
Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python - crux
http://blog.zdsmith.com/posical-the-positivist-calendar-for-python.html
======
chinpokomon
I've been a proponent of this reform for a while. Strangely on my way into
work this morning I was trying to figure out why a week is 7 days and not some
other division. I thought maybe it was religious, but I now think it has more
to do with lunar cycles being close to 28 days and that predating any
religious foundation.

12 months has the benefit of dividing the seasons into 3 month quarters.
However having an uneven number of days per month and with the solstices and
equinoxes falling somewhat haphazardly on the calendar, this doesn't seem like
a good reason to stick with the current system.

As long as we're redesigning the calendar system, I think the solstice and the
equinox should fall in the middle of a season with the Winter Solstice
effectively marking the start of the calendar year as a holiday. The leap day
could be the day that proceeds that, effectively being used as a day to mark
the end of the year. Seasons would then define periods of similar daylight.

The only reasons not to adopt this sort of calendar are ceremonial. Having a
13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations to having
consistent day of week/month boundaries that I can't see any real down sides.

I have no idea how to promote widespread adoption of a new calendar, but it is
something I've thought about a lot.

~~~
jack-r-abbit
> _Having a 13 month calendar simplifies so much from financial calculations
> to having consistent day of week /month boundaries that I can't see any real
> down sides._

It seems like that would complicate the business practice of dividing your
fiscal year into quarters. I guess each quarter would be 3 months + 1 week but
then you don't have quarters starting/ending evenly with months.

~~~
jberryman
Solution: everyone takes the extra month off.

------
kps

        Fri Sep 7535 20:02:59 EDT 1993
    

Think big. Let's decrease the speed of Earth's rotation so that a day is 20
(old) minutes 58 (old) seconds longer. Then we get to sleep in a little, and 1
day = 1°.

------
truantbuick
I understand this is a bit of fun trying to rethink a very old thing, but the
benefits are really bare even when looking past all the damage of a potential
transition.

Basically, you're consolidating the unevenness between years/months/days of
the week to one special 1 or 2 day period. Ok, that's alright, but it still
requires a bit of extra help. You still have to think through calendars
understanding "Oh! I have to add a day for the epagomenal. Oh, it's a leap
year, so it will be 2 actually."

That might be preferable to having to think through 31 or 30 or 28 or 29 days,
but not by that much. Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time
every year a good thing? I suppose it's easier to determine what day
Thanksgiving is every year, but otherwise, it seems like a minute benefit. On
the other hand, I wonder if there are some benefits of that not happening. The
only one that comes to mind is it would suck for your Birthday to be on a
Monday every year, but I suspect there might be other reasons where enforcing
a day to occur on the same place in the week could be harmful.

~~~
resu_nimda
_Is aligning months and days of the week to the same time every year a good
thing?_

There are benefits for things like accounting, logistics/scheduling,
standardizing periods for better comparative analysis, etc.

Such systems are already in common use (though the extra day of the year does
create a wrinkle):
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-5_calendar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4-4-5_calendar)

------
kbmax
I love the idea, but this has no chance of happening in my lifetime. I'm still
holding out hope that the US will switch to the metric system however.

~~~
toyg
Believe it or not, world elites were once on the brink of adopting the
International Fixed Calendar, which was basically the same as Comte's.

Then judaist religious backlash kicked in, and here we are.

~~~
cgore
Our current calendar has absolutely nothing to do with Judaism, it is the
calendar of Rome with some very minor tweaks.

[http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm](http://www.jewfaq.org/calendar.htm)

~~~
toyg
"The origin of the seven-day week is the religious significance that was
placed on the seventh day by ancient cultures, including the Babylonian and
Jewish civilisations."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-
day_week](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven-day_week)

"Some Jewish, Christian, and Islamic groups have been historically opposed to
the calendar because their tradition of worshiping every seventh day would
result in either the day of the week of worship changing from year to year or
eight days passing when Year Day or Leap Day occurs.[11] Others have contended
that Year Day and Leap Day could be counted as additional days of worship."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar)

"Thus, once or twice a year there would be eight days rather than seven
between consecutive Saturdays. Thus the Jewish Sabbath, which must occur every
seventh day, would be on a different weekday each year. The same applies to
the Christian Sabbath. Hertz realised that this would cause problems for Jews
and Christians alike in observing their Sabbaths, and mobilised worldwide
religious opposition to defeat the proposal."

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Hertz#Calendar_reform)

~~~
cgore
The seven-day week, yes, the rest of it is Roman in origin: the solar nature,
the months, their names, their order, etc.

One of the weird ones is our (English) weekday names: Sunday, Monday, etc.
Those are apparently from German, but after their contact with the Romans, and
after the Romans adopted the 7-day week. Which means it is after the
Christianization of Rome, but before the Christianization of the Germanic
tribes. They took the Roman week and put their gods' names in place instead.

