You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

by zdw • 6 years ago

145 152 6 years ago

kibwen• 6 years ago

your name for the thirteenth month is questionable

In my plan for twelve 30-day months, I intended to call the leftover 5/6 days "Etcember", for et cetera. :P

(This submission appears to be a riff on the classic "Programming Language Checklist": https://www.famicol.in/language_checklist.html )

LeoPanthera• 6 years ago

Which in turn is a riff on the "spam solutions" checklist: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

pjscott• 6 years ago

I remember seeing that posted often, back when email spam was a big problem, and it always bothered me. Whenever people were discussing possible fixes, someone would post that checklist -- and you could always find some way to apply the checklist, even if it was just by invoking the generic "Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches" objection. Every sophisticated person knew that the email spam problem was intractable. Your inbox would always be full of spam, and it was considered foolish to think otherwise.

I haven't had much spam hit my inbox lately, though. So much for the checklist.

dredmorbius• 6 years ago

Linked at the end of TFA.

ddevault2• 6 years ago

In fact it is based on the older spam checklist:

https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

phinnaeus• 6 years ago

It even says so at the bottom!

airstrike• 6 years ago

[ ] The most significant program written in your language is its own compiler
[ ] The most significant program written in your language isn't even its own compiler

This bit always cracks me up

kstenerud2• 6 years ago

[ ] You have reinvented PHP but worse
[ ] You have reinvented PHP better, but that's still no justification

alex_young• 6 years ago

This sounds like the French Revolutionary Calendar: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

amptorn• 6 years ago

( ) they tried that in France once and it didn't take

zzo38computer5• 6 years ago

They missed:

You appear to believe that: [ ] The entire world speaks Unicode

Unfortunately, your language (has/lacks): [ ] comments [ ] include files [ ] hygienic macros [ ] unhygienic macros [ ] string escaping [ ] name quoting [ ] come from [ ] undefined behaviour

Your implementation has the following flaws: [ ] It won't let you program dangerous behaviour

isidor3• 6 years ago

having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid having one or two days per year with no day of the week is asinine

These don't sound like real reasons to me. If it costs having a 13th month with just a few days in it or a NO_DAY_OF_WEEK constant in my DAYS_OF_WEEK enum, I'd take it if it meant all of the weirdness was limited to a few days always located at the end of the year. Sounds like a convenient place to put leap seconds as well! While you're at it, make those days holidays for most people, so that when tech inevitably breaks due to the weirdness, those of us who get paged for such things can fix them in peace before the rest of the world starts back up a few days later.

msla2• 6 years ago

These don't sound like real reasons to me.

They are if you have to write date-handling code or, worse, use the date-handling code of others.

Date-handling code is hard enough without NULLs.

ketzu• 6 years ago

This does not only concern code, but regulation, tradition, contracts etc. The mutual understanding of weeks, days, months of roughly equal lengths is baked into a lot of our things and it's not enough to change it in some header file/law to clean up the rest.

twic3• 6 years ago

The Romans at one point had a setup where a year was 38 8-day weeks plus a bunch of days over winter when nobody is up to much so there's no point having weeks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nundinae

new_realist• 6 years ago

A time scheme in which sunrise is always at same time (skewing the clock by a few seconds or minutes every day at three a.m.) is likely a boon to human health. Smart watches and Alexa/Siri take care of time zone calculations. The fact that two dimensional time zones skew a bit more at the poles is a silly reason to dismiss the idea. The poles are weird for a bunch of other reasons and no time works there.

gberger• 6 years ago

Analog watches would all be rendered useless.

gizmo6862• 6 years ago

coordinating geographically dispersed events would become nearly impossible
I shouldn't need to adjust my wristwatch every few miles
many clocks do not have line-of-sight to GPS satellites
you can't put a GPS chip in a mechanical clock
clocks on planes would literally run backwards

There is a reason most timezone offset by hours. It is very convinient for everyone to agree on the time when ignoring the most significant digits. Otherwise, you end up having meetings start at 17 past the hour, and be much harder to mentally calculate the offset.

You would also need to know the location of the other party much more presicily. At the moment, I know how to offset my schedule when planning a meeting with a customer in Texas.

TylerE• 6 years ago

In fact, historically time WAS just set in each location, at local noon.

This was done away with by the railroads because it made scheduling a complete nightmare.

