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.
If we had the ability to make orbital adjustments, I feel like we would have the ability to make rotational adjustments as well to counteract tidal locking.
> ( ) 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>
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.
> I am unaware of any Office of Decades charged with deciding precisely what constitutes the sole definition of "decade"
ISO 8601 defines what a 'decade' is.
I mean you're free to ignore it of course, like you're free to say March has 34 days if you want... but you may have trouble communicating with people and integrating with existing systems.
8601's definition of a decade is somewhat different from common parlance. They're using it only to mean "the first digit of a two-digit year", and doesn't really apply it beyond that. If you stick to only that definition of a decade, you're going to have communication problems with human beings.
“Decade” isn’t a technical term, which is the point here. It has no intrinsic meaning except “a span of ten years”. Everything else is nominal, not technical; conflating the two is basically nerd sniping, and enlightens no-one.
There is no technical context for time defining “decades” that is anything other than nominal.
The fact that people are so hung up on this detail is itself evidence that it has no concrete philosophical foundation. Any definition you care to toss around is arbitrary.
It is pure bikeshed, and this is what gives the article its glimmer of truth that validates the satire.
I feel like this entire thread has been an elaborate attempt to demonstrate that you know an ISO definition. With the carefully constructed adjectives used to describe the definition ("standard technical meaning", "In a technical context") leading inexorably to the "ISO" gotcha.
decade
time scale unit (3.1.1.7) of 10 calendar years (3.1.2.21), beginning with a year whose year number is divisible without remainder by ten
Note 1 to entry: Decade is also used to refer to an arbitrary duration (3.1.1.8) of 10 years, however decade is not used as such in this document.
ISO 8601 is the standard technical way to refer to time and has been for ages - I guessed everyone who worked with computers and time would know about it sorry thought it was obvious.
What's not so standard, in my opinion, is that people be required to restrict their use of language to the noted restrictive sense of a definition as used "in [that] document."
Yes, yes, all of the adjectival disclaimers were used to try to align the discussion directly to how words are used "in [that] document." While the document is highly important, there are many technical contexts in which it is completely appropriate to talk about decades without the slightest consideration of how the same term might be used therein.
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'.
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.
Was there a checkbox for: 'capture a significant part of the market for All Email and use it to build a graph that you can use for bayesian classification'?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
> 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.
If hinkley is not American he might not so much be biased against country music as wholly ignorant about it. That's one of the few cultural aspects of American culture you haven't managed to successfully export abroad (alongside American Football and the Ambrosia "salad").
As a foreigner I'm definitely familiar with the songs hinkley talks about, while I have no idea what a country Christmas song even sounds like.
Bof, Shania Twain habite chez nous. No need to import the music when we can just import the musicians.
I am having trouble coming up with chansons de noel country that aren't canadian. If they had been exported further, they'd sound something like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ni29Fdct21M
Disney finally gave up that fight. Barring a last minute lobbying effort, Steamboat Willie will be in the public domain on 1 January 2023. Of course the trademarks on Mickey Mouse will be valid in perpetuity.
That doesn't seem to be the cause. Competition from out-of-copyright traditional or nineteenth-century songs didn't prevent pop songwriters from having new Christmas hits until the post-Carey slump, and most of those commercial Christmas hits haven't gone out of copyright themselves yet.
So, first, this is someone else's rant that I'm trying to recite from memory, because it sorta stuck with me. And second, I think you are talking about covers, while I am talking about original works.
GenX has the song rotation handed down from the Boomers, and then they barely got anything new to hand down, if you exclude satires. I kinda have my fingers crossed for a holiday music Renaissance over the next twenty years. Probably started by a 54 year old Lin Manuel Miranda, trying to rekindle youthful moments.
> 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.
[1] not exactly christmas, but it's got family, decorated trees, vacation time, TV specials, and a guy in robes with a beard handing out presents. Porting should be trivial.
Go listen to it right now, but first imagine that you are tired of colonialism and exceptionalism from the West.
It is a condescending song, even without perhaps the worst line in charity history:
Well, tonight thank god it’s them, instead of you.
I had forgotten that line was in the song until I heard it again years later. What. The. Fuck.
Worse, this line is belted out by Bono, with an unusually tight closeup in his face. He is still trying to do work in Africa. Every time I think of this song, I wonder if he cringes remembering it.
Good bits by Boy George and George Micheal, but boy is the rest hard to listen to now.