~~~
toyg
Even more peculiarly, anglo-saxon names actually do not reflect full
Christianization of Rome itself: Saturday is still the day of Saturn rather
than the Shabbath, and Sunday is still the day of "Triumphant Sun" rather than
the "Dominicus" (belonging to the Lord). Which means they originated before
the end of IV century AD, when Rome officially introduced these two Christian
references in its weekday names (all others were maintained intact).

It has to be said also that Roman calendars were actually "pillaged" from
Greek culture and then tweaked until right - a pragmatic approach they
followed in so many different cultural and scientific areas when interacting
with foreign civilisations. Unfortunately, they didn't go as far as trying to
align the 7-day week (of Middle-Eastern origin) with their Greek-ish months,
and their legacy ended up being managed by a Church that valued immutability
over everything else. So here we are, 1600 years later, still celebrating the
months of Julius (Caesar) and Augustus when the weather is the best around the
Mediterranean Sea, the month of war-god Mars in the best period to start
military campaigns in the same region, and with four months named by numerical
positions they've long since changed... and still completely mismatched with
7-day weeks.

------
toyg
It's sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an "enlightened" age for
science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo,
something that will never be changed. It's such an obvious legacy hack, it
should be refactored with a modern and proper design, but the API is so
popular that breaking it would generate unbearable amounts of stop-energy. I
wish we could have a wrapper or something.

~~~
maxerickson
Years and days are both reasonable periods to track and while some other
system of tracking which day we are on is easy to imagine, the current system
doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with (it's 2 numbers...).

~~~
munificent
> the current system doesn't deserve to be called hard to deal with

OK, then tell me what day of the week May 4th, 2054 will be.

~~~
mbreese
How often do you really need to know what day of the week a specific date in
40 years will fall on?

The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is _good
enough_.

Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think there
would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be
unclassified as days. That is another hack that would probably end up doing
more harm than good. How would you model that extra day (or two)? You wouldn't
have (13) 4 week months. You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or
two-day month. Hardly an elegant system worth changing for.

~~~
toyg
_> The current system will stand, because however irrational it is, it is good
enough._

Exactly like a broken but popular API. It's still fundamentally bad.

 _> Not to mention, people don't like things that aren't classified. I think
there would be a lot of people that didn't like having day 365 (and 366) be
unclassified as days._

I think we'd all be relieved to have a separate classification space for leap
days (29 February is an abomination) and other adjustments we might have to
add here and there. We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and
religious celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or
something. It's a very subjective judgement anyway, one way or the other.

 _> You'd have (13) 4 week months, plus (1) one-day or two-day month. Hardly
an elegant system worth changing for._

Still much more elegant that the current mess.

~~~
notdonspaulding
_We could dedicate these days to generic "spiritual and religious
celebrations" to make traditionalists happy, call it "Holy Month" or
something._

I can't tell if that's a serious suggestion, but if it is, I don't think
that'd be very helpful. I'm trying to imagine which religion is standing
around waiting for some benevolent calendar dictator to free up a couple new
days in the year so they can implement a new tradition. :-D

Religions will stick their holy days on the calendar quite apart from your
classification of them as holy. Provided you're not removing any capability
for them to continue celebrating their current holidays, I don't think they're
looking for any special consideration on the calendar front.

~~~
toyg
I'm Italian: every given day most of my fellow nationals are supposed to
celebrate this or that saint... the Catholic Church is always more than happy
to extend its cultural hegemony by attaching itself to celebrations of any
sort, I'd be surprised if other confessions were very different on that front
- there's always a scripture or an event that you can use to celebrate a
specific day of the year. Even Christmas has not always fallen on the 25th day
of the 12th month of the year, after all.

Any calendar reform unfortunately has to deal with this backward-compatibility
nightmare with religious tradition, which doomed most previous attempts; hence
my parent comment.

------
krick
I like French Republican Calendar [1] much more for some reason. Months are 30
day each, no 7-day weeks, 10-day decades instead, so any day of the year is
the same day of the "week" and the same day of the month. The rest 5 or 6 days
are simply treated as "special days" (sansculottides), so it would be pretty
easy to deal with them in any accounting software as well. The whole calendar
has very nice spirit to it, each month is named in due to climatic effects of
this one (at least it happens so in my location, and weather happens to change
exactly according to this calendar, not Gregorian one), and each day of the
year also has it's own name (something natural, like tree or fruit, no human
names or something, which I find really cool). I really really like that
symbolism. Such a calendar isn't just boring list of numbers, but something
truly beautiful.