The first use of "Standard Time" was by the Great Western Railway in the UK. Even in a relatively small country like the UK - only about 100 miles wide in most places - that was still enough to shift "local" noon by about 15 minutes.

dwighttk• 6 years ago

Depending on which part of Texas. El Paso is in Mountain time.

brandmeyer• 6 years ago

Some churches in Florence maintain their clocks this way. Its more about tradition than practicality, though.

Spooky23• 6 years ago

Sunrise is a local phenomenon, and time zones are there to make things easier in a world where travel is possible.

Tomorrow morning, sunrise in Boston is 5:29; NYC 5:46; Dayton OH 6:29; Miami, FL 6:43, all EDT.

qtplatypus• 6 years ago

What happens in places that have no sunrise. For example northern Canada during the winter?

irrational• 6 years ago

If the USA can’t convert to metric, despite passing laws to that affect, my belief that the world will adopt a new calendar system is less than non-existent.

hinkley5• 6 years ago

I hate to scapegoat, but there are a bunch of odd things the US does because boomers like things the way they've always been.

Why were a bunch of new Christmas songs written 60 years ago and barely a song a decade has been added to the repertoire since? George Michael is dead, and Mariah Carey seemed touch and go for a while, and those are pretty much the last two people to create a successful Christmas song (and the less said about Do They Know It's Christmas, the better)

gizmo6862• 6 years ago

US copyright terms:

1978+: Author's life + 70 years. 95 years if work-for-hire

1967-1977: 95 years

1924 - 1963: 28 years if never renewed. Maximum 95 years.

Pre-1924 - All copywrights have expired

mhh__3• 6 years ago

What's wrong with do they know it's Christmas?

leoc2• 6 years ago

Why were a bunch of new Christmas songs written 60 years ago and barely a song a decade has been added to the repertoire since? George Michael is dead, and Mariah Carey seemed touch and go for a while, and those are pretty much the last two people to create a successful Christmas song (and the less said about Do They Know It's Christmas, the better)

I don't see how the Boomers get the blame here. The two obvious suspects in the death of the Christmas song are, first, the general decline in the quality of Anglophone pop music over the past few decades (with the biggest arguable exception being the rise of hip-hop, not a genre that's an obviously good platform for Christmas-themed top-10s) and, second, a decline in the cultural resonance of Christmas. Boomers are (directly) driving those trends less than later generations are, I'd assume.

dhosek3• 6 years ago

https://youtu.be/pc9bPycuEc4

dragonwriter2• 6 years ago

Why were a bunch of new Christmas songs written 60 years ago and barely a song a decade has been added to the repertoire since?

You are factually incorrect, and i suspect biased against country music, which is disproportionately (but not exclusively) where new original-and-popular Christmas music has come from.

annoyingnoob2• 6 years ago

having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid

There are some valid points in there but this kind of thing is not productive. No need to be rude.

evan_2• 6 years ago

how about we just do away with months altogether. One or two days per year that aren't in a month would be weird but 365ish days should be fine, right?

annoyingnoob2• 6 years ago

I'm referring to the name calling. I'm not looking to change any dates or calendars. I found this approach of 'old man screaming at cloud' while name calling offensive.

You don't need to be condescending to make a point - and that is my point. This person shared this rant and I gave feedback about the rant, not the subject of the rant.

ddevault2• 6 years ago

Newcomers to qntm.org are advised to browse around a bit. There's some great stuff here. Here's one:

https://qntm.org/responsibility

qntmfred• 6 years ago

qntm's work is indeed quite excellent and highly recommended (no relation)

sdiupIGPWEfh• 6 years ago

Brings back memories of reading "Fine Structure" while it was still a work in progress on Everything2. "Ed stories" was great too. Looks like there's a lot to catch up on.

And then there's https://qntm.org/hatetris

creade• 6 years ago

The Antimemetics Division series on SCP is great http://www.scp-wiki.net/antimemetics-division-hub

guerrilla• 6 years ago

Am I supposed to be able to select an option?

evan_2• 6 years ago

The premise is that this would be pasted in its entirety into a reply to a usenet or listserv post, with the text of the appropriate line- or lines- modified from "( )" to "(x)".

The implication is that amateur calendarists, who do not fully grasp the enormity of the task, frequently post to this list with proposals for a new calendar. The regular contributors to this list see so many ill-conceived proposals that they have prepared a post with all of the common mistakes and oversights so they may shoot the theory down without having to type them all over again.

In reality this list is prepared and posted as a joke for the members of the community and a deterrent to posting calendar proposals at all, at least those that do not consider all of these common errors ahead of time.

zzo38computer5• 6 years ago

What is the newsgroup for writing calendar proposals?

staycoolboy• 6 years ago

metric.

all hail the kiloday.

