A More Rational Time

July 5, 2019

Abstract

Time, as anyone who works with itThis is especially true for software engineering, a field that your author is well-aquainted with. will tell you, is BIZARRE. Though days and weeks are finefine-ISH. , once you start talking about months and years, there are some really sharp edges. This article identifies the problems, potential solutions, and if there’s anything we can do about it.

The Problem

The Year

The fault is in our starsNot just a great book by John Green, but also paraphrasing Shakespere’s Julius Caeser. . Or rather, our planet and nearest heavenly body, the Moon. If we planned our calendars by just one of these, it would be easier. Our planet’s rotation around the sun, a year, does not divide equally into whole-numbered days, as measured by the rotation of our planet. This is what causes leap years, the formula for which is byzantine and unhelpful.A year in the Gregorian calendar is a leap year, if the year number is divisible by 4 UNLESS it is valso divisible by 400 .

The Month

A lunar month ⊕Our word for month comes from moon, and in many cultures the word is still exactly the same. In Chinese, for example, it’s 月 (yuè, in Mandarin), which looks like a crescent moon (and indeed in older forms WAS a crescent moon). (the time between sucessive full or new moons) is between 29 and 30 days. It varies because, though the moon is orbiting the earth at a continuous rate, the interplay with the sun (and therefore the phase of the moon) is more complex. It was a good enough measure for our ancestors, but hardly one hard-headed civilisations could build a calendar around.

An Example

Our curent calendar is unhelpful in ways that we all sort-of ignore. Consider the simple question: “what date is in a month’s time?”. Imagine today is the 10th of September. Is a month’s time the 10th of October? that’s 30 days later, but is another month’s time the 10th of November? that’s not another 30 days later, as October has 31 days. So the two intervals have different durations. If I pay you a fixed amount for a month’s work, you’re probably doing a day of work for free in October. I say probably because we now need to talk about Weeks.

Weeks

Ah, weeks. I love weeks. They have problemsNot least because their duration is a prime number of days! , but at least they are REGULAR. Up until the end of the year, when you find that 365 doesn’t divide by 7 equally. But for the OTHER 51 weeks of the year, you can ignore that.

It is in their interplay with months that they fall down. Not all weekdays are equal. 5 days of work, followed by the 2-day weekend is a nightmare for figuring out how many work days there are in a month.

If the 1st of January is a Monday, then the 31st is a Wednesday, and the 1st of February is a Thursday.

Who came up with this!? F–, see me after class.

Solutions

In short, there are none, because calendars are for interacting and scheduling with the world. HOWEVER, the revolution, dear reader, could start with YOU.

An example of where it can work in isolation is in the Kodak company. From 1928 to 1989, Kodak ran their business on a calendar with 13 months of 28 days. The astute reader will note that only accounts for 364 days. The 13-month calendar handles this in the same way as the gregorian calendar handles different workdays every month, in that it ignores it. Specifically, it is a long weekend, a sort of new year holiday that belongs to no month and no week. The same happens on a leap yearwhich is still needed, as the planet’s rotation around the sun isn’t exactly 365 days , and we all get a 4-day weekend.

This calendarAnd those materially like it. , is known as the International Fixed Calendar. Every month looks like a Febuary that starts on a Monday, like this:

Why not join me in trying out this interesting calendar for privately organising your life?