You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)
qntm.org
qntm.org
1. Disintegrate the moon, anyone who has ever advocated for lunar calendars, and anyone who fails to convincingly support this Plan(tm), converting their mass to energy that we can use for productive purposes such as orbital adjustments. 2. Adjust the rotational period of the earth to an aesthetically pleasing multiple of the length of the solar year. Adjust the axial tilt and orbital eccentricity of the earth to eliminate "seasons". 3. Adjust the definitions of time units to aesthetically pleasing multiples of the now-constant solar year and rotational day.
Problem solved.
So you’re the guy who wants to kill summer?
<rant> I'm annoyed by this argument, which came up again at the start of this year in dumb Twitter discussions about whether 2020 marks the beginning of a new decade.
2000 was not the final year of the Nineties. 2000 was the final year of the second millennium, and of the 20th century, and of the tenth decade of the 20th century. The Nineties were the years 1990-1999, the tenth decade of the 20th century were the years 1991-2000. These are different ranges, but we also use different terms to refer to them. There is no logical problem. There is only a problem with the assumption that these different terms "should" refer to the same concept.
So did 2020 mark the beginning of a new decade? Yes, it marked the beginning of the decade we might call the Twenty-Twenties. It did not mark the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century; that will be 2021. </rant>
But 2020 is technically the start of a decade, not just informally.
ISO 8601 defines what a 'decade' is.
I mean you're free to ignore it of course, like you're free to say March has 34 days if you want... but you may have trouble communicating with people and integrating with existing systems.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decade
> A decade is a period of 10 years.
Which explains why it is so difficult to make a reservation at Milliways.
This isn't the standard technical meaning of 'decade'.
This whole article and thread is about building technical systems for dates.
In a technical context, 'decade' is a term with a specific standard meaning, which is that it starts on a year ending with a zero.
It's not nerd sniping to point that out in a thread already all about giving dates precise technical meanings!
The thread is nothing but nerd sniping.
There is no technical context for time defining “decades” that is anything other than nominal.
The fact that people are so hung up on this detail is itself evidence that it has no concrete philosophical foundation. Any definition you care to toss around is arbitrary.
It is pure bikeshed, and this is what gives the article its glimmer of truth that validates the satire.
ISO
To save others time, here's the ISO-8601 document which is apparently being referenced: https://dgn.isolutions.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:std:iso:8601:-1:ed...
"decade" is defined in 3.1.2.22:
decade time scale unit (3.1.1.7) of 10 calendar years (3.1.2.21), beginning with a year whose year number is divisible without remainder by ten Note 1 to entry: Decade is also used to refer to an arbitrary duration (3.1.1.8) of 10 years, however decade is not used as such in this document.
Yes, yes, all of the adjectival disclaimers were used to try to align the discussion directly to how words are used "in [that] document." While the document is highly important, there are many technical contexts in which it is completely appropriate to talk about decades without the slightest consideration of how the same term might be used therein.
In my plan for twelve 30-day months, I intended to call the leftover 5/6 days "Etcember", for et cetera. :P
(This submission appears to be a riff on the classic "Programming Language Checklist": https://www.famicol.in/language_checklist.html )
I haven't had much spam hit my inbox lately, though. So much for the checklist.
> [ ] The most significant program written in your language isn't even its own compiler
This bit always cracks me up
> [ ] You have reinvented PHP better, but that's still no justification
You appear to believe that: [ ] The entire world speaks Unicode
Unfortunately, your language (has/lacks): [ ] comments [ ] include files [ ] hygienic macros [ ] unhygienic macros [ ] string escaping [ ] name quoting [ ] come from [ ] undefined behaviour
Your implementation has the following flaws: [ ] It won't let you program dangerous behaviour
These don't sound like real reasons to me. If it costs having a 13th month with just a few days in it or a NO_DAY_OF_WEEK constant in my DAYS_OF_WEEK enum, I'd take it if it meant all of the weirdness was limited to a few days always located at the end of the year. Sounds like a convenient place to put leap seconds as well! While you're at it, make those days holidays for most people, so that when tech inevitably breaks due to the weirdness, those of us who get paged for such things can fix them in peace before the rest of the world starts back up a few days later.
They are if you have to write date-handling code or, worse, use the date-handling code of others.
Date-handling code is hard enough without NULLs.
Kodak adopted it in part because Georgia Eastman (founder) was a big proponant, but also because for corporate scheduling the regularity made things like maintenance and long run chemical/manufacturing processes simpler to plan.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
They had a somewhat (?) reasonable plan:
In November 1699, the Government of Sweden decided that, rather than adopt the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740. In the meantime, this calendar would not be in line with either of the major alternative calendars and the differences would change every four years.
Then war started and they stopped, after starting the process, so they were on their own calendar that no one else in the world used.
Then the king decided it was a bad idea, so reverted to the Julian calendar. Then they decided to jump to the Gregorian outright.
There's a bunch of other details, like Easter being calculated by one calendar but Easter Sunday by the other.
Oh yeah, and they had February 30 one year[2] (which was Feb 29 in a Julian calendar or March 11 Gregorian).
