13 Months

The Picard Maneuver@startrek.website to Memes@sopuli.xyz – 1339 points –
213

13 Fridays the 13th

Jason would unionize if he had that many hours of work to do

If the first was Monday as he describes, every 12th would be a Friday. There would be exactly zero Fridays on the 13th of any month.

Every 13th would only be Friday if the first was on Sunday.

Oh shit you're right.

Then I think Jason should look into universal basic income cuz he's about to be out of his job.

Kodak used to operate on this 13 month calendar. When I asked someone who used to work there, she was shocked that I knew about it and said that it was the best thing about working there. The original plan that this calendar is based on called for a liminal day between years for New Year's Day with 2 days for leap years

Big Calendar would never allow for this. Imagine only ever having to buy one calendar!

You don't need to buy more than (I think) 4 right now...

There are 14, they can start on any day of the week and they may or may not have a leap year.

I work for a company which used to have 13 financial periods. It was great. Then they switched to 12 and we now have a couple of 5 week periods thrown in to balance the year out. I don't know why they decided that but it's not as good now.

I'm surprised they successfully attempted that and that it resulted to be taken positively. It seems as every out-of-the-norm scheduling idea is so frowned upon that even in small companies you can steer them to anything but the same ole.

I've used iso-weeks for this purpose. I don't really care for dates if I don't absolutely have to. It's nice to refer to "week 44 five years ago" in my journals. Truth be told, no one else around me uses the weeks and the only mention to it I've heard was not positive.

I'm responsible for our databases and work with our BI guy a lot. Changing from 13 to 12 periods was a right pain. We had snapshots, budgets and loads of forecasting data, all of which needed to be updated to reflect the new calendar. It wasn't as easy as dumping a new calendar in, well it perhaps could have been if we were given ample time to plan it.

In regards to week, period, year, quarter, etc that's all easy for the user to switch to their preferred view in the BI system. The ERP system will use the financial calendar but reporting is done against whatever the user sees fit.

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13 period financial calendars don't break down into quarters that easily. One reporting quarter will always have an extra period.

5-4-4 creates even quarters except it requires either one extra day every year or one extra week every five to six years. It's most beneficial for companies that either experience high seasonality or high consistency, such as retail and manufacturing.

Most other companies just use calendar month since it's simple, easy to determine, and allows for rather consistent year-over-year comparison.

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There is a choice between having an extra day in the holiday season and counting up the extra days plus leap days, and inserting an extra week every several years

Adding the extra day annoys people who value weeks continuing as they have since ancient times

Using a leap week rule makes the calendar track the seasons a little worse. Solstices and equinoxes will move by about a week over several years

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Every birthday you have, for your entire life, being on a Wednesday.

Sounds great.

Mine would be on saturdays, but I haven't celebrated in years, so...

Happy belated all the birthdays, have a cumulative party at some point!

How is no one in here talking about the International Fixed Calendar? It was exactly this, and Kodak used it for 60 years. It does work. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar

Well if the 1st is on Sunday then every month would have a Friday 13th.

Did you know that the 13th day of the month is more likely to be a Friday than any of the other weekdays?

I'm a nerd so I had to write code to check this out.

https://pastebin.com/62kwesZz

So from 1/1/1500 until 12/31/2023:

Weekday counts: Monday: 898 Tuesday: 897 Wednesday: 901 Thursday: 896 Friday: 901 Saturday: 896 Sunday: 899

No idea why, and other than a tie with Wednesday, this is indeed true. Well if my code is correct.

Depends on the year you start, it is thrown off by leap years.

For most proposals like this, new years day and leap day wouldn't have a day of the week. And therefore the calendar wouldn't change from year to year.

I was just talking about why there have been more fridays the 13ths since 1500.

until 12/31/2023:

My eyes see mixed-endian! I want them to unsee it!

Decide already whether you want 2023.12.31 or 31.12.2023.

I think your code is fine. The Gregorian Calendar actually runs on a 400-year cycle (i.e. the pattern caused by 7-day weeks, variable-length months and leap years repeats every 400 years) so if you re-ran the code against a 400-year period you'd get the correct ratios.

I don't wanna pay bills for another month

Landlords salivating at the prospect of an entirely new way to increase rent almost 10% for every tenant

As long as I get an extra payday without a decrease in payment, I’m good. I doubt that would be the case though.

Number of hours worked remains the same. TPTB would never allow this to improve the lives of ordinary folk. I say we cut a month out of the year. Who likes August, anyway?

If anything an extra month just means more time for holiday pay, more time for accountants, and more time to waste in general

But think of the possibilities. If you were born on the 31st, you'd stop aging.

