Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python
blog.zdsmith.com
blog.zdsmith.com
12 months has the benefit of dividing the seasons into 3 month quarters. However having an uneven number of days per month and with the solstices and equinoxes falling somewhat haphazardly on the calendar, this doesn't seem like a good reason to stick with the current system.
As long as we're redesigning the calendar system, I think the solstice and the equinox should fall in the middle of a season with the Winter Solstice effectively marking the start of the calendar year as a holiday. The leap day could be the day that proceeds that, effectively being used as a day to mark the end of the year. Seasons would then define periods of similar daylight.
The only reasons not to adopt this sort of calendar are ceremonial. Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides.
I have no idea how to promote widespread adoption of a new calendar, but it is something I've thought about a lot.
In general, I can't imagine what month reform could be done that would be worth the pain of switching. Computers are doing all the hard calculations now. While calendars throw programmers for a loop sometimes, what really nails programmers (and therefore computers) are timezones and all the screwy things we do with seconds. Changing calendars is orthogonal to those problems, and the possibility of real reform on that front is more likely, since the costs/benefits work out more pleasingly.
Saying that it doesn't matter because computers do it for us is just hiding dirt under the carpet. I agree that timezone and second adjustments are more problematic, but having a more rational overall approach would also help there: you would have a "hack zone" where to dump all the madness (the special 1-day/2-days period), making it easier to deal with any adjustment. Currently, you are inserting most changes on 1 January and / or 31 December, but then also hacking February for no particular reason, all the while not being able to use the week as a meaningful unit.
Throughout history, we experienced periods when people would not shy away from bold cultural and rational changes in order to improve life for future generations. Holding the (adjusted) Gregorian calendar as an ultimate taboo is just sad.
The first chapter of Daniel Boorstin's The Discovers has an interesting history of calendars and time-keeping. For the question of Why a seven-day week, start on page 13:
http://books.google.com/books?id=aEr07wJ21NYC&lpg=PA13&vq=7%...
tl;dr The week varied among cultures, and the seven-day week was in use by the Romans by the third century. Each day of the week honored one of the seven "planets" (in the ancient use of the word, a wanderer in the sky): Sun Moon Mars Venus Mars Mercury Jupiter Venus and Saturn. Derivations of those words are still in use today.
It seems like that would complicate the business practice of dividing your fiscal year into quarters. I guess each quarter would be 3 months + 1 week but then you don't have quarters starting/ending evenly with months.
Today if you pay a monthly fee for something, the daily cost varies month-to-month. Why should things cost the most in February? While it may be true that fiscal quarters won't be aligned with month boundaries, they are more evenly spaced.
Fri Sep 7535 20:02:59 EDT 1993
Basically, you're consolidating the unevenness between years/months/days of the week to one special 1 or 2 day period. Ok, that's alright, but it still requires a bit of extra help. You still have to think through calendars understanding "Oh! I have to add a day for the epagomenal. Oh, it's a leap year, so it will be 2 actually."
That might be preferable to having to think through 31 or 30 or 28 or 29 days, but not by that much. Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good thing? I suppose it's easier to determine what day Thanksgiving is every year, but otherwise, it seems like a minute benefit. On the other hand, I wonder if there are some benefits of that not happening. The only one that comes to mind is it would suck for your Birthday to be on a Monday every year, but I suspect there might be other reasons where enforcing a day to occur on the same place in the week could be harmful.
There are benefits for things like accounting, logistics/scheduling, standardizing periods for better comparative analysis, etc.
Such systems are already in common use (though the extra day of the year does create a wrinkle): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-5_calendar
Then judaist religious backlash kicked in, and here we are.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week
"Some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic groups have been historically opposed to the calendar because their tradition of worshiping every seventh day would result in either the day of the week of worship changing from year to year or eight days passing when Year Day or Leap Day occurs.[11] Others have contended that Year Day and Leap Day could be counted as additional days of worship."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
"Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal."
One of the weird ones is our (English) weekday names: Sunday, Monday, etc. Those are apparently from German, but after their contact with the Romans, and after the Romans adopted the 7-day week. Which means it is after the Christianization of Rome, but before the Christianization of the Germanic tribes. They took the Roman week and put their gods' names in place instead.
It has to be said also that Roman calendars were actually "pillaged" from Greek culture and then tweaked until right - a pragmatic approach they followed in so many different cultural and scientific areas when interacting with foreign civilisations. Unfortunately, they didn't go as far as trying to align the 7-day week (of Middle-Eastern origin) with their Greek-ish months, and their legacy ended up being managed by a Church that valued immutability over everything else. So here we are, 1600 years later, still celebrating the months of Julius (Caesar) and Augustus when the weather is the best around the Mediterranean Sea, the month of war-god Mars in the best period to start military campaigns in the same region, and with four months named by numerical positions they've long since changed... and still completely mismatched with 7-day weeks.
OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.
The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good enough.
Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days. That is another hack that would probably end up doing more harm than good. How would you model that extra day (or two)? You wouldn't have (13) 4 week months. You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad.
>Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be unclassified as days.
I think we'd all be relieved to have a separate classification space for leap days (29 February is an abomination) and other adjustments we might have to add here and there. We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and religious celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or something. It's a very subjective judgement anyway, one way or the other.
