With the BILLIONS it cost to get Y2K compliant, how much would this calender reform cost??
How come those rip-off 
programmers didn’t get together and work in this calendar change with the Y2K stuff, so that they could get twice the price?
Why do we need months anyhow? Companies can use whatever pay period they want anyhow. And why a 7-day week? What goes around what in 7 days? How about 5 days of vacation between every 5 days of work? Birthdays could be worked out on a logarithmic scale, because it takes more time to make equivalent progress as you get older. Well, as we get into space travel, maybe we’ll have quite a variety of calendars. Just stick more numbers on your digital watch.
Ray (give us this day our monthly bread)
Well, I recently created a 10 month calendar, with one “month” of 5 days (six for a leap year), and 9 months with four weeks of ten days each. I think the 7 day week may be, because that’s the time “god created the world”.
Anyway, I think the Islamic Lunar calendar uses 6 months of 29 days, and 6 of 30 days with an extra month of 11 days, which is 13 months (IIRC).
How about putting the 13th month at the end and calling it “Omega”? Think about it. Omega is the last letter of the Greek alphabet (and Omega would be the last month), plus the names’s classy, and has the same number of syllables as September, October, November, and December.
“I had a feeling that in Hell there would be mushrooms.” -The Secret of Monkey Island
Sorry – don’t mean to hijack the thread or anything – but funneefarmer just hit on one of my pet peeves.
As Cecil pointed out many years ago
http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_170b.html
seasons do not begin on solstices or equinoxes (equinii?), as these do not coincide with actual weather/climate patterns. Rather, they begin on the 1st. As in December 1st. So a happy First Day of Winter to all. We now return you to your regularly scheduled thread.
Doobious is mistaken. Both the Islamic and Jewish calendars have strictly 29-30 day months. Both follow the moon, with the new month starting on the New Moon (i.e., when the moon is not visible because it is between the sun and earth) and would not tolerate an 11-day month.
However, due to various technical considerations, the Jewish and Islamic months often start on consecutive days, rather than on the same day.
A more significant point for this discussion is that the Jewish calendar inserts a 13th lunar month every few years (7 times in a 19 year cycle, if you really want to know), whereas the Islamic calendar never adds a 13th month. Therefore the Islamic year is consistently shorter than the solar year by 11 days or so, and so all the months and holidays keep on slipping backwards through the seasons.
Asimov once proposed a four-“month” calendar roughly corresponding to the seasons. He also had “Year Day” (falling between the fourth and first months) and “Leap Day” (falling between the second and third months every four years) which were considered outside the normal days-of-the-week rotation, so that you bought one calendar and used it for the rest of your life… the only thing you needed to remember was whether it was a leap year or not.
from a practical standpoint, it would be very difficult to get everyone to change their ways. The gregorian adjustment (that made our calendar the way it is) was not universally accepted (England thought it was a Popish plot) causing everyone who did business with England /colonies to memorize 2 calendars. I think the US only accepted the Gregorian calendar in the 1770’s, England slightly before then.
There’s an interesting book called “Calendar: Humanity’s Epic Struggle to Determine a True & Accurate Year” by Duncan, David E. I think you’d all enjoy it.
Another thing that will make the 13 month calendar as popular as the metric system (it’s the tool of the devil I tells ya!) is that 13 is a prime number. No way to conveniently divide the year into fiscal periods other than months.
Bad mojo doesn’t bother me because I was born on the 13th.
It’s your fault that I have no one to blame but myself.
Ask a mathematician what is 2+2 and he says 4. Ask an accountant and he says ‘what doyou want it to be?’ Thats a calendar we need.
How many days should you work this year? 'What do you want it to be?"
Bad mojo doesn’t bother me because I was born on the 13th.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Same here. March though for me.
Gee, I was born on the 13th, too, (of July) and that’s also why I laugh at 13 an unlucky
though I’m starting to get an idea of why others look at it the opposite way.
Hey, my dad’s birthday is October 28th…what are you trying to say? (inaudible mumbling)
Turning serious for a moment (yeah, REAL serious)…
What is it with these ‘months?’ They’re arbitrary anyway, so if you wanna be creative, why get yer knickers in a knot trying to figure out a new way to describe 'em?
One year = 52 weeks + one extra HoliDay + a leap year corrector. Period.
If you prefer, divide it into 26 fortnights (the Chinese lunar calendar sounds very similar to the Jewish calendar, but they also had a ‘fortnightly’ planting and harvest mnemonic, so you could even make reference to ‘ancient Oriental knowledge…’).
There was a thread related to this before, wherein some maroon claimed the Great Sidereal Calendar answered all problems. (Moon? Sun? Too local-yokel, galaxy-wise. Time Zones, jet lag? No problem!) Don’t get him started…
None of the usual proposed calendar reforms are going to go through, because they all break the week. Neither Jews nor Christians, nor Moslems will accept that.
The 13-month calendar has the additional problem that it won’t divide into quarters.
John W. Kennedy
“Compact is becoming contract; man only earns and pays.”
– Charles Williams
Why not just denote the year with days. Instead of needing 4 digits to represent the date, you would only need 3. 01-01 would be 001. Do we actually need weeks or months ?
To Rmariamp: The British Empire adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1750, by act of Pariament, imposing it everywhere in the world under the authority of the Crown, including the American colonies. George Washington was actually born on February 11, 1731 (“Old Style”), and was about 19 years old when the change was made. (He continued to observe his own birthday until near the end of his life, in the 1790s, when he was President.)
In Europe, only the Swedes (1753), the Russians (1919), and the Greeks (about 1920) continued to use the Julian calendar after the English made the changeover.
I too was disturbed about Friday the 13th coming every month, 13 times a year; I wanted to call the 13th month “Onzember,” from the French *onze,*meaning “eleven.” On “I’ve Got a Secret,” in the 1960s, a calendar authority appeared, however, proposing a 13-month calendar in which the months begin on Monday– which would eliminate Friday the 13th forever!
A correction: George Washington continued to observe his birthday on February 11 until near the end of his life.
I agree with Funneefarmer, but the debate could go the opposite way, why do we have to stop with month/day/year? Why not go a step further and add in another somewhat meaningless measure of time?
“I may be crazy, but at least I’m not as crazy as you.”-- Calvin and Hobbes
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I hate to break this to the two posters who said that a 13 month calendar won’t break into quarters… it will. Perfectly evenly, in fact.
You don’t think so because you want your quarters to begin on the first of a month – they don’t have to. The U.S. figures fiscal quarters based on the 15th of months.
Since a month has four weeks, no matter how many months a year has, the number of weeks can be divided into quarters (13 weeks in a quarter, as it is now). And that’s more important to accountants than the actual start date of each quarter.
In fact, a year that has exactly 52 weeks would make all accountants and payroll departments of the world stand on their heads and spit nickles. It is currently a nightmare for accountants to deal with monthly or quarterly salaries and budgets when the months and quarters have a different number of days in them.
And the weekly paycheck is also a nightmare if it’s paid out on the same day each week (let’s say ‘Friday’), because some years have 53 Fridays, but only 52 weeks.
The best way not to screw around with days of the week is to wait until you need to adjust the calendar by a month (like the Jewish calendar). That would keep the number of weeks in a year divisible by four (to create quarters); it would keep the days of the week in proper sequence; and it would make every month and year start on the same day of the week.
Sure, this will screw up yearly budgets in the leap year and anniversaries that occur in the leap month would disappear the next year (like birthdays on Feb 29), but those problems are less troublesome than the current work-arounds we’re doing.
Peace.
There’s a creepy notion – letting accountants determine our calendar.