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Comment by forinti | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

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.

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