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Comment by simonblack | Hacker News Reader

Originally, the year started on the first day of Spring: the Equinox. That was originally arranged to be the 1st of March, but slippage over the years means that the Equinox falls on or around the 21st of March in today's world. The New Year on 1st March also explains why the Leap Day falls after the 'last day of the year' on a day of its own: the 29th February.

I'd like to see a new calendar that reverts to the Equinox as the New Year's day and has the 28th February (and the 29th February if needed) as special 'Non-Week-Days' as part of a New Year Holiday Period. That would allow the New Year to start on the same day of the week as the previous year. In other words, we would have a perpetual calendar that never changes from one year to the next.

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I love everything about this idea.

And then I think about every bit of code that I would need to write to support it and. From deep down inside, where my heart and soul are I can hear the screams "fuck no, fuck that".

And then I remember that I only do consulting now and get paid by the hour and think "chaching, carry on with this as you please".

The real question is if it's better or worse than the existing mess of date/time fun that we have to manage.

Good question!

My bet is this:

Existing nonsense: Doesn't change much.

Transition for all the badly set up systems... Y2K v2 baby!

Cognitive overhead for Users, therefor Product and therefor Developers will be huge. I think a lot of the rage will be fendign off stupid and bad ideas more than anything else.

Note: any one who deals with dates and deep history will have a chuckle and think nothing of it.

Here's a great blog post about fun coding around timezones

https://www.zainrizvi.io/blog/falsehoods-programmers-believe...

Perpetual calendars are a bad idea because of skipping special days. How long until the next Thursday? It depends on if it is February or a leap year. Think of how complicated the logic will be to calculate the day of the week.

The point of weeks is to have consistent cycle that can organize life. Also, why is it advantage to have the same day of week for same day of year? I suspect most people would prefer that their birthday wander around instead of always on Thursday. Calendars solved the problem of figuring out the day of week, and computers make it even easier.

There are also religions that require you to rest every 7th day. Having those two leap days would be anathema to them.

You would end up with the "religious week" and the "standard week" moving relative to one another over the years, in a classic case of trying to fix messy details and thereby adding more details (as in https://xkcd.com/927/).

Even without that issue, many Orthodox Christians still use the Julian rather than the modern Gregorian calendar for religious purposes (while still using the Gregorian for daily life). That's why Orthodox Christmas and Easter are on different days than the Catholic/Protestant ones.

Even the Roman Catholic Church that uses the Gregorian Calendar has moveable dates: Easter Sunday always falls on a Sunday and not on fixed day of a fixed month. On the other hand, Christmas day is always on December 25. Go figure.

> In other words, we would have a perpetual calendar that never changes from one year to the next.

Who really wants their birthday to be on a Tuesday for the rest of their life ?

This presupposes that the current socioeconomic system is the fixed norm. I don't think self-sustaining farming communities of the past cared too much which day it was if they had a cause of celebration. Likewise, I don't see why a post-scarcity future society wouldn't party on a Tuesday.

Our "fixed norm" might be temporary in the Grand Scheme of Things(TM), but for the typical human life span, it could still work out to be nothing but... birthdays on Tuesdays :-/

In such situations, I can see the culture adapting so that you have a "real birthday" and a "celebration birthday".

Famously, Queen Elizabeth II was born on 21 April 1926, but her official birthday was also celebrated on the second Saturday in June each year in the UK.

Why that particular day ? Maybe just because June didn't have any holidays yet ?

One issue is the religious aspects. For example Abrahamic religions base their whole calendar on the unending 7 day week. Having a non-weekday smudged in is very sacrilegious to may adherents.

It's surprising, in a way, but time is very much a political and religious thing.

> I'd like to see a new calendar that reverts to the Equinox as the New Year's day and has the 28th February (and the 29th February if needed) as special 'Non-Week-Days' as part of a New Year Holiday Period. That would allow the New Year to start on the same day of the week as the previous year. In other words, we would have a perpetual calendar that never changes from one year to the next.

Alas, that would wreak havoc around the world, because I'm fairly sure that even if you can convince civil authorities, Christians, Muslims and Jews around the world won't be so easily convinced to shift around their God given days of worship (Sunday, Friday and Saturday respectively).

So their rest days would drift every year through the civil week.

Oh yes, absolutely in favor of starting the year in the equinox (or at solstice). And while we are at it: change the days of a month to match the cycle of the moon - 28 days. So we would have 13 months. That's how they came to be: the earths rotation around itself is a day. The moons rotation around the earth is a month - and the earths rotation around the sun is a year.

But I believe, the natural rhytms are not perfect and constant, so I cannot claim, that this calendar would "never change from one year to the next". But I like the idea of directly refering to the natural cycles, instead of arbitary ones.

But like the other comment said, implementing any change of dates in reality won't be welcome, nor workfree ..

The original Roman calendar was based on lunar-solar calendars, and they don't line up with a solar year, because a moon cycle is 29.5 days, not 28. The Jewish calendar is one such calendar. It's why Jewish holidays vary so much. Some Christian holidays are based around moon cycles, like Easter. All lunar-solar calendars get around this problem by adding an extra month every few years.

Well sort of. Christian holidays were originally based on the same cycle as the Jewish Holidays but then the church fathers didn't like having to go ask the nearest Rabbi when their holidays were and tried to do it algorithmicly with absolutely no consoltation with anyone that knew anything about time keeping or astronomy and invented the ecclesiastical equinox (always March 21), and ecclesiastical full moon, neither of which bares relation to any astronomical event.

Interestingly the beginning of a lunar month is static (the new moon happens at the same moment everywhere on earth) while the beginning of a calendar month is sequential around the earth by timezone. The lunar cycle, earth orbital cycle (year) and earth rotational cycle (day) do not really sync up. There are approximately 12.37 lunar cycles per year (so once every 3ish years there is a 13th moon which roughly correlates to a "blue moon" although more specifically a blue moon is the second full moon in a given quarter. Each lunar cycle is not consistently the same length. That's just the tip of the iceberg. Source: I spent some time trying to mesh a lunisolar calendar model with our modern Gregorian model (https://www.cycalendars.com). I can't recommend lunisolar calendars as an efficient way of communicating consistent dates. Time becomes radial rather than sequential and integer timestamps cease to exist. But it is cool. :-)

You want probably this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

Not exactly this, but pretty close .. thanks, did not heard of that one

> the cycle of the moon - 28 days

29.53059 days, so no, that's not super practical, and there's less than 13 of them in a year...

> Originally, the year started on the first day of Spring: the Equinox.

Nowruz [0], the Persian New Year, still does today.

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

I also think each year should start at spring equinox. However, I think that the day of week should be how it is rather than being the same day of week each time. Actually, I think Solar Hijri calendar will be good, but using Scientific Anno Mundi (not the usual Anno Mundi, and not Hijrah either).

I wonder on how many days you could celebrate new year in the same year with various cultures. New Year's Eve, Chinese New Year, Roman new year. I think there's an old Russian new year too.

The British tax year still follows roughly this. A UK tax year runs from 6 April to the following 5 April.

See, e.g., https://www.theguardian.com/notesandqueries/query/0,5753,-23...

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