The problem with charities like that is that they fill coffers of some corrupt middleman instead of the intended recipients, and even when this doesn't happen - they disrupt functional businesses in Africa by random price-dumping so you cannot plan years ahead because westerners can just flood your market for a year with free stuff out of the blue.
All the countries that went from developing to developed - did this not because of charity, but because of globalisation and business. The only charity that seemed to help was reduction of debt and cheap money for investment.
The song isn't a problem compared to that.
And BTW most of the condescending meaning is infered by western listeners. I'd like to hear the opinion of people from Africa, because often this kind of outrage on behalf of someone is a self-fulfilling prophesy:
"I think Africa is backward, poor and unhappy and there's nothing you can do - therefore when you sing about that it's rude, because you are pointing out the thing that can't be helped, like pointing a finger at a person on a wheelchair".
But if the song was about some poor part of USA you wouldn't have that problem, because you would assume it's temporary thing that will get fixed. And even if not - all these people can just move to other state, right?
Well maybe the problem is with your assumptions? People don't usually think of themselves as a lost cause.
As I have said elsewhere, it was written in 5 minutes on the back of napkin. The point was making money for charity, which it did. For that reason I doubt Geldof or Bono care.
And that line is condescending to the listener, surely. It's clearly not actually saying thank God it's not you.
If they had more time Midge Ure probably would've written something a bit less crap but they didn't.
However, they actually don't know it's Christmas (elsewhere) on Dec 25, because the Ethiopian Orthodox Church follows the Coptic calendar and celebrates Christmas on January 7th.
It was written in 5 minutes on the back of a napkin by midge ure (and sort of Bob Geldof), the lyrics don't really matter.
It was inspired by footage of and visits to (not sure on the chronology of Bob Geldof visiting) of thousands of dying children in tents - the idea was clearly the western idea of Christmas rather than the religious celebration.
Small anecdote: When the British song (aforementioned) was written, the musicians went out for fish and chips and got back to work, whereas the American equivalent (We are the world) was apparently catered with an enormous near-banquet for the stars.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
> ( ) 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.
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).
> 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.
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.
() Your solution shows you don't understand hemispheres or seasons.
I don't. Who does??
When was the last time a city dweller needed to worry about where the Earth or moon was?
Things we do need to know:
• How many days in a row do I have to work
• When do I get my next paycheck
• When is X product coming out
• How long do we have to put up with X politician
• When should I plan a vacation
• When will it get colder or warmer
Except for maybe the last 2 questions, all of the above can be answered by a calendar that has nothing to do with astronomy whatsoever.
Farmers and scientists can continue to use the astronomical calendar of their choice. Perhaps make one that is specifically designed for them, in maybe a S%.M% format, where S% is the percentage of Earth's solar orbital period we are currently at, and M% is the moon's orbit.
For the rest of us ordinary folk, we would be fine with a "Human Calendar" that is simply a cycle of working days <-> weekends, with some holidays thrown in every N weeks.
Say a 4/2 or 4/3 (work/rest) day week, 4 weeks in a Human Month, and an 8-10 day holiday every 3 such months.
A Human Year could be the equivalent of 9 or 10 months of the current calendar, the average duration a new person takes from conception to birth. :)
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.
Timezones were introduced as a generalization of country wide time references. And those were introduced because trains became so fast that calculating train tables with local time was very confusing.
Of course it would! You know the location of each station and your watch would automatically adjust depending on your location as you travel (using GPS or whatever). People with mechanical wristwatches might find it tedious :-)
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.)
> Leap years are fine. It’s leap seconds that annoy me.
The implementation of leap seconds is obviously worse than the implementation of leap years, though. (This might make more sense if leap seconds had come first...)
In a leap year, February 28 is followed by February 29, a day that doesn't ordinarily exist. It has the same weight as any other day. If you had a dentist appointment on the 29th, then on March 3rd people will all happily admit that the 29th happened and you might have had a dentist appointment on that day.
In a leap second, 23:59:59 is followed by 23:59:59 2, 23:59:59 Harder. Then, a few seconds later, everyone agrees to just pretend the whole thing never happened. The POSIX standard specifies that there are 86400 seconds in a day, and God forbid we deviate from the standard just because some days might -- but only in reality! -- have 86401 seconds.
I think I have seen it written as "23:59:60" during a leap second. In Unix time, you could code it as the previous second but +1 billion nanoseconds, or as the next second but -1 billion nanoseconds (if you use this option, the number of nanoseconds must be a signed type).
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.