Forebruary, an endless wall calendar | Hacker News Reader

Forebruary, an endless wall calendar

ilyabirman.net

247 pointsilyabirman101 comments

If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days, but we could make it a special case (the first day of the year, for instance) not belonging to any month or week. Then all months would be alike, every 1st, 8th, 15th, etc, would be a Sunday, and so on. We would never need a calendar again.

I don't really know why, but I like the imperfectness of our calendar system now.

Stupid stuff like February having only 29 days is pretty funny and those 7 days of December 25th to January 1st is perfect because its an exact week.

It would be too boring if every month was the same.

Could we have fun stuff like `April Showers Bring may Flowers' if every month was just the same 28 days? I'm sure we could, but everything would be the same and that's boring.

February has 28 days - 29 in a leap year.

Thirty days has September, April, June, and November;

All the rest have thirty-one except February alone which has twenty-eight;

Except on every fourth year, when it has 29;

Except on years divisible by 100, when it has 28 again;

Unless the year is also divisible by 1000, when it's back to 29.

Almost, but the last one should be:

Unless the year is also divisible by 400, when it's back to 29.

I grew up with this:

  Thirty days has September,
  April, June, and November,
  All the rest have thirty-one except February,
  Which has four and twenty-four,
  'til leap year gives it one day more.

Use your knuckles, with both hands next to each other, from left to right Jan - Dec. Each 'hump' has 31 days.

Yes, this is the way I remember. My wife quotes the rhyme and I annoy her by pointing out the following issues:

1 - 3 lines of the rhyme at the end are utterly pointless as it's much easier to just remember that leap years are actually a thing.

2 - The fact that it rhymes doesn't help you remember which months you're talking about. It could quite easily be, "30 days hath September; October, November, December" and it would still rhyme but be wrong.

My grandfather used to say "Thirty days has November, all the rest I can't remember."

> 1 - 3 lines of the rhyme at the end are utterly pointless as it's much easier to just remember that leap years are actually a thing.

I was taught:

    Thirty Days has September,
    April, June and November.
    All the rest have Thirty One;
    Except February, it's a different one!

or use just the left hand and tap twice on knuckle of forefinger for july and August :)

From a developer standpoint, I loathe our calendar/time system.

The world has wasted shit load of time & money trying to fix stupid bugs with our time systems, I would welcome a more linear system.

You might enjoy Naggum's A Long, Painful History of Time:

http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

"enjoy" or "remind you of those gaping wounds that never really healed and you may have forgotten about them but NO!"?

Meh, a lot of that is buried away in libraries and stuff and I never worry about it.

Time zones on the other hand...

It's not a popular opinion at all, but that's how I feel about the Imperial units of measurement. I get the benefits of metric, but Imperial just feels more... poetic?

It could also be just familiarity with what I grew up with, I suppose.

It works better as a spoken language (and therefore fairly well for estimated distances), but man, does it make any kind of calculation annoying (many engineering textbooks are from the US and use imperial units - you end up with stupidity like BTU/ft^2.s.

The thing I think many people from the US don't understand about a transition is that it doesn't mean you're somehow not allowed to use imperial units anymore - in Australia it's still used regularly in spoken language (especially with regard to distances) - but anything where the number matters, the value is given in metric, so calculations can be performed simply.

> I don't really know why, but I like the imperfectness of our calendar system now.

Both in your case with calendar and in case of dustincoates and the Imperial units, I think you like the way things are because you got used to it.

> If we had 13 months, all of them would have exactly 28 days. We would need and extra day in order to complete 365 days

And sometimes another extra day in order to complete 366 days.

I wonder what would be more difficult: convincing the world to switch their calendar, or convincing the Earth to speed up slightly then maintain a steady speed forever. I'll bet we could get the Earth to give us 365 days much more easily than getting its population to give us 13 months.

http://what-if.xkcd.com/26/ examines that exact question.