Watch out for places (like gyms) that bill biweekly instead of monthly. You may think it lines up with months, but over the course of a year you pay an additional 8.6% more.

But, if you get paid biweekly and all of your bills are monthly, you basically get an extra paycheck each year.

Two extra I believe. And every few years three. BTW advertisers know this and try to sell big ticket items like TVs when that happens.

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Let’s make each month 73 days.

5 months. We can figure out a season for each one!

And pay less than half as much rent!

Landlords thought process: Since 2 months was typically 60-61 days and that range is higher, we'll have to charge 3 payments for each monthly payment!

See also: Metric time.

10hrs in a day. 100min in a hour. 100 sec in a min.

Though I like the idea a lot, 60 has the great advantage that you can devide it by 2,3,4,5 and 6 which is a very useful property... The real power move would be to use the 60-system for everything... Like the Babylonians did, or so I heared

Nah, base 12 number system with the same logic as metric. But it's probably too late to switch to a different number system.

It's useful. But when was the last time you used it? You usually don't say a twelves or a third or a sixth of an hour, you say 5, 20 or 10 minutes. Half and quarter are available the same in decimal time.

It's more a matter of habbit. You know what a second, a minute and an hour are because you had all your life to precisely learn it.

But then we will change either seconds or days.

If you take rhe same 24 hour day, and convert it to 10 metric hours, or mours, and split that to 100 metric minutes, or cenutes, and then 100 meconds, one cenute is 1.44 minutes, and one mecond is 0.86 seconds. The practical difference would be almost imperceptible. A mour would be significantly longer than an hour, 2.4 times, but you'd have the metric system attour disposal to break it into decimals.

That's not to say we should switch, but it wouldn't be that different.

I always thought that the argument is that metric time sounds nice but it's actually worse than traditional time because 24 and 60 have much more factors that are more convenient in every day use. You can split them in half, in quarters, in thirds, in sixths.

You can make that same argument for Imperial units like inches and feet and cups and ounces. That's why imperial units are still popular, because decimals are great for science and conversions, but 100 doesn't have many divisors.

Also 10 days in a week. And 3 weeks in a month. Still 12 months, and 5 free days at the end. I like free days.

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Except that a lunar cycle is 29.5 days long.

The Jews recognized this and their calendar runs akin to it (https://www.timeanddate.com/date/jewish-leap-year.html), but with 7 "leap months" occurring over the course of 19 years. Of course, then they fuck it up with extra or fewer days to keep certain holidays from falling on certain days of the week. You win some, you lose some.

Guess the Jews win the Design the Most Convoluted Calendar contest.

Fuck it. No-one is this thread can seem to agree, so I'm making a unilateral declaration that from here on out, all units of time except for the second are abolished, and we just use unix time for everything. You have until 1699217619s to make the switch.

Two words: Seasonal regression

So? I don't care if it's hot in December or not and presumably we can figure out a more sciency way to time crop planting. Not like the almanac is worth fuckall in a changing climate anyhow.

13 x 28 = 364

Make New Years Day it's own thing, not counted in a month (or just make the new 13th month 29 days long), and continue tacking on leap days to the end of February using the currently established rules.

The length of the year doesn't change and no seasonal regression. It has so many fewer exceptions than our current system that you'd wonder how we ever ended up with a 12 month calendar.

you’d wonder how we ever ended up with a 12 month calendar

Roman Empire politics...

That's when you add one or two days outside of any month - that was a legit proposal.

So like leap days which we already have tacked on to the shortest month.

Yes and no. The days would be outside of the normal week (so they would be in a kind of an 8 day week), and they would be holidays to not mess up work schedules in relation to the fixed calendar.

Many facilities are 24/7 operations that can't just close for a holiday (ex: hospitals, first responders). It definitely would mess up people's work schedules.

Can we all just agree not to have an emergency those days?

I've never been a fan of this idea, it doesn't go far enough and further makes things less symmetric/divisible. I say we use 6-day weeks, 5 weeks per month, 12 months per year, and an inter-calary holiday week of 5-6 days. A six day week means 4 days working, 2 days rest, and that can be staggered more easily/equitably assuming work needs full coverage in a week. We start the new year on the Spring Equinox because it's generally more pleasant.

For bonus points, we switch to base-12 (or dozenal) in our numbering system because after the transition it's a much easier system to deal with as far as division and multiplication is concerned (e.g. 1/4 would be .3 instead of .25, 1/3 is .4 instead of .333..., 1/2 is .6, etc.).

What would we call the 13th month?

* sorry guys, this had apparently been decided already

Who cares? Right now the 10th month is named after the number 8.

