Calendar Thoughts

[mishalak]

Well we are now coming to the close of the year 2758. Well at least we are by the Roman style counting from the legendary founding of Rome. And I am thinking to myself about how the calendar could be different. What if there were thirteen months instead of twelve? Thirty days each with 5.25 left over to be stuck at the end of the year. If the beginning were pegged roughly to the winter solstice that would put day one of the five (or six in leap years) days of Calendis, or Intercalaris, on the 22nd of our Gregorian Calendar and the 1st of January coming on our 27th of December. This would also put the equinox on the 25th of March just as it was in the time of Julius Caesar. Just dandy for a bunch of enlightenment era neo-Romanists. It even mostly works out with the Gregorian calendar, as the 4th year leap day would come in the winter before the Gregorian leap day in February adding in the 753 year difference between CE and AUC.

Of course it is almost exactly the same as the French Revolutionary Calendar and so suffers from the same problem. One or two (later on) days off in ten is not as good from the point of view of the work as one or two days off in seven. This could be remedied in the 20th century by having alternating two days and one day off in every five (30% off rather than 28.6%) or just one day off in five when a one day of rest was standard (20% rather than 14.3%). Or keep the one day in five and just give a minimum of 18 days vacation to workers.

Alternatively some revolutionary type person might decide 10 months of 36 days makes a lot of sense. That way you could have an even number of 6 weeks of six days or four weeks of nine days. Either way with a weekend of two days or three day would work out to be about 4.8% more time off than just getting weekends off. But it is probably more useful to be able to divide the year evenly into quarters than to divide a month evenly into quarters. So the 10-month year probably is a no starter.

And all of these systems, including the Gregorian, have the problem of what to do about dates before its start. If the common era had been sensibly set up rather than organically evolved we would be somewhere past the year 10,000 now so that all of human history could fit into the date system and BCE would be only for things on an evolutionary scale. Or at the very least past 6000 as the earliest confirmed writing is about 5,500 years old.

Comments

[cindy-reddeer.livejournal.com]

I had to wait for the coffee to kick in before that made sense to me. :-D This is just a side note cause you reminded me of it, but years ago, at a restaurant I worked at, we had 3 shifts of two full time employees. We worked 3 morning shifts (6 a.m. - 2 p.m.), 3 afternoon shifts (2 p.m. - 10 p.m.) and then we had 3 days off. It worked great cause everyone had a weekend somewhere in the month and you had 24 hours off in the middle.