That still seems easier than convincing the world to use a new calendar (we still can't convince the world to use the same calendar everywhere).

While we're at it, change the leap-year scheme: every 4th year except every 128th year. It's both simpler and much more accurate than the Gregorian calendar, with bonus binary-number geekiness.

Is the existing system really that broken, though? It's a pain, but it works. People know it.

The pain of moving to a new calendar system would be considerably bigger than the pain of dealing with the current system.

It's a shame nobody had the idea in 1582. Since they were tweaking the Julian calendar, they could have been a bit bolder.

Every Intro to CS class could take a week out of their syllabus as suddenly the assignment "create a calendar application that takes input as dd/mm/yyyy and prints the day of the week" disappears from textbook.

Although it would be quickly replaced with "create a calendar app to translate between Gregorian and Modern calendars."

Which would be a terrible idea. Delivering actual software is all about understanding the real-world problem domain, with all of the complexities inherent to it. Doing a "nerd normalization" of the calendar instead of teaching students how to model and deal with the existing one is pretty much exactly the wrong pedagogical approach.

The point would be that the "existing one" itself would change. Many countries adopted the current calendar less than a hundred years ago.

Would it really be a big pain? It's not like you have memorized the calendar. You always look it up, you will just be looking it up in a new system (or not needing to look it up as it's a logical system).

People tend to write date code themselves, no matter how many times we tell them not to.

There have been leap year bugs in everything from Zune to Windows Phone 8 to iPhone/iOS.

This, in spite of legions of CS professors trying to get it into people's heads that they should be using libraries (once, of course, they have verified that said library is accurate).

We already are on a "new" calendar system.

If you're on unix/linux/os x, run

    cal 9 1752

To quote Eliezer, "not every change is an improvement but every improvement is a change". I think people in general are too conservative, and that's why we get stuck for tens or even hundreds of years with suboptimal solutions that are barely good enough to work.

And people's birthdays wouldn't rotate around the days of the week, which would be lame for 5/7 of the population.

Edit: back to Forebruary, I think it's quite nice looking. and the timeline at the bottom is awesome. Reminiscent of the timeline in "Rock Me Amadeus". one of these things is not like the others...

I suggest you do what I did and redefine your birthday the way they do Federal Holidays. It's not "September 22nd" for me anymore, it's "The 4th Saturday in September".

Under the proposed system, "The 4th Saturday in September" would also be known as "September 28". I suppose you mean to suggest simply celebrating your birthday on a nearby weekend.

How well does that work with authorities and other entities that demand your birthdate? I mean, here they don't like it already when I give them a date in YYYY-MM-DD; I can't imagine what they'd do if one used FREQ=YEARLY;BYDAY=SA;BYMONTH=9;BYSETPOS=4 ...

Authorities generally aren't invited to my birthday parties.

If you read the Lord of the Rings appendices, you will find that Shirefolk do something similar: they divide the year into 12 months of 30 days each, with a four-day midsummer holiday called Lithe.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle-earth_calendar#Hobbit_C...

If we were to adopt a similar scheme outside of Middle Earth, I'd be in favor of borrowing the name.

Which is itself quite similar to the French Republican Calendar adopted after the revolution, and which was used for about 13 years. This divided the year into 12 months, each composed of 3 weeks of 10 days each. At the end of the year there were 5 'extra' days (or 6 in the case of leap years).

http://www.webexhibits.org/calendars/calendar-french.html

A 10-day week would be really uncomfortable. It would mean 8 days work and 2 days rest, rather than the current 5-2 split, which seems to be the most comfortable.

It could also mean 7/3 which is a better fit to the other ratio.

I'll celebrate with you on Friday the first when this is actually implemented.

Or just use 3 digits for the day.

I've long wished we simply numbered days from the first of the year onward, and didn't bother with months.

Today is 213.2013.

If you're going to make that big of a change, why not go all the way and use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time

Well, switching to metric is a far bigger change than people continuing to count the days consecutively through the year.

