Posical, the Positivist Calendar for Python

I&#x27;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.<p>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&#x27;t seem like a good reason to stick with the current system.<p>As long as we&#x27;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.<p>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&#x2F;month boundaries that I can&#x27;t see any real down sides.<p>I have no idea how to promote widespread adoption of a new calendar, but it is something I&#x27;ve thought about a lot.

<p><pre><code> Fri Sep 7535 20:02:59 EDT 1993 </code></pre> Think big. Let&#x27;s decrease the speed of Earth&#x27;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°.

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.<p>Basically, you&#x27;re consolidating the unevenness between years&#x2F;months&#x2F;days of the week to one special 1 or 2 day period. Ok, that&#x27;s alright, but it still requires a bit of extra help. You still have to think through calendars understanding &quot;Oh! I have to add a day for the epagomenal. Oh, it&#x27;s a leap year, so it will be 2 actually.&quot;<p>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&#x27;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.

I love the idea, but this has no chance of happening in my lifetime. I&#x27;m still holding out hope that the US will switch to the metric system however.

It&#x27;s sad to see that, in what we all consider to be an &quot;enlightened&quot; age for science and rationality, the calendar problem is considered a de-facto taboo, something that will never be changed. It&#x27;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.

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 &quot;week&quot; and the same day of the month. The rest 5 or 6 days are simply treated as &quot;special days&quot; (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&#x27;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&#x27;t just boring list of numbers, but something truly beautiful.<p>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.<p>[1] - <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_Calendar" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;French_Republican_Calendar</a>

There is also the slightly more modern International Fixed Calendar: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;International_Fixed_Calendar</a><p>It&#x27;s essentially the same as the positivist calendar except:<p>* gregorian names are kept<p>* the extra month is inserted before july and is called Sol<p>* the extra day on leap years is inserted before the 1st of Sol<p>* was in actual use by Kodak until 1989 (amazing!)

We need to be able to timestamp stuff still, right?<p>If the 28th of Bichat is <i>2014-13-28</i> and the 1st of Moses is <i>2015-01-01</i>, how do we timestamp those &quot;uncharted&quot; festival days? Would they just be <i>2014-13-29</i> (and <i>2014-13-30</i> on leap year) but just not have a day of week name?

The Terran Computational Calendar (<a href="http://terrancalendar.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;terrancalendar.com&#x2F;</a>) is an interesting read - &quot;13 identical 28-day months, followed by a &#x27;minimonth&#x27; that is generally composed of leap days and leap seconds.&quot;

I like Asimov&#x27;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.<p>I&#x27;d make one change to Asimov&#x27;s scheme. He gets rid of months. I&#x27;d keep them, with each season consisting of 3 months: 2 of 30 days and 1 of 31 days.<p>[1] <a href="http://calendars.wikia.com/wiki/World_Season_Calendar" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;calendars.wikia.com&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;World_Season_Calendar</a>

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.

The article fails to make the distinction between lunar and solar calender. It&#x27;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...<p>by the way, no need to invent a new calendar. the Hebrew calendar is both solar and lunar.

Another mathematically elegant calendar is the 7date:<p><a href="http://tylerneylon.com/a/7date_spec/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;tylerneylon.com&#x2F;a&#x2F;7date_spec&#x2F;</a>

<p><pre><code> &gt; Comte set year 1 of his new calendar as the first year of the &gt; truly modern age: 1789, the first year of the Great Crisis. </code></pre> For me 1789 is the first year of the Great Constitutional Ratification. I did a quick google search for &quot;great crisis&quot; and came up empty. Google seems to be convinced that when I type &quot;great crisis&quot; I am looking for &quot;Great Depression.&quot; What is the Great Crisis?

So is the extra day, or two days during a leap year, simply appended to the year, waited out and ignored?<p>It&#x27;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.<p>I guess most peoples&#x27; minds go immediately to, &quot;do I have to work it?&quot;. Mine did.

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&#x27;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!

&gt; Finally it is perennial, in that the weekdays of every year are always the same.<p>No, the epagomenal&#x2F;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&#x27;t fall somewhere in the middle).

&gt;There are 365 days in a year (366 on leap years)<p>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.<p>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,...