Dealing with Time in the Roman Calendar | Hacker News Reader

Dealing with Time in the Roman Calendar

aransentin.github.io

57 pointsAransentin20 comments

Worth mentioning the French revolutionary calendar which applied the decimal system as much as practically possible [1]. 12 months, 3 weeks of 10 days each (plus occasional adjustment days), 10 hours per day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.

It feels weird, but I am sure so did the metric system at the time, but like the metric system, once you adopted it, it makes things simpler and I think is superior (whatever you think of the horrors of the revolution).

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

10 day weeks does not sound superior to me.

You are not an employer, I guess? ;-)

can't wait for my next employer in paris to ask me

"we have a different way of doing things here; do you prefer 6-day work-weeks or 4-day week-ends?"

> By far, the common method of specifying what year you were talking about was to mention what consuls were serving during that time.

This system is still used in monarchies around the world. For example ”year” a given law is passed in Great Britain is not the gregorian year number but the year of the reign of the monarch.

I was going to write “survives in…” but remember a similar system apples to Japan.

Not that any of this matters to the ordinary person on the street!

Good thing we don't have consuls, so we don't have to worry about this any more! Until the 32-bit integer overflows >_<

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2000_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2011_problem

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem

Linux has had 64 bit date-time since the beginning of last year even on 32 bit architectures.

See https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-is-ready-for-the-end-of-...

Might be wise to migrate to a file system that uses 64 bit timestamps though if you have disks formatted with ext3.

Thankfully, 64-bit counters don't overflow in practice, so that should be the last bitwidth increase.

Maybe, maybe not. You seem awfully confident about this fact but I don’t plan on dying any time soon…

Still need to worry once you hit 2^32-1 consuls

The Japanese Imperial Era System is the de jure (or de facto?) method of keeping track of dates on many official/un-official documents, and people sometimes refer to their birthdays or generational eras by the imperial era (showa, heisei, reiwa, etc).

If it's like the Chinese system, that's the emperor being named after the name of the period, not the period being named after the name of the emperor.

Yes. And to add to this, afaik a living emperor is not to be referred to by his era name.

I would assume a living emperor is not generally referred to by any name.

In the Chinese system, emperors before the Tang dynasty are referred to (now) by their posthumous name (汉武帝 Han Wudi, the "Han Martial Emperor"), from the Tang to the Yuan they are referred to by temple name (唐太宗 Tang Taizong, the "Tang Great Ancestor"), and from the Ming dynasty forward they are referred to by the name of their reign period (康熙帝 Kangxi Di, the "Kangxi Emperor").

They could not be referred to by the name of a reign period before then because the norm was for one emperor to reign over several named periods. And they are never referred to by their actual personal name (e.g. 李世民 Li Shimin, the name of the person who became Tang Taizong).

And there are the "monarchial eras": georgian, victorian, edwardian etc.

I consider those merely informal groupings (like “regency”, “restoration”, or even “generation X”) as they have no (and never have had any) legal force.

You know. I deal with laws on an almost daily basis in the UK and never noticed or payed attention to this. Current legislation has the Calder year, but also a “Chapter” Marker, i.e. Road Traffic Act 1988, has under this title 1988 CHAPTER 52.

Reading [1] I’ve learned that “Until 1963, Sessions of Parliament were numbered according to the year of the monarch's reign. In each Session, the Acts passed were given chapter numbers. For example, the Universities Act 1825 was Chapter 97 for the year 1825, which was the 6th year of George IV's reign. You may therefore see it referred to as: 6 Geo. 4 c. 97 (year - monarch - chapter). … Since 1963 a much simpler system has operated. Acts are now referred to simply by their calendar year and chapter number. For example, the Children and Young Persons Act 1969 is 1969 c. 54.”

The more you know!

[1] http://www.educationengland.org.uk/documents/acts/index.html

A related read about the Seleucid innovation of the monotonically increasing calendar

https://aeon.co/essays/when-time-became-regular-and-universa...

This always makes me wonder if civilisations never skipped a day or something because everyone forgot or did not keep track at some point.

There's a conspiracy theory called the phantom time hypothesis that years 600-900 were skipped so certain emperors could rule in year M(1000)

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

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