The Calendar: A radical solution.
As of now, a month is not a standardized unit. The variation is hard.
For Time up to a day:
Let us define 1 second as per the SI unit of time. Let us define 1 minute as 60 seconds. Let us define 1 hour as 60 minutes. Let us define 1 day as 24 hours.
For Time up to a year:
Let us define 1 week as 7 days.
Let us define 1 month as 4 weeks. As is defined in the human calendar, and kodak, and a bunch of other places.
Let us define 1 quarter as 3 months and 1 week. Which is equivalent to 13 weeks.
Let us define 1 year as 13 months, plus 1 day. Which is equivalent to 52 weeks plus one day. Or, 365 days.
We can make the day outside of a week into a mega holiday.
Every four years or so, we'll need to add another day. We can do so at the end of the 2nd quarter, and make it a holiday.
Lots of places there are banking holidays. We can make these the first of every month.
This gives 14 built in holiday days per year. We always know that the first is a Monday. There are exactly 4 weeks per month.
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Power is going to your head⸮
ReplyDeleteI AM THE PUMPKIN KING!
ReplyDeleteShould we also adopt the Traveller names for the days of the week?
ReplyDeleteOneday
Twoday
Threeday
Fourday
Fiveday
Sixday
Sevenday
Sure!
ReplyDeleteAnd while we're at it, let's all goto GMT. It is 1855
And Year 0 is/was when?
ReplyDeleteBut... why?
ReplyDeleteJosh Roby Shrug. I dunno. Let this be the year 2017 of the common era. When did that start? Who cares, those people are all dead.
ReplyDeleteMatt Johnson Because i have no idea how many days are in October. Because I never know when I'm getting paid. Because there are a thousand mental work arounds we all have to deal with the nonsensical calendar.
ReplyDeleteShould we decimalise? If we shortened each second by 13.6% we could have 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour, and ten hours in a day. Much more sensible.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RsSjkXSfDU
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford Hah. Quite literally, the first time I did that math was in high school. I find it initially attractive.
ReplyDeleteAnd while I don't mind it to get up to a day, it doesn't help me with the calendar.
Besides, base 60 is actually pretty dang useful.
Josh Roby I know the knuckle trick. That I have to do the knuckle trick is a problem.
ReplyDeleteHow much effort would it be to slow down the rotation of the Earth so that we get exactly 360 days a year?
ReplyDeleteI mean, you could also speed up our orbital period keeping the days the same length, but that has it's own issues.
ReplyDeleteBrian Ashford That's what Greek and Portuguese do. In Greek, Monday is called Second, Tuesday Third, and Wednesday Fourth, etc. Technically Sunday is the first day of the week but, as with most European languages, that's a version of Sabbath, or Sun's Day.
ReplyDeletePortuguese is similar, except that their days are followed by '-feira', so Monday is Segunda-feira, Tuesday is Terça-feira and so on, although in conversation they're usually abbreviated to Segunda, Terça, etc.
I... see.
ReplyDeleteThis one drove me nuts while I was trying to teach the metric system! We'd all look at stopwatches and go through milliseconds to seconds and then try to figure out why we don't have hectaseconds. Here's an interesting link (out of the 4 I looked at) with this discussion, based on someone trying to play a practical joke on his friends. He wanted to create "Canadian time" which would be metric. A couple people popped on to say that this has kind of already been created by Swatch in something called Beat time, and there are links to how it works and watches that actually keep beat time. worldbuilding.stackexchange.com - How to make this base-10 metric time concept work
ReplyDeleteAnd, I mean, the french did try metric time when they invented the metric system during the revolution [ Also, the Revolution invented the metric system and even paper sizes come in metric. ]
ReplyDeleteFolks couldn't stand the 10-day week because, in large part, how do you know which day is the Sabbath?
Have you seen all the Russian calendars after their revolution? Russian timekeeping was insane.
ReplyDelete.
ReplyDeleteOhhh, have a link?
ReplyDeleteIn one culture I built, the twelve months of the year (each four weeks long) corresponded to the double-hours of the day (each 120 minutes long).
ReplyDeleteThe remaining four weeks, one each quarter, were part of the "secret month," and used to celebrate and catch up on official paperwork. The solstices and equinoxes all fell during those weeks.
William Nichols But at least we got lobster thermidore out of it 🍤😁.
ReplyDeleteHere's the link to the Wikipedia about the Soviet calendar. My eyes started to cross when they changed it (again) and did that color-coding thing where you went to work based on your color, which was stated on the calendar. en.wikipedia.org - Soviet calendar - Wikipedia
ReplyDeleteOh, and for metric time theorems the old 100 ks per day trick. A kilo second is about 16 minutes, tweaking the second duration down to make a metric day work isn't obvious moment to moment.
ReplyDelete1 second: a moment.
ReplyDelete1 decasecond: enough to catch your breath (10s).
1 hectosecond: a short verbal exchange (1m 40s).
1 kilosecond: a short task (16m 40s).
1 myriasecond: an evening's entertainment (2h 46m 40s).
1 fifthpowersecond: a (long) day (27h 46m 40s).
1 megasecond: 'one business week' (11d 13h 47m 40s).
And this is a secret, but our time keeping is all just an interface for humans anyway. We actually keep time by the number of seconds since Jan 1, 1970 and the beginning of the modern epoch.
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols [Thinks....] Ok, I'll have to work on that one.
ReplyDeleteShould I unpack that, catty _big?
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols Yes please. I don't think it'll come to me.
ReplyDeleteThe Unix Epoch began Jan 1, 1970. Unix computers measure time in seconds, in seconds since the beginning of the Epoch. While there are for sure other ways computers tell time (Excel uses days since Jan 1, 1900 iirc), when servers talk to each other they really talk in Epoch Time.
ReplyDeleteRecently, a project was finished to change all unix dates from an 8-bit integer that would expire in, i think, 2040, to a large enough integer to roll over after the heat death of the universe.
Derek Balling We're on the same page!
ReplyDeleteWilliam Nichols Ah, coding stuff. I'm so tech-unsavvy I can barely hold a pen 😝.
ReplyDeleteIt's good to have concurrence from a professional.
ReplyDeleteI remember a Vinge novel set in the FAR FUTURE in SPACE. They used the Unix Epoch, and assumed it was when we first went to the moon. Which, legit, makes a lot more sense if you are a space-faring humanity.
ReplyDeletePrecision!
ReplyDeleteInsufficient coffee for me, and not looking facts up before looking them up. Thanks for the clarification.
Yep.
ReplyDeleteAnd the main point remains: most computers talk to each other in standardized terms, and there's no reason to modify that. Just get everything onto unix time internally and we're fine.
But, to talk to humans? Let's make the month a standardized unit of 28 days. The rules to tell humans what day it is aren't especially complicated.
I think the official name is the International Fixed Calendar. The full details are here: en.wikipedia.org - International Fixed Calendar - Wikipedia
ReplyDeleteDerek Balling Wanna write the code, and start deploying it to every server in the world?
I'm doing exactly that in my West Marches campaign calendar. EXACTLY that. Also, I'm pretty sure that the calendar for the Faerûn D&D setting uses the same system.
ReplyDelete