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Comment by dghughes | Hacker News Reader

Maybe some aliens see us and say "Wow that blue planet takes 548 gleeglubs to orbit their star."

Yeah there’s a lot of things we’ve normalized that are kinda silly from a zoomed out view.

“Okay so we have 12 months. About half are 30 days and the other half are 31 days but then ONE of them is 28 days except every fourth year that month with 28 days has a 29th day”

https://twitter.com/foone/status/1572260363764400129

https://twitter.com/Foone/status/1572263752346796033

In reference to the above tweet, it might surprise you to know that at times in the past (and per Wikipedia, even in some cultures today[0]) March has been considered the first Month, meaning that the new year would start on March 1, the leap day would be the last day of the year, and September, October, November and December would in fact be the seventh, eighth, ninth and tenth months of the year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/March#Origin

to be fair to us the aliens calendar is likely impenetrable as well, especially if they did agriculture. The more I learn about ancient societies the more I learn that calendars were really important and really complicated. It was the hobby of many rich people to stare at the sky and figure out how the stars move based on how the temprature feels and the daylight length. This let them calculate better when to plant/harvest crops, which grow based on the seasons. Calculating the exact number of days including fraction in a year is a nightmare before you figure out the mechanics of how orbits work, which is mindblowingly complicated to do just looking at the sky, and if you get it wrong your food production WILL slowly get worse. Many larger societies had whole quasi state/religous orders whose whole function was to keep the calendar working.

Compare for example the mayan calendar. Or the orthodox, or syrian, or basically any culture's calendar. None make sense.

Except every X years where we add another second, except the next 100ish years, except....

It's highly likely that aliens have to deal with that as well. It's to combat the mismatched division of the planet doing a full rotation around the sun and the planet doing a full rotation itself. They might even have more oddities.

I still think we should just have 12 months of 30 days and then a ~5 day long party at the end of the year. Or we could do 12 * 28 and then a 24 day bonus month.

The Mayan Haab` calendar was kind of the opposite of that, 18x20 with 5 "nameless days" at the end. The nameless days were considered a dangerous, unlucky, and very unparty time though.

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

Calendrical idiosyncracies make far more sense when you realise that:

1. They refer to three distinct and largely independent phenomena: the rotation of the Earth about its axis (day, and subdivisions hours, minutes, and seconds), the orbit of the Moon around Earth (month, with caveats), and the orbit of Earth around the Sun (year). The fact that there is a rough days-based approximation of each is coincidental. Consider that on some planets there is no clear definition of a day (e.g., gas giants with no observable solid ground), or fixed rotational period (the duration of Venus's "day" apparently varies considerably under the influence of winds, and even Earth's day changes measurably due to tidal influences and factors).

2. Collective agreement and tradition are a real bear. It took nearly 500 years for the Gregorian Calendar to be universally adopted --- Russia's "October Revolution" occurred in what most of Europe considered to be November, as Russia had not yet adopted the Gregorian Calendar first introduced in October 1582. And it wasn't even the last country to do so! China's adoption of the Gregorian Calendar occurred in the 1940s. Calendrical decimalisation has been attempted, particularly notably during the French Revolution (amongst the same reforms which brought us the Metric System), as well as in the USSR. Switching to a ten-day week was exceedingly difficult given a) the traditions of seven-day cycles, particularly in religious contexts, as well as an external world based on the seven-day week.

A great book exploring the history of the (mostly) universally-adopted Gregorian system is Eviatar Zerubavel's Seven Day Circle: <https://openlibrary.org/works/OL1962761W/The_seven_day_circl...>

Late edit/correction: tidal influences and seismic factors.

That is, measurable changes to Earth's rotation have been observed following major earthquakes. Small, mind, but measurable.

Except every 100 years except every 400 years.

I once thought it would make more sense to have a calendar of 9 months of 8 weeks with 5 days per week (or 5wks * 8days) with a 5 day 'solstice period' at the end/beginning of every year (6 days every 4th year).

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