Deciyear Calendar(deciyear.com) |
Deciyear Calendar(deciyear.com) |
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.)
Playing devils advocate here, the problem with this proposal is that it didn't go far enough with its decimalization. A "better" (more decimal) approach would be to divide year to 100 "weeks" (10 "months" with 10 "weeks" each), and have each "week" vary in number of days. This would open up to fun ways to notate it, for example now (2023-12-17T21:03:31Z) could be "2023.95/2.87744Z", i.e. "week" 95 (or month 9 week 5) of 2023, day 2 of the "week", and 877.44 millidays ("minutes") since midnight. It's only slight abuse of decimal notation :)
you're describing the French Republican calendar btw. I blame Christianity for the travesty of stopping it's adoption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar?wpr...
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.
I only use calendars that acknowledge the 96-hour Cubic Day.
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.
Since unfortunately 365 isn't a round number it seems like the best compromise. The other top approach would be counting days.
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?
Through sheer fatigue, you'll get nothing done on the 5th day (just like now), and certainly not the 6th.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
Found it : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar
https://hankehenryontime.com is another alternative calendar, but doesn't attempt to also "decimalize" time units shorter than the day.
Nobody would adopt this, so why bother?
What makes it especially appealing to me is that we don’t need to invent new names for the digits A and B (though I’d like to come up with better glyphs than reusing those letters).
Ten and Eleven work just fine, and can be used for larger numbers like “forty-ten” (₁₀58) and “eleventy-four” (₁₀136)
Another bonus is that when we transition to this superior numbering system, I can sneer at the metric world, what with their archaic finger-based measuring system. The Foot will return to a place of honor.
But consider base 12 has few advantages over base 6 but base6 greatly simplifies math since you only need to remember 24 entries for the commutative pair tables (multiplication)
I'm not saying this is a good enough reason to even begin trying to upend the existing calendar system and replace it. But the somewhat random nature of how weekends and certain holidays are distributed throughout the calendar can have effects on business, and presumably other areas. One might suggest it is all awash because the bad effects of one year/week/month will erase the good effects of a future one, but I don't find that comforting if it contributes to, say, the company I work for having an under-performing year, resulting in layoffs (granted, there would be other factors here as well). Regardless, the inconsistency is a problem.
I recall working at a FinTech company and hearing some team gloat about something like an 8% increase in MoM revenue, only to be shut down by someone in finance pointing out that there were 8% more bank days that month. Imagine someone wasn't thinking of this and people got promoted (or fired) because of a total nothing-signal being misinterpreted as a hugely positive (or negative) performance. The existing calendar allows this.
Yes, and? Isn't it to be expected? Calendars are long-living standards, that adjust over long periods of time, because of the practical impact they have on societies.
Why should those commons adjust themselves in order to satisfy self-imposed, often antisocial business requirements? (how MoM revenue performance is calculated and rewarded is strictly a concern for said businesses).
If it should contribute to an underperforming year for your company, it would be a way lesser factor than the lack of preparation or perspective from its owners/executives, because the calendar-related discrepancies are already known in advance (and it's not a particularly recent phenomenon either).
Would even such a deciyear (or any other new) calendar be adopted, it would "diverge" again in the next 10/20 years by the simple sheer force of society cultural evolution: "we will have more bank days here", "we need more working days there", "ho, we need to mark this particular date because of this event", "ho, these partner countries follow a new tradition, we need to adjust somehow".
Ok. Perhaps a new calendaring system could make sense for businesses. The only way forward would be for businesses first to design and adopt it, in parallel with the public calendar system, and show how it works better. Would there be a favorable business case? Especially in relation with financial and regulatory requirements which are still based on civil years? (and even different across countries)
These questions are a pain in the ass with the Gregorian calendar and they would be a pain in the ass with this one, and basically any conceivable calendar. No calendar can change the fact that there isn't an integer number of days in a year, and that the closest integer (365) doesn't have nice factors for making a calendar out of.
Just one more in the long history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform#Proposals
Nevertheless, my colleague bothered to do it and he could tell you the DOW without pausing. He is of average intelligence maybe a little more intelligent than I (though I was better at mental math)
Then what are they?
Otherwise, so what indeed.