any special consideration on the calendar front.
I'm Italian: every given day most of my fellow nationals are supposed to celebrate this or that saint... the Catholic Church is always more than happy to extend its cultural hegemony by attaching itself to celebrations of any sort, I'd be surprised if other confessions were very different on that front - there's always a scripture or an event that you can use to celebrate a specific day of the year. Even Christmas has not always fallen on the 25th day of the 12th month of the year, after all.
Any calendar reform unfortunately has to deal with this backward-compatibility nightmare with religious tradition, which doomed most previous attempts; hence my parent comment.
Weekdays shift by 1 every year (365 mod 7 = 1), and once more every leap year (366 mod 7 = 2). May 4, 2014 is Sunday. In 40 years there will be 10 extra leap years so the total shift is 50 mod 7 = 1, so May 4, 2054 is a Monday.
Off the top of my head, I have no idea. Finding out takes a minute (I can't think of all that many situations where I would need to know but not be able to arrange some reference that turned that minute into seconds).
It's analogous to the current situation with the metric and imperial unit systems - yes, it would make sense to switch away from imperial units, but it would require many people to fundamentally change how they think about distance, volume, speed, etc. (or time, in the case of the calendar).
Although in that case, we sort of have a wrapper, in that many labels list both types of units, but I tend to just look at the unit that I know, and haven't built up a correspondence between the two, so that doesn't really help adoption.
I do not know how analogous this is to metric standardization. Everyone using metric seems to produce some very clear and concrete gains.
I like to think we (americans) are standing on principle and refusing to accept the metric system on the basis of semantic consistency: an SI base unit should not contain a prefix.
Just stop teaching imperial units. Europe adopted the Euro and usage of old national currency is fading away. Even the elders around have started to stop converting Euros to old national currencies.
It's hard but not impossible. It's a matter of doing it and stick to it.
I like French Republican Calendar [1] much more for some reason. Months are 30 day each, no 7-day weeks, 10-day decades instead, so any day of the year is the same day of the "week" and the same day of the month. The rest 5 or 6 days are simply treated as "special days" (sansculottides), so it would be pretty easy to deal with them in any accounting software as well. The whole calendar has very nice spirit to it, each month is named in due to climatic effects of this one (at least it happens so in my location, and weather happens to change exactly according to this calendar, not Gregorian one), and each day of the year also has it's own name (something natural, like tree or fruit, no human names or something, which I find really cool). I really really like that symbolism. Such a calendar isn't just boring list of numbers, but something truly beautiful.
So I was using it for some time for reminders and such, but using calendar nobody else uses is pretty pointless, so I dropped it. Such a pity.
We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right?
If the 28th of Bichat is 2014-13-28 and the 1st of Moses is 2015-01-01, how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be 2014-13-29 (and 2014-13-30 on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?
Why? It's still three numeric digits. If anything, it would be much easier to calculate date validity. In Python:
acceptable_days = range(1,29)
if pickedMonth == 14:
acceptable_days = [1];
if isLeapYear(year): acceptable_days = [1,2]
# any future hack will just go here
if pickedDay not in acceptable_days or pickedMonth > 14:
raise InvalidDateException()
Compare this with anything we use today. Which code is simpler?
Are you saying you'd put the extra days at the start of the first month of the year? Wouldn't that put you back to where the days are not consistently ordered based off their position in the month?
The Terran Computational Calendar (http://terrancalendar.com/) is an interesting read - "13 identical 28-day months, followed by a 'minimonth' that is generally composed of leap days and leap seconds."
I like Asimov's calendar [1]. The year is divided into 4 seasons of 91 days (13 weeks per season), with one extra day a year that is not part of any season and is not part of the weekday count. For leap years, another extra day occurs between the second and third seasons.
I'd make one change to Asimov's scheme. He gets rid of months. I'd keep them, with each season consisting of 3 months: 2 of 30 days and 1 of 31 days.
Inserting a day between the regular weekdays once a year sounds pretty dangerous to me. I bet there are a lot of things that need to happen weekly that would quickly go out of whack if they are delayed a day.
Why? What things need to happen every exact 7 days? Isn't it rather the case that we do some things weekly because that is a conventional unit of time?
And if you are designing something so that some process needs to be performed on it every week, you should be building some tolerance into that time-period. Which the eight day span, once every year, would test.
I think we would need to be more precise about our measures of lifetime for some things (recent e.g. would be MH370's black box battery life rating) but the idea of measure lifetime with days since an event is already used quite widely (I rarely heard the phrase 2 weeks since that event) and could be adjusted to without much difficulty.
Financial and similar institutions would likely treat the festival day(s) as they do any long weekend at the moment. Pay cycles could be adjusted with end of year 'bonus' to cover out of cycle days.
I'm sure there's something but we've dealt with quirky calendars for a long time so really we're just attacking the same problem that we currently have with 30 day fixed cycles.
Once we get off the surface of the earth, seconds are more useful than days. Or, more likely, Ksecs and Msecs. A kilo-second is 16.67 minutes, 100 Ksecs is 27.7 hours, an Msec is 11.57 days. 30 Msecs is 95% of an Earth year. These are all useful measures for humans to work in.
The article fails to make the distinction between lunar and solar calender. It's just about dividing the solar year to equal months, but we also want to make the month align with the moon, which circles earth for 29.5 days on average. The big problem with the Gregorian calendar, in my opinion is that it so clearly missed the lunar month. it just feels intolerably close, but not quite there...
by the way, no need to invent a new calendar. the Hebrew calendar is both solar and lunar.