So I was using it for some time for reminders and such, but using calendar
nobody else uses is pretty pointless, so I dropped it. Such a pity.

[1] -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar)

------
lsh
There is also the slightly more modern International Fixed Calendar:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar)

It's essentially the same as the positivist calendar except:

* gregorian names are kept

* the extra month is inserted before july and is called Sol

* the extra day on leap years is inserted before the 1st of Sol

* was in actual use by Kodak until 1989 (amazing!)

------
jack-r-abbit
We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right?

If the 28th of Bichat is _2014-13-28_ and the 1st of Moses is _2015-01-01_ ,
how do we timestamp those "uncharted" festival days? Would they just be
_2014-13-29_ (and _2014-13-30_ on leap year) but just not have a day of week
name?

~~~
crux
Good question. In the library, intercalary days are just their own month. So
it would just be 2015-14-1.

~~~
userbinator
In other words, there's actually a 14 month that either contains 1 or 2 days,
both of which have no weekday associated with them?

I don't see how it would make things much easier, especially for timestamps in
various date formats and date-input fields.

~~~
toyg
Why? It's still three numeric digits. If anything, it would be much easier to
calculate date validity. In Python:

    
    
      acceptable_days = range(1,29)
      if pickedMonth == 14:
         acceptable_days = [1];
         if isLeapYear(year): acceptable_days = [1,2]
         # any future hack will just go here 
      
      if pickedDay not in acceptable_days or pickedMonth > 14: 
         raise InvalidDateException()  
    
    

Compare this with anything we use today. Which code is simpler?

------
donpdonp
The Terran Computational Calendar
([http://terrancalendar.com/](http://terrancalendar.com/)) is an interesting
read - "13 identical 28-day months, followed by a 'minimonth' that is
generally composed of leap days and leap seconds."

------
tzs
I like Asimov's calendar [1]. The year is divided into 4 seasons of 91 days
(13 weeks per season), with one extra day a year that is not part of any
season and is not part of the weekday count. For leap years, another extra day
occurs between the second and third seasons.

I'd make one change to Asimov's scheme. He gets rid of months. I'd keep them,
with each season consisting of 3 months: 2 of 30 days and 1 of 31 days.

[1]
[http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/World_Season_Calendar](http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/World_Season_Calendar)

------
0x0
Inserting a day between the regular weekdays once a year sounds pretty
dangerous to me. I bet there are a lot of things that need to happen weekly
that would quickly go out of whack if they are delayed a day.

~~~
ecma
I think we would need to be more precise about our measures of lifetime for
some things (recent e.g. would be MH370's black box battery life rating) but
the idea of measure lifetime with days since an event is already used quite
widely (I rarely heard the phrase 2 weeks since that event) and could be
adjusted to without much difficulty.

Financial and similar institutions would likely treat the festival day(s) as
they do any long weekend at the moment. Pay cycles could be adjusted with end
of year 'bonus' to cover out of cycle days.

I'm sure there's something but we've dealt with quirky calendars for a long
time so really we're just attacking the same problem that we currently have
with 30 day fixed cycles.

~~~
dsr_
Once we get off the surface of the earth, seconds are more useful than days.
Or, more likely, Ksecs and Msecs. A kilo-second is 16.67 minutes, 100 Ksecs is
27.7 hours, an Msec is 11.57 days. 30 Msecs is 95% of an Earth year. These are
all useful measures for humans to work in.

------
ishener
The article fails to make the distinction between lunar and solar calender.
It's just about dividing the solar year to equal months, but we also want to
make the month align with the moon, which circles earth for 29.5 days on
average. The big problem with the Gregorian calendar, in my opinion is that it
so clearly missed the lunar month. it just feels intolerably close, but not
quite there...

by the way, no need to invent a new calendar. the Hebrew calendar is both
solar and lunar.

~~~
saraid216
It's actually unclear to me why we particularly care about how long it takes
to orbit the Sun. Axial rotation, sure, the length of a day is important. But
outside of that... why do we need particular units like weeks, months, and
years at all?

~~~
toyg
Religion and seasonality. 7-days as a unit of measurement is written into
unamendable documents hold as holy by all Judaist monotheisms (Jewish,
Christian and Islamic). The ciclical experience of seasonal-weather and
daylight-lenght changes are also too powerful to deny.

~~~
notdonspaulding
Unrelated, why do you call Islam "judaist"?