TMWNN• 6 years ago

In Vernor Vinges A Fire Upon the Deep (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Fire_Upon_the_Deep#Time), the future human civilization uses [kilo|mega|giga]seconds as time units because nothing else makes sense in an environment where Earth is long gone and hibernating for years or decades between planetary visits is common.

(Beyond being great novels, the above and its prequel, A Deepness in the Sky, have points of interest to Unix and Usenet users.)

jaggederest• 6 years ago

A year is 31.54 megaseconds, who needs months :)

iso947• 6 years ago

Months are fine. Leap years are fine. It’s leap seconds that annoy me.

hinkley5• 6 years ago

Becoming a Class 2 stellar civilization so that we can alter the orbit and rotation of the earth to be exactly 365 days, 24 hours.

Razengan4• 6 years ago

Must a calendar only represent the physical positions of heavenly bodies?

What happens after we propagate to other planets?

Why should there be only one calendar?

Why can’t we have, say, a Social Calendar alongside a Astronomical Calendar?

We could have a sane, logical calendar with even and regular divisions for determining working days, holidays, financial calculations and political durations etc.

And there could be another calendar for the galactic rotation, orbital period, lunar cycle etc. that only people who need to care about such things would use (astronomers, farmers).

Ruthalas• 6 years ago

I tend to agree with the concept, but you'd probably have to address holidays that are season-specific.

Perhaps 'Christmas is always in the third winter time-block', or something to that effect.

Razengan4• 6 years ago

Yes, “floating” holidays are already a thing, so some of them would just have to be tied to the astronomical calendar instead of the social calendar.

rodgerd• 6 years ago

() Your solution shows you don't understand hemispheres or seasons.

Natsu• 6 years ago

What happens after we propagate to other planets?

Relativity will become a pain and we'll have significant lag on communications to the tune of several minutes within the Sol star system and years for anywhere else, so you'd end up using asynchronous communication like email, workdays would be based on local conditions (and likely not map to a local day on some planets), etc.

jhanschoo• 6 years ago

Before considering abolishing the calendar perhaps consider abolishing DST, or the imperial system. The solar and lunar cycles, and day/night are important forces that life on earth have to work around; interplanetary civilization will not abolish the need for a calendar on Earth.

Razengan4• 6 years ago

Where did you see a motion to abolish the calendar?

every• 6 years ago

I've played this game twice:

https://every.sdf.org/Geekish/sol13cal.txt

https://every.sdf.org/Geekish/lunasolcal.txt

zzo38computer5• 6 years ago

I like the solar hijri calendar (not to be confused with the lunar hijri). Better than anno domini would be a anno mundi system, but to make a new scientific anno mundi system rather than the old way, due directly to the Earth going around the Sun, because that is how the year is considered, so to count years starting from that, too. For time keeping, use local time based on mean solar time, with no daylight saving time (I hate daylight saving time), with 12:00 being mean solar noon. Perhaps make half hour time zones. Continue using UTC with a "Z" suffix when you need to use the time that isn't local time (and if you do need to explicitly note local time, you can use a "J" suffix, or use the + and - and number of hours if you need to specify the timezone explicitly too). My idea for dealing with leap seconds in Unix time is to allow the number of nanoseconds to exceed one billion during a leap second; at all other times, the number of nanoseconds is less than one billion. Don't be over-civilization.

My ideas do perhaps have some (maybe most, or even all) of the problems mentioned in that document, but nevertheless, this is my ideas.

patrickthebold2• 6 years ago

I'm a big proponent of continuous time zones, so that noon drifts ever so slightly as position changes.

Seems like a no-brainer to me.

cecilpl2• 6 years ago

Definitely a no-brainer, I'd say.

defen• 6 years ago

(x) I shouldn't need to adjust my wristwatch every few miles

Arcorann2• 6 years ago

Already addressed: https://qntm.org/continuous

Suffice to say, we stopped doing that in the 19th century for very good reasons.

earthboundkid2• 6 years ago

Time zones were a premature optimization. Now we all have GPS, so we can return to location based times.

twic3• 6 years ago

This post has been up for over 450 .beats, and seriously nobody has pointed out that Swatch Internet Time solves all these problems?

pattisapu• 6 years ago

. . . anno mundi . . . ante meridiem . . . :P

zzo38computer5• 6 years ago

I admit that the abbrevation may be confusing, but the numbers would hopefully be large enough to avoid this confusion.

taveras• 6 years ago

If you are interested in calendar reform and enjoy world history, the French Revolutionary calendar is fascinating to read about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar

dhosek3• 6 years ago

I used to use a bastardized version of this on our team calendar on the whiteboard at work (just the month/year, ignoring the fact that French Republican months don't correspond neatly to Gregorian months). I was able to get away with it because the month/year were not really functional parts of the calendar. I doubt I could have gotten the team to fully adopt the French Republican calendar, although it would have been fun to try.

