“Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
Thirty-one the others date,
Except in February, twenty-eight;
But in leap year we assign
February, twenty-nine.”This nonsense must now cease. Get today’s date from here.
I dream of replacing our clunky, outdated calendar with this:
Simple, isn’t it? Every month has exactly four weeks. End of year has 1-2 leap days. New year is near the winter solstice (23 Dec 00:00 in the old calendar).
Why?
13 months of four weeks each is actually not a new idea. It’s the obvious way to divide the year. The problem has been getting the reforms adopted.
Want to know what weekday Christmas is on? It’s a Friday. Always.
Want to know how many days there are to Christmas? If, for example, it’s 7 August? Well, there are four months (12-8) and 18 days (25-7) to Christmas. That’s 130 days (4*28+18). Not easy to count, but it’s possible.
As for the first day of each month being 0, this is a debate as old as counting. Midnight is at 0, not 1 o’clock. Our years start from 1, which led to some juicy arguments at the end of the millennium. 0 is easier for counting, and then we can keep months 1-12 for January-December.
Why not?
If we were creating a calendar from scratch, there’s not a chance we’d end up with the mess we have now. Dump varying numbers of days in each month? Ridiculous. But.. we’re kind of used to it now, and changing something ingrained is tricky. Can we do it?
I’m tempted to answer: of course we can. Our current calendar is a reform of the old Julian calendar (which in turn reformed the old Roman calendar). But on the other hand.. it took centuries to get it adopted. Nor is something so obvious as dumping summer time a walkover.
Other than inertia, there’s no good reason for our current calendar. It’s something we got saddled with by history. When we finally reform it, it won’t take long to get used to the new calendar.. and wonder why we tolerated the old one so long.
Practical questions
How do we convert dates?
Just let a computer do it. But for anyone interested, it’s actually quite straightforward. Count the number of days from 23 Dec 00:00. Divide by 28 to get the month. The remnant is the day.
# R users, it's this easy to do
days = as.Date("2023-08-09") - as.Date("2022-12-23")
days = as.numeric(days)
month = floor(days / 28)
day = days %% 28
# Python users, just as easy from datetime import datetime, timedelta days = (datetime(2023, 8, 9) - datetime(2022, 12, 23)).days month = days // 28 day = days % 28
When is my birthday?
I was born 29 May. That date doesn’t exist in the New Calendar. There’s nothing for it, I’ll just have to celebrate on the equivalent date in the New Calendar, 17 May.
If you were born between 1-27 of a month, lucky you. Just choose which date (the old or the new) to use. Or celebrate both 🙂
How do we pronounce the new dates?
I’d say: seventeen May or May seventeen. Not seventeenth. After all, we say “one o’clock” rather than “first hour”.
I’m not sure what to call the start of each month. Zero May? Start May?
But here, I’m prepared to let things just form by themselves. If everyone goes around saying “First of May” for May 0, so be it.
“Niviary” for month 0, by the way, is because that’s the snowy month.