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Pax Calendar

by rfreytag on 5/12/23, 2:51 PM with 24 comments

• by halosghost on 5/12/23, 5:53 PM

  At this point, I doubt there will ever be any proposal as easy to adopt and as radically-improved as Symmetry454 [1].

  One day, I hope to live in a world where I get to use this calendar and the average response isn't for people to look at me funny…

  For anyone looking for a tl;dr, Symmetry454…

  - is perpetual; one printed calendar will work, more or less, indefinitely

  - preserves the 7-day sabbatical week cycle (no intercalary days like IFC)

  - simplifies the leap rule to a formula which should work for a very long time (at least a few millenia from now)

  - preserves 3 months in a quarter, and 4 equal quarters making up a year

  - results in every week, month, quarter, year, etc. beginning on a Monday and ending on a Sunday; this also means knowing just the day number tells you exactly what day-of-week it is

  - ensures all months now consist of a predictable, whole-number of weeks

  … it's just… so much better…

  All the best,

  [1]: http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/symmetry.htm

• by helmsb on 5/12/23, 10:16 PM

  I’ve always been fascinated by alternative calendars (also alternative timekeeping). However, barring an apocalyptic event, I don’t for see any alternative calendars taking off.

  For most of human history, we didn’t need a standardized calendar, you just needed to agree with people that you interacted with. Religion pushed most of the standardization and later reinforced during the Industrial Revolution—helped along by colonialism.

  Now that we are a globalized society, it would require parties from every nation and every industry to agree to the change and coordinate a simultaneous migration. Given we can’t get close to that level of cooperation when faced with potentially existential crises, it’s doubtful we could do it because it’s a “better” system than the current one.

  I’d love to be proven wrong though!

• by digging on 5/12/23, 6:53 PM

  Pretty unpleasant to have an extra week once in a while, IMO. Seems this calendar would lead to confusing seasonal drift in more stable (pre-industrial) climate, but I guess there's no seasonal predictability going forward .

  As a fun thought experiment, I once devised my own Equal Terrestrial Calendar, intended to be both predictable and actually secular.

  - Weeks are 5 days long.

  - Months are 6 weeks long (exactly).

  - Thus, a month is 30 days, and as close as possible to an average lunar month.

  - Every week/month/year begins on the same day of the week

  - Work weeks are 3 days long.

  - 3 intercalary holidays at the winter solstice, and 2 intercalary holidays at the summer solstice (make it 3 every leap year)

  - 30 days/month * 12 months + 5.25 days (intercalary) = 365.25, but in a fairly even spread

  Not possible for a calendar to be perfect, but I'd really enjoy living in this world.

• by smitty1110 on 5/12/23, 7:31 PM

  Or we could go with a real classic from Ye Olde Days: The Babylonian calendar[1]. A visual explanation is here [2]. I rather like that they use the physical properties of a pendulum to link length and time.

  1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babylonian_calendar 2: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/Sumerian...

• by nayuki on 5/12/23, 7:35 PM

  I don't think this reformed calendar goes far enough. Many of our services are billed monthly - Internet, phone, electricity, property tax, etc. I don't know if the pax week would be considered its own super-short month or fused into another month, but it massively complicates financial calculations and issues of fairness.

  Other people have pointed out issues like with 13 months, you can't divide the year into quarters.

• by aranchelk on 5/12/23, 8:54 PM

  I don’t like leap weeks. I’d much rather have 1-2 leap days. Let them exist outside the months: year starts with 0 and every 4th year 00 then 0.

  For anyone thinking that will be a pain to code, side benefit, it’ll hasten the adoption of sum types.

• by dhosek on 5/12/23, 6:52 PM

  I recently ended up in a wikipedia rathole looking at various alternative calendar systems, at least in part to be able to give a true but unintelligible answer to the question of when my birthday is. Among the oddballs were the Discordian calendar which divides the year into five seasons of 73 days each with 5-day weeks and the Pataphysical calendar which has 13 months each of 29 days, but for most months, the 29th day is imaginary.

• by jmclnx on 5/12/23, 4:58 PM

  Will make things rather hard for financial businesses that expect 3 months per quarter and 4 quarters per year.

• by 082349872349872 on 5/12/23, 7:42 PM

  cf https://qntm.org/calendar

• by cryptonector on 5/13/23, 7:13 AM

  Why not have the 13th month be a 29 day month and every four years have a leap day?

• by bombcar on 5/12/23, 5:04 PM

  Shire Calendar beats it.

• by adamtheclayman on 5/12/23, 7:07 PM

  Like other simplifying calendar proposals, Pax Calendar is faced with an almost impossible technical integration challenge if human beings have to achieve the transition, recoding all existing systems to conform to the new calendar requirements rather than the Julian/Gregorian calendar support we've built up over hundreds of years.

  But now, with AI emerging, it might be possible to foresee a day, a half-century from now, when the transition to Pax or Synchrony or another such calendar is much less laborious and far more feasible, with a transition and switching cost that is actually palatable, given that AI and advanced robotics may largely be able to reprogram itself, and other systems AI can be given access to, rather than consuming a bajillion hours of human engineering and maintenance time.

  Maybe in 75 or 100 years a transition will become more crystal clear as an achievement we can complete with the help of ubiquitous, universal, super-efficient, sudo-trusted ML.

  But anyone hoping for a transition in the next 25 or 30 years is probably suffering from delusion.