Comment by lucasjung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lucasjung | Hacker News Reader

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>The world would be a better place with only one (and simple) calendar. Go ahead, propose one.

A hobby of mine is thinking up "better" ways to do things that I know will never be implemented because the current way is good enough and the barriers to change are huge. My personal favorites are a combination of a new calendar, new lat/long system, and new set of timezones.

The calendar has eight months of 28 days and four months of 35 days (so that every month has an exact number of weeks, so that a given day of the month is always the same day of the week). The first day of the year exists outside of the months (month zero, day one), and would colloquially be "new year's day." When a leap day is needed, it is added as an extra day at the end of the year (month thirteen, day one), and would colloquially be "leap day." The order of the months would be short-long-short-short-long-short-etc (so that each season has one long and two short months).

Whenever I'm in a situation where I can't keep myself engaged by reading or conversation (e.g. waiting in line with no wireless signal), I amuse myself by dreaming up crap like this.

Though not every place on earth has 4 distinct seasons. The tropics have two (wet and dry), and many cultures have/had seasons based on farming practices of their primary crop.

Creating an entirely new calendar would be easiest on an entirely new planet.

I actually gave some consideration to that. There are also places that have six seasons. However, I'm pretty sure that a majority of the world's population lives in temperate zones (I didn't bother researching that, so I could be wrong), which have four seasons.

Even if you decide to go with four seasons, the definitions of the seasons get tricky. You can define them by the solar calendar, or you can define them by environmental conditions; the two tend to be out of phase by about six weeks. I actually figured out a way to make the months line up reasonably well with the four environmental seasons and with the six environmental seasons (which are not of equal length); it wasn't perfect for either, but it was OK for both. I didn't bother keeping notes...

You really think short-long-short-short-long is better? It seems confusing enough to be of dubious value. Why not have seasons and months be equivalent and each equal to 73 days in length? That way you'd had the 50th day of summer, for example. Sure it would require a new season, but you reduce complexity quite a bit and there is no reason to keep the existing 12 month requirement. You can align the first month/season with the first of the year and add a 0-day for leap years.

Yeah, it's kind of fun to think about...

I wanted the months to be equally-divisible into weeks of equal length. It turns out that the 7-day week is the only really good way to divide the year equally into smallish units and only have one or two days left over.

So you could have four season-months of 13 weeks (91 days) each. But I like the idea of months that are in the same ballpark as lunar cycles. Lunar cycles and solar cycles don't mesh, so you can't have months that perfectly match lunar cycles unless you're willing to have months that float against years the way weeks currently float against months, but then again some people might find that appealing.

You could also use 13 months of 28 days each - that totals 364 days as well.

That was my initial idea. But then there's no good way to divide them neatly into seasons, whether you want to have two, four, or six.

It does have the advantage that it comes very close to lining up with the lunar cycle, so that the lunar month would only slide very slowly against the calendar month (about half a lunar-month of phase shift per year). And since the definition of "season" is very mushy anyway, maybe thirteen months would be the way to go.

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