AFAIK, Islam traces its roots back to Abraham, who was Judah's great-
grandfather. So it would seem more appropriate to call it an Abrahamic
religion, no?

~~~
toyg
I'm not a religious scholar by any means (and certainly less versed in Islamic
tradition than any Muslim), so you're probably correct.

------
tylerneylon
Another mathematically elegant calendar is the 7date:

[http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/](http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/)

~~~
lsh
I really like the 7date notation with the base-7 notation counting the weeks
down, but the 7month with the remaining 22/23 days of the year are still a
kludge. With a 13 month calendar those remaining 1/2 days are neatly packaged
and disposed of as "festival days". Harder to deal with 22/23 tailing days.

------
dfc

      > Comte set year 1 of his new calendar as the first year of the
      > truly modern age: 1789, the first year of the Great Crisis.
    

For me 1789 is the first year of the Great Constitutional Ratification. I did
a quick google search for "great crisis" and came up empty. Google seems to be
convinced that when I type "great crisis" I am looking for "Great Depression."
What is the Great Crisis?

~~~
ecma
It might be referring to la Grande Peur[0] (the Great Fear) which was the
panic reaponse to the initial rebellions at the beginning of the French
Revolution.

[0] en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Fear

------
midhir
So is the extra day, or two days during a leap year, simply appended to the
year, waited out and ignored?

It's an interesting concept; similar to the Time-slip in Red Mars. Wanting a
Martian day to equal that of an Earth day, colonists define the time between
00:00 and 00:01 as being 39 minutes 40 seconds in length.

I guess most peoples' minds go immediately to, "do I have to work it?". Mine
did.

~~~
lsh
In case anyone hasn't read it, it's my LOTR:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mars](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Mars)

------
tunesmith
With all this talk about universal basic incomes and automation taking away
jobs, etc etc, there really might be something to the idea of switching to 73
5-day weeks. I wouldn't be in support of taking away Saturday and Sunday ;)
but a 3-day workweek of W-F followed by a weekend of Saturday and Sunday could
have real possibilities!

~~~
ecma
Automation doesn't preclude the need for high levels of human productivity,
especially in a knowledge industry based society. Having a 60% productivity
(admittedly soft and cultural) limit for the week would be a more significant
change than if we were to do 4-1 weeks instead of 5-2 (71.4%). 4-1 seems like
it could be a perfectly reasonable way of doing things for a lot of hackers,
maybe not for everyone though.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Having a 60% productivity (admittedly soft and cultural) limit for the week

The culture will quickly adjust productivity levels back up. This isn't
something you need to bother worrying about.

The Chinese government mandates an excessive holiday total; during those
holidays, businesses and schools close. But the cultural solution is that
schools open and businesses work for however many nearby weekend days the
official holiday legally consists of (this irritates expats no end; I'm not
quite sure why). So if M-W are a holiday one week, expect to work for the
preceding weekend and the saturday after.

------
joeclark77
> Finally it is perennial, in that the weekdays of every year are always the
> same.

No, the epagomenal/intercalary days would change this from year to year. The
weekdays would be the same from month to month within a given year, of course
(assuming the extra day doesn't fall somewhere in the middle).

~~~
yaddayadda
According to the great and wise Wikipidia,

>This extra day added to the last month was outside of the days of the week
cycle, and so the first of a month was always a Monday. On leap years, an
additional festival day (also outside the week cycle), to celebrate holy
women, would join the memorial day of the dead.

Which to me reads that the extra day/s are not one of the 7 weekdays. Hence
these days would fall between a Sunday and Monday, but would not be refereed
to by any of our current weekday names. So, each year there would be the forth
Sunday of Bichat, followed by the The Festival of All the Dead epagomenal day,
followed by the first Monday of Moses.

edited out some typos

~~~
moron4hire
You know, I just really like the idea of leap days not being called anything.
It sort of reminds me of the Egyptian mythology. Something-something-
something, why doesn't the year have 360 days like degrees in a circle, blah
blah blah, so here's some fake days to get around Ra and have your babies by
another man. It's like metaphysical hackers.

------
cyborgx7
>There are 365 days in a year (366 on leap years)

Wrong already. I do not understand this obsession to make a year exactly the
length of a given number of days. They are both completely unrelated, exept in
that they are units of time.

A year should be exactly one time the period of the earth moving around the
sun. We just need to agree on a starting point. The day on which that starting
point falls would be the last day of that year or the first day of the next
(or both). And while I understand the need to group days (not sparate the
year) into weeks the concept of month seems completely unnecessary. Just agree
on a number of weeks on which pay is given out, rent payed,...

~~~
thaumasiotes
> Just agree on a number of weeks on which pay is given out, rent payed,...

You can do this now. In particular, pay is quite frequently handled by the
week.

