A year should have 13 months | Hacker News Reader

A year should have 13 months

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4 pointsalexmolas11 comments

Its not a perfect fit. New Years would arrive at a slightly different time every year, and ignoring the massive software rewrite, we would have issues with things like GPS satellites and other stuff. Its too late.

I thought GPS satellites utilized milliseconds since epoch instead of a string date

It's not the GPS spec, it's the EPROM flying through space that now needs upgrades to sync itself.

why would it be relevant for the GPS to switch calendar we have converters between the various current ones, afaik to switch to a 13 month calendar we would only need to software updates for dirt side devices

Satellite has an OS. OS needs to know and log things. 2028-13-13 does not compute, and all time would require a translation layer. This layer needs to work in hardware, because space is hard and when things break it can't be rebuilt. So each sat could have a hardware box on the ground, making new timestamps from old, but it would just be easier to run with the current calendar until we become a true space civilization.

We can kick off this new calendar and gradually migrated over :), some cultures around the world already use multiple calendars, their traditional ones (Lunar calendar, Indian calendar etc) and Gregorian Calendar.

I am also thinking once we've gone multiplanetary (going to Mars), we might need a new calendar system.

I have never received more vitriol from my friends than when I tried to pitch this idea. Anecdotally this is an engineer pipe dream and the public will never go for this, but a smart idea!

Considering the mess that we feared Y2K would create, I am too scared to think what a change like this could do…

Cute if it were true. But no, that's only 364 days.

Could make New Year's Day into one day that belongs to no month, to get to 365, and every four years have an extra New Year's Day to get to 365.25

obligatory mention of: https://qntm.org/calendar

More seriously, why even bother with months? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_week_date

Or think long term. No, not just 02023, longer than that; come up with a calendar that syncs up with: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axial_precession

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