0823498723498723• 6 years ago

I'm trying to imagine the hacker equivalent of the republican calendar's Wheezy, Sneezy and Freezy; Slippy, Drippy and Nippy; Showery, Flowery and Bowery; Hoppy, Croppy and Poppy. Maybe one season would have months named CacheInvalidation, NamingThings, and OffByOne?

More seriously, what's wrong with Year-Week-Day? (I propose this having been in an industry where I regularly received swag calendars marked with week numbers, YMMV.)

msla2• 6 years ago

Your next Death March might have lead to a Thermidorian Reaction.

avs733• 6 years ago

I'm surprised to see no mention in here of the international fixed calendar [0](sometimes called the 'Kodak calendar').

Kodak adopted it in part because Georgia Eastman (founder) was a big proponant, but also because for corporate scheduling the regularity made things like maintenance and long run chemical/manufacturing processes simpler to plan.

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

fellowniusmonk• 6 years ago

The disadvantages listed are pretty are pretty much nothing.

Arcorann2• 6 years ago

(2013)

Previous discussion (the only substantial one at any rate): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11193152

The main problem with calendar reform as I see it is that network effects and lock-in mean that unless everyone changes at once it'll never stick. I've long felt that the optimal time for calendar reform was several decades ago -- with increasing computerisation the cost of switching has gone up over time, much faster than any potential benefits.

efitz• 6 years ago

I advocate a solution similar to proposals floated years ago on alt.pave.the.earth on UseNet.

1. Disintegrate the moon, anyone who has ever advocated for lunar calendars, and anyone who fails to convincingly support this Plan(tm), converting their mass to energy that we can use for productive purposes such as orbital adjustments. 2. Adjust the rotational period of the earth to an aesthetically pleasing multiple of the length of the solar year. Adjust the axial tilt and orbital eccentricity of the earth to eliminate "seasons". 3. Adjust the definitions of time units to aesthetically pleasing multiples of the now-constant solar year and rotational day.

Problem solved.

markrages• 6 years ago

alt.chrome.the.moon forever!

helsinkiandrew2• 6 years ago

Adjust the axial tilt and orbital eccentricity of the earth to eliminate "seasons".

So you’re the guy who wants to kill summer?

swsieber• 6 years ago

No, summer will be alive and well in Phoenix, AZ.

Chris2048• 6 years ago

imagine if temperature was a function of geo-locale only.

progval• 6 years ago

( ) planetary-scale engineering is impractical

Y_Y• 6 years ago

Well that's just a matter of time. I posit that given sufficient time for technology to develop, anything can be practically engineered.

Igelau• 6 years ago

That's just fear talking!

nl2• 6 years ago

My favorite calendar disaster was the Swedish calendar[1] between 1700 and 1753.

They had a somewhat (?) reasonable plan:

In November 1699, the Government of Sweden decided that, rather than adopt the Gregorian calendar outright, it would gradually approach it over a 40-year period. The plan was to skip all leap days in the period 1700 to 1740. Every fourth year, the gap between the Swedish calendar and the Gregorian would reduce by one day, until they finally lined up in 1740. In the meantime, this calendar would not be in line with either of the major alternative calendars and the differences would change every four years.

Then war started and they stopped, after starting the process, so they were on their own calendar that no one else in the world used.

Then the king decided it was a bad idea, so reverted to the Julian calendar. Then they decided to jump to the Gregorian outright.

There's a bunch of other details, like Easter being calculated by one calendar but Easter Sunday by the other.

Oh yeah, and they had February 30 one year[2] (which was Feb 29 in a Julian calendar or March 11 Gregorian).

And in 1753 they finally sorted it all out by skipping all the days between February 17 and March 1.

Good luck writing billing software for that.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_calendar

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_non-standard_dates#Swe...

thaumasiotes2• 6 years ago

Good luck writing billing software for that.