And in 1753 they finally sorted it all out by skipping all the days between February 17 and March 1.
Good luck writing billing software for that.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Swe...
How often do you need to bill someone for events that took place 300 years ago?
Previous discussion (the only substantial one at any rate): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11193152
The main problem with calendar reform as I see it is that network effects and lock-in mean that unless everyone changes at once it'll never stick. I've long felt that the optimal time for calendar reform was several decades ago -- with increasing computerisation the cost of switching has gone up over time, much faster than any potential benefits.
Why were a bunch of new Christmas songs written 60 years ago and barely a song a decade has been added to the repertoire since? George Michael is dead, and Mariah Carey seemed touch and go for a while, and those are pretty much the last two people to create a successful Christmas song (and the less said about Do They Know It's Christmas, the better)
You are factually incorrect, and i suspect biased against country music, which is disproportionately (but not exclusively) where new original-and-popular Christmas music has come from.
As a foreigner I'm definitely familiar with the songs hinkley talks about, while I have no idea what a country Christmas song even sounds like.
I am having trouble coming up with chansons de noel country that aren't canadian. If they had been exported further, they'd sound something like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni29Fdct21M
Moving to the next holiday season, carnaval may be more amusing in the old world than in the new: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF7DW_mZatA
(In our household, the Hosen assure xmas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cn0AdE_vTc8 )
1978+: Author's life + 70 years. 95 years if work-for-hire
1967-1977: 95 years
1924 - 1963: 28 years if never renewed. Maximum 95 years.
Pre-1924 - All copywrights have expired
Pre-Mickey Mouse: Expired
Post-Mickey Mouse: Copyrighted for eternity.
There's always a last-minute lobbying effort.
GenX has the song rotation handed down from the Boomers, and then they barely got anything new to hand down, if you exclude satires. I kinda have my fingers crossed for a holiday music Renaissance over the next twenty years. Probably started by a 54 year old Lin Manuel Miranda, trying to rekindle youthful moments.
ETA: and a switch to metric
I don't see how the Boomers get the blame here. The two obvious suspects in the death of the Christmas song are, first, the general decline in the quality of Anglophone pop music over the past few decades (with the biggest arguable exception being the rise of hip-hop, not a genre that's an obviously good platform for Christmas-themed top-10s) and, second, a decline in the cultural resonance of Christmas. Boomers are (directly) driving those trends less than later generations are, I'd assume.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m7PlSJNFfII
The composition's originally from the turn of the century, but as you can see above they've gone mainstream in the decades since.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xviBEvbxgZ0
[1] not exactly christmas, but it's got family, decorated trees, vacation time, TV specials, and a guy in robes with a beard handing out presents. Porting should be trivial.
It is a condescending song, even without perhaps the worst line in charity history:
Well, tonight thank god it’s them, instead of you.
I had forgotten that line was in the song until I heard it again years later. What. The. Fuck.
Worse, this line is belted out by Bono, with an unusually tight closeup in his face. He is still trying to do work in Africa. Every time I think of this song, I wonder if he cringes remembering it.
Good bits by Boy George and George Micheal, but boy is the rest hard to listen to now.
All the countries that went from developing to developed - did this not because of charity, but because of globalisation and business. The only charity that seemed to help was reduction of debt and cheap money for investment.
The song isn't a problem compared to that.
And BTW most of the condescending meaning is infered by western listeners. I'd like to hear the opinion of people from Africa, because often this kind of outrage on behalf of someone is a self-fulfilling prophesy:
"I think Africa is backward, poor and unhappy and there's nothing you can do - therefore when you sing about that it's rude, because you are pointing out the thing that can't be helped, like pointing a finger at a person on a wheelchair".
But if the song was about some poor part of USA you wouldn't have that problem, because you would assume it's temporary thing that will get fixed. And even if not - all these people can just move to other state, right?
Well maybe the problem is with your assumptions? People don't usually think of themselves as a lost cause.
And that line is condescending to the listener, surely. It's clearly not actually saying thank God it's not you.
If they had more time Midge Ure probably would've written something a bit less crap but they didn't.
It was inspired by footage of and visits to (not sure on the chronology of Bob Geldof visiting) of thousands of dying children in tents - the idea was clearly the western idea of Christmas rather than the religious celebration.
Small anecdote: When the British song (aforementioned) was written, the musicians went out for fish and chips and got back to work, whereas the American equivalent (We are the world) was apparently catered with an enormous near-banquet for the stars.
I find your lack of vision disturbing.
Given that we likely need planetary-scale engineering anyway in the next 50-100 years, getting a few asteroids to nudge the earth’s orbit a bit over a long period of time isn’t that much of a stretch.
With asteroid mining it might even pay for itself.
Note: I didn’t do any calculations but over millions of years we’ll need to stabilize earth’s orbit anyway, otherwise our calendars will get out of sync even more.
Of course we’ll have to deal with the inaccuracies of the Gregorian calendar rather soon, in 7000 to 8000 years.