>You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.
Still much more elegant that the current mess.
And yet, not bad enough to @deprecate.
> Still much more elegant that the current mess
I'd argue that it's just as much of a hack... if there was something that was obviously better, I'd be all for it, but this is just a different mess. I'd rather deal with the devil I know...
I can't tell if that's a serious suggestion, but if it is, I don't think that'd be very helpful. I'm trying to imagine which religion is standing around waiting for some benevolent calendar dictator to free up a couple new days in the year so they can implement a new tradition. :-D
Religions will stick their holy days on the calendar quite apart from your classification of them as holy. Provided you're not removing any capability for them to continue celebrating their current holidays, I don't think they're looking for any special consideration on the calendar front.
Any calendar reform unfortunately has to deal with this backward-compatibility nightmare with religious tradition, which doomed most previous attempts; hence my parent comment.
Not so hard, is it?
Although in that case, we sort of have a wrapper, in that many labels list both types of units, but I tend to just look at the unit that I know, and haven't built up a correspondence between the two, so that doesn't really help adoption.
I like to think we (americans) are standing on principle and refusing to accept the metric system on the basis of semantic consistency: an SI base unit should not contain a prefix.
It's hard but not impossible. It's a matter of doing it and stick to it.
So I was using it for some time for reminders and such, but using calendar nobody else uses is pretty pointless, so I dropped it. Such a pity.
[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar
It's essentially the same as the positivist calendar except:
* gregorian names are kept
* the extra month is inserted before july and is called Sol
* the extra day on leap years is inserted before the 1st of Sol
* was in actual use by Kodak until 1989 (amazing!)
If the 28th of Bichat is 2014-13-28 and the 1st of Moses is 2015-01-01, how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be 2014-13-29 (and 2014-13-30 on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?
I don't see how it would make things much easier, especially for timestamps in various date formats and date-input fields.
acceptable_days = range(1,29)
if pickedMonth == 14:
acceptable_days = [1];
if isLeapYear(year): acceptable_days = [1,2]
# any future hack will just go here
if pickedDay not in acceptable_days or pickedMonth > 14:
raise InvalidDateException()
And making dates 0 indexed will make all the C-weenies happy.
I'd make one change to Asimov's scheme. He gets rid of months. I'd keep them, with each season consisting of 3 months: 2 of 30 days and 1 of 31 days.
And if you are designing something so that some process needs to be performed on it every week, you should be building some tolerance into that time-period. Which the eight day span, once every year, would test.
Financial and similar institutions would likely treat the festival day(s) as they do any long weekend at the moment. Pay cycles could be adjusted with end of year 'bonus' to cover out of cycle days.
I'm sure there's something but we've dealt with quirky calendars for a long time so really we're just attacking the same problem that we currently have with 30 day fixed cycles.
by the way, no need to invent a new calendar. the Hebrew calendar is both solar and lunar.
AFAIK, Islam traces its roots back to Abraham, who was Judah's great-grandfather. So it would seem more appropriate to call it an Abrahamic religion, no?
> Comte set year 1 of his new calendar as the first year of the
> truly modern age: 1789, the first year of the Great Crisis.
[0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear
It's an interesting concept; similar to the Time-slip in Red Mars. Wanting a Martian day to equal that of an Earth day, colonists define the time between 00:00 and 00:01 as being 39 minutes 40 seconds in length.
I guess most peoples' minds go immediately to, "do I have to work it?". Mine did.
The culture will quickly adjust productivity levels back up. This isn't something you need to bother worrying about.
The Chinese government mandates an excessive holiday total; during those holidays, businesses and schools close. But the cultural solution is that schools open and businesses work for however many nearby weekend days the official holiday legally consists of (this irritates expats no end; I'm not quite sure why). So if M-W are a holiday one week, expect to work for the preceding weekend and the saturday after.
"Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to the Christian Sabbath. [British Chief Rabbi] Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide religious opposition to defeat the proposal."
No, the epagomenal/intercalary days would change this from year to year. The weekdays would be the same from month to month within a given year, of course (assuming the extra day doesn't fall somewhere in the middle).
>This extra day added to the last month was outside of the days of the week cycle, and so the first of a month was always a Monday. On leap years, an additional festival day (also outside the week cycle), to celebrate holy women, would join the memorial day of the dead.
Which to me reads that the extra day/s are not one of the 7 weekdays. Hence these days would fall between a Sunday and Monday, but would not be refereed to by any of our current weekday names. So, each year there would be the forth Sunday of Bichat, followed by the The Festival of All the Dead epagomenal day, followed by the first Monday of Moses.
edited out some typos
Wrong already. I do not understand this obsession to make a year exactly the length of a given number of days. They are both completely unrelated, exept in that they are units of time.
A year should be exactly one time the period of the earth moving around the sun. We just need to agree on a starting point. The day on which that starting point falls would be the last day of that year or the first day of the next (or both). And while I understand the need to group days (not sparate the year) into weeks the concept of month seems completely unnecessary. Just agree on a number of weeks on which pay is given out, rent payed,...
You can do this now. In particular, pay is quite frequently handled by the week.