Calendres and Culture, part III
Dec. 22nd, 2005 01:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_fantastic_ms_foxSome years ago, while working on a prefeable future
project for a humanities class, I got a litttle fed up with the
Gregorian and worked out the basics for a new calendar; one that would
be... better. By this, I mean it solves some of the more serious
problems we have with ours. Plus it's like new or something.
The first and most salient problem is hat of confusing dates. What day and date will it be 145 days from now? A Tuesday? A Friday? May 14th? July 6th? If I see you three Tuesday from now or on January 5th, what day will that be? Why is our calendre a mix of base 7 and base 28/29/30/31 and our numbering system base 10?
The days of the week then: Oneday, Twoday, Threeday, Fourday, Fiveday, Sixday, Sevenday, Eightday, Nineday and Tenday.
Instead, let's have a calendre that goes from 1 to 365. The first day of the year will be 0 (a Zeroday in week zero). It will be followed by Day 1 (Oneday in week zero). Ths pattern will continue until Day 365 (Fiveday in week thirty-six) except in leap years when the last day will be 366. No months; only days, weeks and years.
It starts on a Zeroday so that all weeks save the last have the same number of days, if it started on Day 1, then either the first week would be a day short or days ending in '0' would be part of the preceding week.
To balance work schedules, and becouse it's fun, the last five or six days in the year will be some sort of holiday.
So then: If it's Day 132, Twoday of week thirteen, in one hundred forty-five days it will be Day 277, Sevenday of Week 27. If it's Day 325, in fifty days it will be Day 10, Zeroday of Week 1.
Holidays could either be fixed, floating or external. Fixed holidays occurs on the same day (and therefore the same weekday) every year. Floating days vary by year, moving back and forth depending on the last digit in the year. For example, Frogday could always fall in Week 20 but would float with the year. In years ending in '1,' it would fall on a Oneday (Day 201) , while in years ending in '7,' it could fall on a Sevenday (day 207).
Why floating holidays? Shiftwork. It seems be necessary in some capacity, at least for essential services. Spreading holidays around the week would allow people who have to work given days to experience the holiday in different ways on different years.
External holidays are tied to other things, typically astronomical events such as Yule, Easter, Eid al-Fitr, Chinese Lunar New Year or Yom Kippur, or variable holidays on someone else's calendar such as Thanksgiving or Labour day.
There could be state holdays in multiples of ten, evenly spreading them throughout the Weekdays over the course of the year. Or not.
More to come. Suggestions and comments actively solicited. I'm thinking of working in Luna somehow.
The first and most salient problem is hat of confusing dates. What day and date will it be 145 days from now? A Tuesday? A Friday? May 14th? July 6th? If I see you three Tuesday from now or on January 5th, what day will that be? Why is our calendre a mix of base 7 and base 28/29/30/31 and our numbering system base 10?
The days of the week then: Oneday, Twoday, Threeday, Fourday, Fiveday, Sixday, Sevenday, Eightday, Nineday and Tenday.
Instead, let's have a calendre that goes from 1 to 365. The first day of the year will be 0 (a Zeroday in week zero). It will be followed by Day 1 (Oneday in week zero). Ths pattern will continue until Day 365 (Fiveday in week thirty-six) except in leap years when the last day will be 366. No months; only days, weeks and years.
It starts on a Zeroday so that all weeks save the last have the same number of days, if it started on Day 1, then either the first week would be a day short or days ending in '0' would be part of the preceding week.
To balance work schedules, and becouse it's fun, the last five or six days in the year will be some sort of holiday.
So then: If it's Day 132, Twoday of week thirteen, in one hundred forty-five days it will be Day 277, Sevenday of Week 27. If it's Day 325, in fifty days it will be Day 10, Zeroday of Week 1.
Holidays could either be fixed, floating or external. Fixed holidays occurs on the same day (and therefore the same weekday) every year. Floating days vary by year, moving back and forth depending on the last digit in the year. For example, Frogday could always fall in Week 20 but would float with the year. In years ending in '1,' it would fall on a Oneday (Day 201) , while in years ending in '7,' it could fall on a Sevenday (day 207).
Why floating holidays? Shiftwork. It seems be necessary in some capacity, at least for essential services. Spreading holidays around the week would allow people who have to work given days to experience the holiday in different ways on different years.
External holidays are tied to other things, typically astronomical events such as Yule, Easter, Eid al-Fitr, Chinese Lunar New Year or Yom Kippur, or variable holidays on someone else's calendar such as Thanksgiving or Labour day.
There could be state holdays in multiples of ten, evenly spreading them throughout the Weekdays over the course of the year. Or not.
More to come. Suggestions and comments actively solicited. I'm thinking of working in Luna somehow.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 04:01 am (UTC)But, my birthday is in September, and I`m a Libra... I`m emotionally attached to the old system, and afraid of change. What would a hall callendar look like?
Your day names are kind of... practical (read: ugly). Why don`t we name them after... uh... body parts or flowers or something. Geranium of the 24th week. Elbow of the 2nd.
z.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-23 10:25 am (UTC)A hall calendar could be 37 pages of ten days per page or it could fit three weeks to a page with a special page for festival week or it could do 0-4 on one row and 5-9 on the next and it could do this twice or thrice or just once per page.
As for your birthday, maybe you could be bribed?