Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar | Hacker News Reader

Searching for Lost Time in the World’s Most Beautiful Calendar

nytimes.com

90 pointsbenbreen32 comments

I've been toying the idea of building a totally different calendar app for a couple of years. Not that the current "square" approach doesn't work for what it is supposed to do, but sometimes its just cool to explore things.

The Romans had an interesting calendar. The lengths of their months were fixed and they had a 13th "intercalary" month that got inserted every few years to keep the months roughly in line with the seasons.

Because everything was completely regular, everything was the same one year to the next, so you didn't need a unique calendar for each year. Consequently, calendars would be engraved in stone on public monuments and the wealthy would have a calendar painted onto a wall in their home.

The year would be written out as a set of 13 columns, with each column being a month. They would then have the list of days in the month going down, and would note any holidays for the day.

The only wrinkle in the Roman calendar were the "nundinae," which were (very loosely) a sort of Roman weekend. But the nundinae happened on an eight day cycle, so they didn't line up from one year to the next. The way they handled this was that they labeled each day in the year sequentially with a letter from A-H. Then all you needed to know was which letter corresponded to the nundinae for that particular year. (And, of course, whether that year had the extra 13th month.)

Here's what a typical Roman calendar looked like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Museo_del_Teatro_Romano_d...

How about: 13 months, each is always 28 days/4 weeks. At the end of the year there is a public holiday. Every leap year the public holiday is 2 days long. The hard part will be thinking of the name for the 13th month.

> The lengths of their months were fixed and they had a 13th "intercalary" month that got inserted every few years to keep the months roughly in line with the seasons.

This is precisely how the current Hebrew calendar works.

Yes, pretty much every civilization that used a lunar calendar relied on an intercalary month getting added to keep the calendar in sync with the seasons.

What made the Roman calendar unique was that it did not tie the months to the lunar phases. In the Hebrew and Babylonian calendars the month started on the first day that the lunar crescent was visible after a new moon. Since the synodic period of the Moon is about 29 and a half days this meant that the length of the month varied. In fact, much of the early development of Babylonian astronomy was likely motivated by the need to predict in advance how long a month was going to be (and whether a 13th month was going to be necessary).

But because the Romans didn't care what the phase of the Moon was (at least by the middle Republic), they could fix the lengths of the months to be same every year.

Please do. I can't believe basically every calendar app quantizes things to "months," with a disruptive jump from one to the next, which is just annoying when you want to access time as a day by day, week by week thing. We could get rid of "months," using week number instead for example, and it would not really matter, but we're all forced to that paradigm.

I've been thinking about creating a budgeting app that finally does away with months. I hate setting a budget for a month and would instead love to do a 30 rolling window.

This was the logic Brex started with when they first introduced their corporate cards.

The rolling window started wrecking havoc very quickly. For instance, we gave all employees $300/month budget for parking garage. However, on some months they would charge the card on 5th of the month, on another at 11th, etc. It was literally unusable and we left for another provider (later Brex also went back to calendar days).

While this might not be an issue for your application per se, the real world operates on calendar days. You will quickly run into situations where 30 day rolling window not only doesn’t work but is explicitly causing problems.

My 2 cents.

This is a great idea. It would be really useful if you could just put in income and expenses with dates attached, and have the app compute things in windows of various sizes, as well as traditional calendar-based periods.

You can use ledger (https://ledger-cli.org/) for that:

  ledger bal <filters> -f <journal file> -b "28 days ago"

Please do it and tell me about it.

—> 28 day rolling window

Honestly weeks feel more relevant than months for day-to-day life. Source: my four-year-old understands weeks (because she can see the difference between weekdays when she has school and weekends when she does not) but not months.

It's unfortunate as a society we don't punctuate our months with something as simple as an extended 4 day break.

I think it would be better for everyone to get four days a month to choose as days off. Then it would be better distributed. I would prefer this to a four work week. After a few days in a row the freedom really sinks in, so I'd love to be able to take a week off every month, guilt free.

Its probably way too late to implement something like this but the idea is still a good one.

Thinking of it, wasn't there a "metric" calendar or something that sort of did this?

The French Republican Calendar had five/six complementary days [0] at the end of the year that were part of no particular month. They were, however, spent contiguously between summer and fall, rather than between each season.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar#Com...

I really like the Fastmail calendar because it has months on a giant scroll, so one leads seamlessly into the next. It works quite well for me because I really think on a "weeks" basis but knowing the month is still important.

Thunderbird also has a calendar view like this called Multiweek, though I do like Fastmail's smoother scrolling.

Not in the week view, which makes it super annoying - I often want to move/copy events from one week to the next, and I can't do it through drag and drop, because (like almost every webapp out there) Fastmail app doesn't understand interactions like "scroll by one day only" and "if I drag to the edge of the canvas, it means I want you to scroll it".

Month view, yes, has this nice continuity you mentioned. It also has a ... I can't pin exactly what's wrong, but I almost always get confused which month I'm looking at, because the month name label above the calendar seems to often be off by one month relative to what month is visible on the screen. But the bigger issue is, of course, that in a monthly view, you can hardly fit any useful amount of events.

At first I thought when he said a “different” calendar app, it would be something perhaps that didn’t measure and record events in standard units of time, but perhaps I guess that is too different to be useful for most people.

>too different to be useful for most people

So is what he's talking about. You just don't realize it until you try to implement it.

Some things are the way they are for arbitrary reasons. Most things timekeeping have a pretty good reason for how they came to be.

But then again I argue the same thing for US system of measurements vs metric, as well.

You'd still have a disruptive jump between weeks.

Yes, but those are "real". Most peoples' life patterns are actually altered by week and weekend boundaries. Mar 1 this year fell mid-week on a Wednesday. It made no difference to most lives except that it made everyone's calendar ugly with duplicated / grey-ed out days at the end of a February calendar and the start of a March calendar.

By the way, why don't we switch to a 8-day week. I.e., 5 working days + 3 weekend days?

Technological progress should have made this possible by now, I suppose. More spare time for side-projects :) Let's call the 8th day "Funday".

More than anything, I want a circle. I want the idea of the clock to extend to all scales, having a second, minute, hour, day, week, month, year, decade, century and millennium hand. I get that there's no m:n mechanical gearing simple machine for this due to the way our calendar system is slightly irregular and the way our years are slightly out of phase with the 360 divisions we like to use at the lower scales. But with an app, there's no complexity needed to put the hands in the right position.

I want my calendar representation to naturally highlight the periodicity of events which occur at fixed intervals. Maybe a spiral such that each 360 degree turn represents 1 week, so all future sundays, mondays, tuesdays etc are just perspective lines leading towards a vanishing point in the infinite future. You scroll through the calendar by zooming in and out. In this quasi 3d view, the months and years are circular rings approximately perpendicular to the viewing plane.

I was very much into spirals :)

Actually, i have been coming back to the same idea every once in a while. A bit weird, but are you interested in having some kind of „pair-exploration“?

When i do such an exploration, it is usually a mix of drawing, coding, maybe take a break to read, be quiet, go for a walk… and if there is someone who does a similar thing and is willing to exchange ideas – without an „agenda“ but still with a goal, that would be awesome.

absolutely! my email is on my profile, hit me up :)

How about trying the French Republican Calendar [0], on this auspicious date: Décade III, Septidi de Germinal de l'Année CCXXXI de la Revolution?

It was still 'square' though. Perhaps alternative versions of the Periodic table might provide some insights.

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

Can anyone post a summary, obnoxious id/paywall on the article, not even allowing to read one sentence.

https://archive.is/zXX4f

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