2013.213 would sort better (in existing systems).

Naturally.

Actually in ISO-8601 it's 2013-213. There is a standard for dates and stuff we can readily use ;-)

At work, I prefer 2013-08-02, because humans can read and understand it, and it sorts correctly.

YYYY-DDD sorts correctly too; and this was about day-of-year notation ;-). But agreed, generally everyone should use ISO 8601.

The National Retail Federation has a different monthly layout that helps solve the year over year retail sales comparison problem.

http://www.nrf.com/modules.php?name=Pages&sp_id=392

+1 - I've always thought the Gregorian calendar was arcane and awkward, a weird artifact. Is there like an ICANN for the calendar?

Let's make Sept/Oct/Nov/Dec the 7/8/9/10th months again. Jan and Feb can be 11 and 12. Make March the 1st month. I would rather start every new year near spring time anyway.

I actually have a keychain just like this, I was always surprised it never caught on as much as it could have because they're extremely useful.

http://keychainarchives.com/image/56257326138

EDIT: This keychain is also very old, 70s to early 80s

Glad someone still knows about those things, and they are indeed useful. My parents have a few of these in their house, although there's are bigger and made for desktops. The OP's is basically a paper version of what my parents had for years.

Cool, but it seems you need to remember how many days are in the current month yes? It always shows a full 31 days.

Yes. This will make it confusing.

30 days hath September...

Quick trick to remember:

http://img.gawkerassets.com/img/17mch8wncw9zmpng/original.pn...

Yeah that's brilliant, and it looks pretty great. This would probably make the whole thing much more complicated but it'd be nice if the "unused" days were invisible, and I agree that the name is a bit awkward. Beyond that though, awesome.

This could be done by printing the calendar on a strip of paper/fabric, then sticking the ends together to make a continuous loop around two vertical rollers.

This would also have the effect of making the calendar less wide, so that it took us less wall space, at the cost of making it thicker.

Okaaaaaaaaaaaay. What about February, which ends on day 28 or 29?

This little bit of snark gave me a laugh: "The red stripe highlights the weekend. For the United States, where week starts on Sunday (but it is anyway considered a part of weekend), alternative frames can be produced."

Can I just say?

Sunday and Saturday are the weekend because they are on each end of the week. If you stack them both up at the back, only Sunday would get to be the weekend. Saturday would just be the day before the end.

A line has got two ends.

I seriously doubt most people think of it like that.

That's exactly how people think of it in the U.S.

And that's exactly opposite of how people in Europe think.

So here we go, it's a perfect example of rationalization - how humans can find any amount of reasons why their arbitrary choice is the natural one.

Really, the "it's both ends of the week" thing? When Americans say "how was your weekend" do they really just mean either Saturday or Sunday? Or do they alternatively say "how were your weekends?", referring to both ends? I suspect the common response to the first is still a list of things you did on both Saturday and Sunday, even in the US.

Erm, the rational usual understanding is that you refer to "weekend" as a period and not "week ends" in two separate words. Weekend = the end of the week, i.e. Saturday and Sunday. Isn't Sunday called the 7th Day of the Week in the religious tradition? Therefore Saturday should be 6th and Saturday and Sunday are both at the same "end".

> A line has got two ends.

A counterpoint of equal snark and uselessness: No, it has one "start" and one "end", especially if it's a one-way line.

In which case the last day would be the end. The day before the last day would simply be the day before the weekend.

And yes, it's all meant lightheartedly, as I assume the original sentence was.

This is not a line, it’s a time period.

For the life of me, I could never understand what compelled americans to switch from monday first to sunday first.

My Casio Twincept had the same calendar on its LCD. It applied backlight on a selected frame depending on the month. It was possible to see full set of numbers if you look closely.

It was something like this:

http://www.pmwf.com/Watches/Casio/FirstTwinceptCalendarTwinc...

Wait, I can't buy this from him?!

