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Symmetry454

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71 pointscaustic33 comments

I love it when ideas that have absolutely no chance of adoption get fully thought through anyway. Esperanto is a similar idea for language - too moonshotty, but complete.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto

Esperanto has actually been criticized for being half baked. There’s this whole website on the subject from a respected expert. In particular it’s really eurocentric.

I assume you mean http://jbr.me.uk/ranto/

Rants about Esperanto aren't terribly different from the similar rants one finds about programming languages -- that Go, or Java, or Rust are poorly designed according to whatever criterion the author thinks a language should have. People can agree or disagree with them, but there isn't really an objective way to validate taste in languages whether human or programming.

All rants on Esperanto fall into these two categories:

- see, the language is not that simple as you think, it has this complexity you haven't thought of, so it fails

- the language is as simple as you think, but no one would ever speak like that, the real world is more complex, so it fails

Sometimes those two get mixed up in the same sentence.

Esperanto actually is used more than the majority of natural languages on Earth -- there's new books and magazines published in it every year. Yes, it seems like a tiny language compared to English or Chinese, but compared to most Amerind or Paupan languages it's not that tiny.

The two problems as I see it:

- A leap week is worse than a leap year. 7 days of birthdays that just don’t exist most years.

- No variety in day of week for your birthday. I know it’s just a cultural thing, but always celebrating a birthday on say a Tuesday sounds depressing to me.

Also the excessive variability of being paid monthly but having only 4 weeks of expenses vs 5 the next would be a challenge.

I assume if the entire world is spending billions of dollars reworking culture, infrastructure, software, etc., that swapping to making weekly pay the norm is just a bit of noise in that transition.

I wonder what the gamification effect would be if we paid everything by the second. I think for example transitioning from social support to employment would be more attractive.

Switching everything to any other system all at once would indeed be a huge waste of money.

That doesn't work for people who are on commission.

https://qntm.org/calendar

They need to give the months different names, so the two can coexist as long as needed.

Worldwide flag days are fatal to progress.

I've been thinking about alternative calendars recently. This is quite interesting. I wonder if we will ever get to a point that we can have a "base 10" calendar (10 day weeks, 10 months in a year, etc.)

I suppose in-grained traditions that are so hard to change (birthdays, memorials, etc.) make this nigh impossible.

It's more that there are 365¼ days per solar year. and seasons happen at ¼ year intervals.

Any calendar will need need to ensure that those relationships can be represented with only minor but consistent variations, e.g. leap years). Weeks largly stem from there being roughly 28 days in a lunar month.

If we're freeing ourselves from any relation to Earth's physical progression through space, e.g. 24 hr day, ~28 day solar month, or 365¼ day year, there would need to be a compelling reason, e.g. being a largely and widespread spacefaring civilization.

The ancient Egyptian calendar had 10 day weeks. And the French revolutionary calendar had something similar. But there's nothing particularly superior about a decimalised calendar.

Too much risk that 10 day weeks would end up still only having a 2 day weekend off of work leaving an 8 consecutive day work week.

What?

The obvious conclusion is that they would have only 1 day off.

> "base 10" calendar

I believe that the closest thing that existed was French Republican calendar [1], accompanied by decimal time [2]. The Swatch Internet Time [3] which uses decimal minute at its base is also worth mentioning - it's almost forgotten nowadays.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time

The thing is though, our current calendar, while maybe not super logical and/or always practical, is not broken in the sense that we're dealing with major unfixable problems. So changing to anything other than what we currently have is creating more issues than it's trying to solve.

And I say that as a purist and nitpicker who loves everything being perfect and organized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

Sounds similar, and IMHO a bit better, because every month is the same and has only one leap day, instead of a whole leap week.

My [alarm] clock displays unix time and a count down in seconds. After a few years I've only partially got used to it. The half alseep version of me does appericate the count down a lot. I just remembered I should experiment counting the seconds of the day.

Friday the 13th doesn't exist on this calendar. Neither do it's cousins Friday the 17th and Tuesday the 13th. Interesting.

This sounds great except the fact it would be a complete nightmare for developers the world over.

I remember in 2004 being fascinated with the tons of alternative proposals to the current calendar. Read about them on the kind of sites one can now find using wiby ;)

The irregular-length years must cause the equinoxes and solstices to shift around, although probably not enough to notice.

by up to a week over a 6 year period rather than up to a day over a 4 year period.

Why having months at all if they don't correspond to moon?

Why have a horsepower if it doesn’t correspond to a horse?

That's why they're trying to make us conversation to kilowatts

In my language 'month' and 'moon' are the same word and some people still don't make the connection. I once had someone ask me, when I was talking about some period of x months in antiquity, if they had months (moons) back then.

Which language?

Not op but Slovak (mesiac), Czech (mesic).

Lousy Smarch weather!

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