1d ago

ISO 8601

https://xkcd.com/1179

232 comments

RFC-3336
I figured there were problems with existing calendars, so I created a new one to supersede all others. That reminds me, though: I need to declare the "official" format for the calendar, to avoid all this nonsense.
I see a window of opportunity, here. Normally, there's no chance for any calendar revision to succeed in adoption; however, I think if I use the right words with the President, I could get it pushed into adoption by fiat. Y'all had best start learning my new calendar to get ahead of everyone else.
Note for the humorously disadvantaged: the Saturnalia Calendar is a mechanism through which I'm playing with a new (to me) programming language. I am under no disillusion that anyone else will see the obvious advantages and clear superiority of the Saturnalia Calendar, much less adopt it. And no comments from the peanut gallery about the name! What, did you expect me to actually spend time thinking of a catchy name when a perfectly good, mostly unused one already existed?
- I'm partial to the IFC.
  
  I'm more into the FRC.
  
  If it isn't carved into a sheet of limestone using the Mayan character set, I don't want to read about it.
  
  That's where I started. I wanted a little project to try V on, and had come across the IFC, so I wrote a thing. While I was doing that, I got to thinking about the deficiencies and inherited complexities in IFC, and thought up Saturnalia.
  If you pop up to my profile in Sourcehut, you'll find a similar program - just a lot longer and more complex, for IFC.
  I don't know if they makes me a genius, but yes. Yes it does.
- Why does nobody mention the Discordian calendar? 5 days per week, 73 days per month, 5 months to a year (Chaos, Discord, Confusion, Bureaucracy and the Aftermath). On leap years, it adds one additional day (St. Tib's day) with a name but no numerical date.
  
  I'm a pope, but then, we're all popes.
  My problem with Discordianism is that it's all 5s, when 6 is clearly superior, and 12 trumps them all.
  Hail Eris.
- Hey, I quite like this! You're the first person I've found that's thought of fixing the calendar by adopting six-day weeks. I have a very similar personal version, with two main differences:
  there's a leap week instead of a leap day, that way weekdays are always the same without having to skip any and every year has a whole number of weeks (either 61 most years [roughly 7 out of every 8] or 60 on short years [roughly 1 out of every 8])
  December includes this leap week and it's either 30 or 36 days long, depending on the year. I put it at the end of December for the same logic that you put Saturnalia at the end of the year, to not mess with cardinal dates and so that the Xth day of the year is always the same date
  I also came to the same conclusion about workweeks. With two-day weekends, the Gregorian calendar has 71 % of workdays but the new calendar only has 67 %. On a thirty-day month this means 20 workdays instead of 21,5. Having the six-day week could also theoretically allow for a move to three- or two-day weeks in a post-scarcity future and doing away with weekends, as well has having either 50 % or 67 % of the workforce being active every day of the week, and not the wild levels of fluctuation seen today. Not having 100 % commuting some days of the week and a fraction of that on others would allow to scale things like transport infrastructure much more effectively
  
  How does that work, with the leap week? Doesn't the year drift out of alignment with the solar cycle?
  
  Only in eight year chunks. By year seven there is more unalignment than there was in year one, but it goes back to normal on year eight. Same thing as with leap days, just a slightly bigger scale.
  In fact, with current rules, the shift in the regular Gregorian calendar becomes quite big when considering 100-year and 400-year cycles. In theory, a leap week calendar with new and updated rules could have a very comparable if not a smaller average deviation from the true solar date, though I haven't ran the precise calculations
  
  Ok, so, first, let me say that while I'm enthusiastic about the concept, I understand it's entirely theoretical. We can't even get US civilians to adopt metric, FFS. Just a caveat, lest anyone wander by and overhear us.
  That said, I did spend some cycles trying to see it it would be possibly to line up a lunar and solar calendar, and it's not. And it isn't nearly as important as it used to be. It would still have been nice.
  So if you do run calculations, I'd like to see them.

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