I suspect the authors intention here was to present a simplified calendar with some nice guarantees (e.g. dates matching days), not a lunisolar alternative. The Positivist calendar ignores the lunar cycle to reduce complexity that others have in spades, including both the Gregorian and the Hebrew calendars.
It's actually unclear to me why we particularly care about how long it takes to orbit the Sun. Axial rotation, sure, the length of a day is important. But outside of that... why do we need particular units like weeks, months, and years at all?
Religion and seasonality. 7-days as a unit of measurement is written into unamendable documents hold as holy by all Judaist monotheisms (Jewish, Christian and Islamic). The ciclical experience of seasonal-weather and daylight-lenght changes are also too powerful to deny.
AFAIK, Islam traces its roots back to Abraham, who was Judah's great-grandfather. So it would seem more appropriate to call it an Abrahamic religion, no?
I really like the 7date notation with the base-7 notation counting the weeks down, but the 7month with the remaining 22/23 days of the year are still a kludge. With a 13 month calendar those remaining 1/2 days are neatly packaged and disposed of as "festival days". Harder to deal with 22/23 tailing days.
> Comte set year 1 of his new calendar as the first year of the
> truly modern age: 1789, the first year of the Great Crisis.
For me 1789 is the first year of the Great Constitutional Ratification. I did a quick google search for "great crisis" and came up empty. Google seems to be convinced that when I type "great crisis" I am looking for "Great Depression." What is the Great Crisis?
It might be referring to la Grande Peur[0] (the Great Fear) which was the panic reaponse to the initial rebellions at the beginning of the French Revolution.
So is the extra day, or two days during a leap year, simply appended to the year, waited out and ignored?
It's an interesting concept; similar to the Time-slip in Red Mars. Wanting a Martian day to equal that of an Earth day, colonists define the time between 00:00 and 00:01 as being 39 minutes 40 seconds in length.
I guess most peoples' minds go immediately to, "do I have to work it?". Mine did.
With all this talk about universal basic incomes and automation taking away jobs, etc etc, there really might be something to the idea of switching to 73 5-day weeks. I wouldn't be in support of taking away Saturday and Sunday ;) but a 3-day workweek of W-F followed by a weekend of Saturday and Sunday could have real possibilities!
Automation doesn't preclude the need for high levels of human productivity, especially in a knowledge industry based society. Having a 60% productivity (admittedly soft and cultural) limit for the week would be a more significant change than if we were to do 4-1 weeks instead of 5-2 (71.4%). 4-1 seems like it could be a perfectly reasonable way of doing things for a lot of hackers, maybe not for everyone though.
> Having a 60% productivity (admittedly soft and cultural) limit for the week
The culture will quickly adjust productivity levels back up. This isn't something you need to bother worrying about.
The Chinese government mandates an excessive holiday total; during those holidays, businesses and schools close. But the cultural solution is that schools open and businesses work for however many nearby weekend days the official holiday legally consists of (this irritates expats no end; I'm not quite sure why). So if M-W are a holiday one week, expect to work for the preceding weekend and the saturday after.
I'm not sure what the statement "religious backlash" in other comments on this page are in reference to, but modifying the week length would certainly be the most disruptive to the vast majority of the world's religious people. Less so if you kept "Saturday" and "Sunday" as weekend days-off, but probably still enough to encounter significant resistance.
It's basically what stopped a good reform from being introduced by the League of Nations:
"Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. [British Chief Rabbi] Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal."
> Finally it is perennial, in that the weekdays of every year are always the same.
No, the epagomenal/intercalary days would change this from year to year. The weekdays would be the same from month to month within a given year, of course (assuming the extra day doesn't fall somewhere in the middle).
>This extra day added to the last month was outside of the days of the week cycle, and so the first of a month was always a Monday. On leap years, an additional festival day (also outside the week cycle), to celebrate holy women, would join the memorial day of the dead.
Which to me reads that the extra day/s are not one of the 7 weekdays. Hence these days would fall between a Sunday and Monday, but would not be refereed to by any of our current weekday names. So, each year there would be the forth Sunday of Bichat, followed by the The Festival of All the Dead epagomenal day, followed by the first Monday of Moses.
You know, I just really like the idea of leap days not being called anything. It sort of reminds me of the Egyptian mythology. Something-something-something, why doesn't the year have 360 days like degrees in a circle, blah blah blah, so here's some fake days to get around Ra and have your babies by another man. It's like metaphysical hackers.
Wrong already. I do not understand this obsession to make a year exactly the length of a given number of days. They are both completely unrelated, exept in that they are units of time.
A year should be exactly one time the period of the earth moving around the sun. We just need to agree on a starting point. The day on which that starting point falls would be the last day of that year or the first day of the next (or both). And while I understand the need to group days (not sparate the year) into weeks the concept of month seems completely unnecessary. Just agree on a number of weeks on which pay is given out, rent payed,...
12 months has the benefit of dividing the seasons into 3 month quarters. However having an uneven number of days per month and with the solstices and equinoxes falling somewhat haphazardly on the calendar, this doesn't seem like a good reason to stick with the current system.
As long as we're redesigning the calendar system, I think the solstice and the equinox should fall in the middle of a season with the Winter Solstice effectively marking the start of the calendar year as a holiday. The leap day could be the day that proceeds that, effectively being used as a day to mark the end of the year. Seasons would then define periods of similar daylight.
The only reasons not to adopt this sort of calendar are ceremonial. Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides.
I have no idea how to promote widespread adoption of a new calendar, but it is something I've thought about a lot.