Anyone know of a place that I can get something similar? Or recommendations on the best was to make one?

It seems like this would be a great Kickstarter item. If I wasn't at sea, I would jump on this. It seems like an easy product to get one's feet wet with some manufacturing experience.

Search for a "perpetual calendar" or "eternal calendar". They used to be reasonably common as desk accessories and are still made as promotional items.

Awesome, thanks!

It is cool. But is it useful? The only information it gives is day of week, assuming you already know where to position your slider. It doesn't have holidays and number of days in a month. So if you don't already have a calendar with all the information, you can't use this calendar.

This looks fantastic, but it doesn't give me any reference as to which month I'm actually looking at.... i.e. I drag the frame so that the 1st is a Saturday, but what month in what year am I looking at? Will the 1st of July 2015 be a Saturday, I have no idea from this.

I have this problem too. Am I supposed to be able to derive a date from the calendar? Am I missing some element on the page?

I generally don't have a lot of interest in time, so I don't have whatever relevant knowledge this might require (if any).

It's a wall calendar - it only shows one month at a time - presumably, the current month.

How do I know how to set the current month, and how do I know how to advance to the next month?

It feels like I'm missing something.

On the first of every month you drag it so that the number 1 lines up with the current day of the week

Oh, so I have to check another calendar/date display device. Right.

Most wall calendars show 3 months (current month large, previous and next small), precisely because it's so common to want to check the day of a recent or (more commonly) upcoming date.

Cool! 2 thoughts:

1) Would be cool if it were a dry erase surface, both for writing the month on it and circling important dates, etc. 2) Many have mentioned the 31 days problem, but that's solved with a magnet of some kind to cover the 31 on months where that day doesn't exist.

The comment at the bottom about the US weekend tickled me. I never really thought about it, but holy guacamole, is it weird that Americans have the week starting on a Sunday, and consider it part of the weekend. Why the HECK are calendars printed with Sunday at the front? This doesn't even need any kind of "restructuring of the Gregorian Calendar or adopting a new more sensible one" (as the rest of this thread seems to be all about), just stop printing/displaying calendars in a disjointed, retarded fashion...

I'm sure it had some meaningful significance in the past, but really, I doubt anyone will get mad if you started printing the calendar from the Monday on the left, in America too.

Sunday has always (FSVO) been the start of the week - it's not an American thing at all (indeed I've found Europeans get more confused when you don't start a week on Sunday). The Sabbath - the seventh day of the week referred to in Genesis - was Saturday, and Jews still celebrate it as such - Christians moved a lot of the way it's treated to Sunday.

"Weekend" is just a catchy name; "weekboundary" would be much more cumbersome.

I'm European and I start the week on Monday. I don't think it makes me more confused than I normally am.

Although "end", when used for time, usually refers to the chronologically later boundary of a period, there are other senses of the word in which an end can also be a start: a line has two ends, and we say "from end to end", for example.

Thus, I don't think it's necessarily contradictory to speak of an end of a week that also comes at the start - and that's without even thinking about the inherently cyclical nature of the week.

Delightful concept. However, perhaps you should reconsider the name? Its spelling/pronunciation may be a bit of an anti-hype barrier.

I think “Forevruary” would be a little better.

Very nice. I had a go at designing some calendars a while back, only they were all pocket-sized:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/joelanman/sets/7215759450272255...

It always shows 31 days, you can't write on it without carrying events onto the next months and the weekend can NOT be adjusted with this design.

Also I've seen this concept before many times, it certainly isn't a unique one.

I would add small labels for Mon, Tue, ... Sun on the movable frame.

This would be cool as a whiteboard with a sliding frame on it.

I am pretty sure my grandma has a desk calendar that has the same system like this one

> United States, where week starts on Sunday

> Yury Gagarin goes to the space

Gotta love Russian-flavour English.

I think I have seen this like 15 years ago at my office.

Not nearly enough ASCII art Snoopy for my taste.

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