by Skeime on 12/16/23, 12:55 PM
My favorite part is that they designed a new calendar system where the months are named starting at one (Primilis, Secundilis, etc.) but numbered starting at 0. So Primilis is month 0, Secundilis is month 1, and Decilis is month 9. This somehow feels even worse than our current system where there’s a shift of 2 in the other direction for September to December.
They also claim that this is useful when dealing with quarters despite their number of month not being divisible by 4. (Admittedly, it works on the level of weeks.)
by kibwen on 12/16/23, 4:21 PM
When it comes to the number of months in the year, 10 is an entirely arbitrary number because, unlike the metric system, there's no opportunity to leverage the convenient zero-shifting property of a base-10 numeral system (the concept of "kilomonths" and "megamonths" is incoherent as a unit of measure given that the number of days in a year is not divisible by 10). Might as well just smooth out the current 12 months (12 being a more highly composite number than 10) to 30 days each and then save the leftover days for a worldwide party outside of time.
by thsksbd on 12/16/23, 1:33 PM
All the problems listed aren't real world problems.
No one has a problem understanding the calendar and there are no engineering problems with it either unlike the inch. For the few folks in astronomy we have computers.
Why would there be a problem? Half the world's population prays according to a base 7 week.
Nor is this proposal new. Its been tried (at least) twice before failed spectacularly embittering people. Based 10 (french) or 5 (soviet) weeks were introduced at the blood thirsty peak of thise anti-religious regime with the explicit goal of also erasing worship to the God of Abraham.
by lordfrito on 12/16/23, 5:58 PM
Earth has 4 corner simultaneous 4-day Time Cube within single rotation.
I only use calendars that acknowledge the 96-hour Cubic Day.
https://timecube.2enp.com/
by danaugrs on 12/16/23, 1:00 PM
Six weeks of six days (4 work days and 2 rest days) in a month would be better than four weeks of nine days (6 work days and 3 rest days) in my opinion.
by bradley13 on 12/16/23, 2:34 PM
Proposals like thus are so unrealistic that it's difficult to take then seriously. This one has lots of problems, but perhaps the worst (and yet, easiest to fix) are the millidays. People do not naturally think in thousands. Put a separator in there.
More fundamentally, the "second" is embedded everywhere in culture, science and engineering. Trying to replace the second with microdays is...let's be polite...suboptimal.
by tolmasky on 12/16/23, 2:46 PM
This is worse than my 365 month calendar since it still has that ugly 5-day “year end”. In my calendar, every month is exactly one day long, no exceptions. Leap years simply add an extra month.
by mcny on 12/16/23, 6:09 PM
My mind blown moment back in middle school was the example of a ballerina spinning in the back of a flat bed truck going round and round on a race track.
It is obvious to anyone here I guess but to my child mind, this was a revelation.
The fact is
the speed at which the ballerina spins in her own dance
has nothing to do with the speed at which the truck goes around the track means.
Similarly, Earth's day of 24 hours and 365 days (I guess 365.25 something) a year are unrelated.
Back to the topic,
I think it is useless to try to square the circle of
a scientific time measurement goal
while trying to guarantee that a day has 24 hours
while also trying to guarantee a year has integer number of days.
We can try to say that we have defined a meter as something or a kilogram as something and pretend they are not arbitrary
but how can any self-respecting physicist / astronomer pretend that our concept of time is anything but arbitrary?
by zokier on 12/16/23, 7:34 PM
Calendar reformations are fun perennial thought experiment topic, even if at this point it seems very unlikely that we'd change away from Gregorian. That being said, this seems particularly weak proposal. If we were to accept this "yearend" thing (which I think is unpalatable), then 12 months of 5 weeks with 6 days each (i.e. 30 day months) would be massive improvement over this 10 × 4 × 9 structure. You'd get even quarters (3 months vs 2.5 months), more palatable work-week (4 days vs 6 days), and best of all the yearend could be a full 6 day week which keeps the year and week cycles in sync. You could simply drop the yearend completely roughly every 8th year to keep in sync with tropical year ((7×366 + 360)/8 = 365.25).
by franciscop on 12/16/23, 1:40 PM
Not a single mention of the topic/reason calendars were invented in the first place: keeping track of the 4 seasons (for agriculture purposes). Though since each month has 4 weeks, I can see a season being 2.5 months making sense. At least much more than the 13-month year.
by demondemidi on 12/16/23, 1:24 PM
I like the variety and history reminders of the Gregorian. Why do we have to make a homogenous suburb out of everything?
by jacknews on 12/16/23, 1:30 PM
6-day work week?
Through sheer fatigue, you'll get nothing done on the 5th day (just like now), and certainly not the 6th.
by veganjay on 12/16/23, 1:17 PM
by WaitWaitWha on 12/16/23, 3:30 PM
by sj4nz on 12/16/23, 5:39 PM
Calendars are a prime example of Metcalf's Law. (The influence of a network is the square of the number of elements participating.)
https://hankehenryontime.com is another alternative calendar, but doesn't attempt to also "decimalize" time units shorter than the day.
by nvahalik on 12/16/23, 5:43 PM
What benefit does this have besides just being a thought experiment?
Nobody would adopt this, so why bother?
by mugwumprk on 12/16/23, 4:04 PM
Wrong approach. We should change our numbering system to base-12 instead.
by dave4420 on 12/14/23, 10:09 AM
This is a proposal to change the clock, change the calendar, and abolish timezones in one fell swoop. This would be harder to introduce than introducing each of these three things separately. But I think it is satire.
by kwhitefoot on 12/16/23, 10:48 PM
What real problem does it solve?
by Titan2189 on 12/16/23, 12:23 PM