Author does not lack vision: https://qntm.org/destroy
More seriously, what's wrong with Year-Week-Day? (I propose this having been in an industry where I regularly received swag calendars marked with week numbers, YMMV.)
And then there's https://qntm.org/hatetris
No, they don't. Proof of this is that they already aren't: there is a band no more than 15 arcseconds wide in each timezone where it is true, and everywhere outside that, civil time does not correspond to solar time.
What happens after we propagate to other planets?
Why should there be only one calendar?
Why can’t we have, say, a Social Calendar alongside a Astronomical Calendar?
We could have a sane, logical calendar with even and regular divisions for determining working days, holidays, financial calculations and political durations etc.
And there could be another calendar for the galactic rotation, orbital period, lunar cycle etc. that only people who need to care about such things would use (astronomers, farmers).
Relativity will become a pain and we'll have significant lag on communications to the tune of several minutes within the Sol star system and years for anywhere else, so you'd end up using asynchronous communication like email, workdays would be based on local conditions (and likely not map to a local day on some planets), etc.
Perhaps 'Christmas is always in the third winter time-block', or something to that effect.
I don't. Who does??
When was the last time a city dweller needed to worry about where the Earth or moon was?
Things we do need to know:
• How many days in a row do I have to work
• When do I get my next paycheck
• When is X product coming out
• How long do we have to put up with X politician
• When should I plan a vacation
• When will it get colder or warmer
Except for maybe the last 2 questions, all of the above can be answered by a calendar that has nothing to do with astronomy whatsoever.
Farmers and scientists can continue to use the astronomical calendar of their choice. Perhaps make one that is specifically designed for them, in maybe a S%.M% format, where S% is the percentage of Earth's solar orbital period we are currently at, and M% is the moon's orbit.
For the rest of us ordinary folk, we would be fine with a "Human Calendar" that is simply a cycle of working days <-> weekends, with some holidays thrown in every N weeks.
Say a 4/2 or 4/3 (work/rest) day week, 4 weeks in a Human Month, and an 8-10 day holiday every 3 such months.
A Human Year could be the equivalent of 9 or 10 months of the current calendar, the average duration a new person takes from conception to birth. :)
My ideas do perhaps have some (maybe most, or even all) of the problems mentioned in that document, but nevertheless, this is my ideas.
Seems like a no-brainer to me.
Suffice to say, we stopped doing that in the 19th century for very good reasons.
That issue wouldn’t be solved with GPS.
> I shouldn't need to adjust my wristwatch every few miles
> many clocks do not have line-of-sight to GPS satellites
> you can't put a GPS chip in a mechanical clock
> clocks on planes would literally run backwards
There is a reason most timezone offset by hours. It is very convinient for everyone to agree on the time when ignoring the most significant digits. Otherwise, you end up having meetings start at 17 past the hour, and be much harder to mentally calculate the offset.
You would also need to know the location of the other party much more presicily. At the moment, I know how to offset my schedule when planning a meeting with a customer in Texas.
This was done away with by the railroads because it made scheduling a complete nightmare.
The first use of "Standard Time" was by the Great Western Railway in the UK. Even in a relatively small country like the UK - only about 100 miles wide in most places - that was still enough to shift "local" noon by about 15 minutes.
Tomorrow morning, sunrise in Boston is 5:29; NYC 5:46; Dayton OH 6:29; Miami, FL 6:43, all EDT.
Are you calling the Ancient Egyptians stupid? I think you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_calendar
And the Aztecs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nēmontēmi
There's a twitter account that posts wonderful artwork along with the republican day of the week.
Hey Sam512, it's kthejoker from E2, hope you're well!
The implication is that amateur calendarists, who do not fully grasp the enormity of the task, frequently post to this list with proposals for a new calendar. The regular contributors to this list see so many ill-conceived proposals that they have prepared a post with all of the common mistakes and oversights so they may shoot the theory down without having to type them all over again.
In reality this list is prepared and posted as a joke for the members of the community and a deterrent to posting calendar proposals at all, at least those that do not consider all of these common errors ahead of time.
There are some valid points in there but this kind of thing is not productive. No need to be rude.
You don't need to be condescending to make a point - and that is my point. This person shared this rant and I gave feedback about the rant, not the subject of the rant.
https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...
all hail the kiloday.
(Beyond being great novels, the above and its prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, have points of interest to Unix and Usenet users.)
The implementation of leap seconds is obviously worse than the implementation of leap years, though. (This might make more sense if leap seconds had come first...)
In a leap year, February 28 is followed by February 29, a day that doesn't ordinarily exist. It has the same weight as any other day. If you had a dentist appointment on the 29th, then on March 3rd people will all happily admit that the 29th happened and you might have had a dentist appointment on that day.
In a leap second, 23:59:59 is followed by 23:59:59 2, 23:59:59 Harder. Then, a few seconds later, everyone agrees to just pretend the whole thing never happened. The POSIX standard specifies that there are 86400 seconds in a day, and God forbid we deviate from the standard just because some days might -- but only in reality! -- have 86401 seconds.