How often do you need to bill someone for events that took place 300 years ago?

nl2• 6 years ago

It's a joke. As is the story it is posted on. Enjoy.

peterburkimsher• 6 years ago

Obligatory link to Falsehoods programmers believe about time:

https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-program...

sixstringtheory• 6 years ago

I like the solutions that have extra days that don’t fit anywhere else. Those should just be legally recognized paid holidays.

tom_mellior2• 6 years ago

( ) by that logic, 2000 was the final year of the Nineties

<rant> I'm annoyed by this argument, which came up again at the start of this year in dumb Twitter discussions about whether 2020 marks the beginning of a new decade.

2000 was not the final year of the Nineties. 2000 was the final year of the second millennium, and of the 20th century, and of the tenth decade of the 20th century. The Nineties were the years 1990-1999, the tenth decade of the 20th century were the years 1991-2000. These are different ranges, but we also use different terms to refer to them. There is no logical problem. There is only a problem with the assumption that these different terms "should" refer to the same concept.

So did 2020 mark the beginning of a new decade? Yes, it marked the beginning of the decade we might call the Twenty-Twenties. It did not mark the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century; that will be 2021. </rant>

kstenerud2• 6 years ago

And yet people will say that 2000 is the beginning of the millenium, and 2020 is the beginning of a decade, because colloquially it's easier and understandable. And no amount of begging, pleading, or berating will change that (although it might get you punched in the face). That pope Gregory XIII neglected to include a year 0 in his calendar doesn't have to condemn us to suffer the mental gymnastics in our daily lives.

chrisseaton9• 6 years ago

2020 is the beginning of a decade, because colloquially it's easier and understandable

But 2020 is technically the start of a decade, not just informally.

yetanta• 6 years ago

That is the real rub. It is like the word 'hacker'. No amount of 'but it really means' will change that. It is like the Mandela effect. People see and hear and remember what they want, but reality can be very different. But they will still go about their day with the 'wrong way'. Life will be just fine with something like this being 'wrong'.

tom_mellior2• 6 years ago

I don't think you read all of my comment. 2020 is absolutely the beginning of a decade. So is 2021. It's just not the same decade.

sofetch3• 6 years ago

When I do this rant, I like to note that "the 1800s" and "the 19th century", while very similar, are not the same 100 year interval.

bhaak2• 6 years ago

( ) planetary-scale engineering is impractical

I find your lack of vision disturbing.

Given that we likely need planetary-scale engineering anyway in the next 50-100 years, getting a few asteroids to nudge the earth’s orbit a bit over a long period of time isn’t that much of a stretch.

With asteroid mining it might even pay for itself.

Note: I didn’t do any calculations but over millions of years we’ll need to stabilize earth’s orbit anyway, otherwise our calendars will get out of sync even more.

Of course we’ll have to deal with the inaccuracies of the Gregorian calendar rather soon, in 7000 to 8000 years.

jerf• 6 years ago

"I find your lack of vision disturbing."

Author does not lack vision: https://qntm.org/destroy

legulere• 6 years ago

I really like the discordian calendar as it replaces chaotic months with regular 73 day long seasons, which are based on numerology. The only thing that was overlooked was the beginning of the year. The day which is the first of the year is pretty arbitrary as well, using the day of winter solstice would make much more sense.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar

opk2• 6 years ago

The winter solstice isn't even a precise thing. It can be a different day depending on whether you're going by sunset or sunrise for example.

twic3• 6 years ago

( ) civil time and solar time have to remain in synch to better than a second

No, they don't. Proof of this is that they already aren't: there is a band no more than 15 arcseconds wide in each timezone where it is true, and everywhere outside that, civil time does not correspond to solar time.

kwhitefoot• 6 years ago

What is the problem for which calendar reform is a solution?

mbar84• 6 years ago

I recently learned that the rate of rotation of the earth depends on how much water vapor is in the atmosphere. I suggest we use this information to turn the earth into a precision time keeping instrument. Instead of regularly adding/removing leap seconds every so often, we geoengineer the atmosphere to increase/decrease the rate of rotation of the earth, so that it on average rotates exactly 86400 SI-Seconds per day.

geogra4• 6 years ago

Too bad we never seriously adopted the French Republican calendar

There's a twitter account that posts wonderful artwork along with the republican day of the week.

https://twitter.com/sansculotides

egypturnash• 6 years ago

( ) having one or two days per year which are part of no month is stupid

Are you calling the Ancient Egyptians stupid? I think you are. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_calendar

And the Aztecs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nēmontēmi

kthejoker2• 6 years ago

To the author, if he's reading this:

Hey Sam512, it's kthejoker from E2, hope you're well!

You advocate a ________ approach to calendar reform (2013)

Related Stories