And September isn't even the 7th month anymore, time to modernize

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Octember it will be after October. The names will be just as incorrect as they have been for way too long but if anyone wanted the names and order to correspond to their own meaning it would have been fixed by now.

If we change the number of months, the names of the off-by-two months (September through December) are getting fixed too. It's better to fix all of the technical debt at the same time.

at the risk of sounding like a weirdo, does anyone else remember a book called the First of Octember? it was written and illustrated as though it was a Dr Suess story, but apparbely it wasnt

Not personally but I have heard a friend mention it and another deny it's existence. I wonder if it might be one of those Bernstein/berenstain bears things. Or as I like to call it, the choice of Berensteins gate.

What was the original idea of our calendar? And did every month have 8 weeks or so? Were weeks longer?

There were ten months. Notice that September, October, November, and December all start with number prefixes ending at 10?

Well a few Roman bad boys decided to insert themselves in the middle of the year (July and August) and blew that idea to shit and we've never adjusted since.

And the reason for only 10 months before that - the earlier Romans didn't even bother to keep count during the winter. From the end of December it was just 'i dunno?' until the head priest decided it was time for a new year.

Jesse, what the hell are you talking about??

Before we get too crazy, let's consider for a second the importance of 12 in units of measure. It shows up in time: minute, second, length (imperial ft), and I'm sure many other places.

The benefit is it's evenly divisible by 2, 3, and 4. How would we define seasons with 13 months?

Base twelve only because Babylonians.

I mean, it was a pretty good idea. The only reason we happen to be so 10 centric is because that's how we happened to evolve our manipulators.

Not even, dozenalists have pointed out that you can do base 12 on your fingers by counting your joints, 3 in each finger with your thumb as the pointer, you can even do it on both hands and get all the way to "100"

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Huh am I missing something?

13 x 28 = 364 but a year has 365,2425 days

The new year day is a transition day and is not in the calendar, but rather in between years

https://theperihelioneffect.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Ce57evjXEAAKE1h-1024x849.jpg

Now rip to people who have birthdays on weekdays because that will never change. People who have birthdays on weekends would hugely luck out.

Hm i don't really see a good point for this. It's not too hard to use a calendar compared to the effort it would take the world to switch.

Nah, if a few aliens put some nukes or worse weapons to our heads from above, maybe shoot a couple here and there, we would definitely switch within 2 weeks at most.

Or, you know, we could just phase out the politics, give some ample time for economies and a few other select business that have work on very very puctual timing, like a few years tops, the 99% of the world would switch pretty seamlessly over a week at most. The remaining 1% could just as easily keep the old year length to continue their internal businesses. Changing most things, especially if from an incorrect or arbitrary thing to a systemic one, is rather easy but hard to accept.

Do you understand how many computer programs will crash when you try to introduce a "month" consisting of a single day for this New Year holiday, or alternatively a day which does not have a corresponding month?

Is your Netflix subscription going to renew in December, and then next in January, or is there a troll of a month sitting in between where you're charged for a day?

How many schedulers have rules like the second Tuesday of the month, or the last Friday of the month, and those days don't even exist!

Is this special holiday even assigned a weekday? If it is, do we repeat the same weekday twice to keep the 28 day months on the same weekday schedule?

Madness! /S

There would be a leap day every year, and two every four years.

What would we call the 13th month?

Since the 12th month is December, a 13th month should obviously be called Undecember (the undec- prefix meaning 11 in Latin).

Better yet, just stick the new month in the middle of the calendar, but don't rename the months that have numbers in their name. It already worked once (thanks, Romans).

Why not just use Tredecember since it the thirteenth month the twelfth month can become Duodecember and not december.

What about another month after May called Maytoo?

After the revolution, the French came up with some poetic and meaningful (if you live north of the Tropic of Cancer) names for months. We could use those.

Hendecember. We could also move Easter and Xmas to both be in that month.

Is it true though?

I mean, for the most part. You would have 13 months of 28 days with 1 leftover. Make that one new year or something. Leap years would just have another straggler day, lump that in with new year I guess.

The moon thing is wrong though. The moon does not operate on a 28 day cycle.

As for Monday being the 1st and Sunday the 28th, that wouldn't matter at all. Any day could be the start of the month.

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Starting the week on a Monday is psych warfare on the working class and pretty fucked up to begin with. Starting it on Sunday was the Church's idea... Start every week for the future of humanity on a Saturday and get your dessert first.

Weeks don't really have first and end days. It's just how you arrange a calendar. Case in point, I view weeks as beginning on Monday but prefer the layout with Sunday on the left.

Downvote all you want. The global default "work" week starts on Monday, and 99.99% of every modern calendar shows Sunday in the leftmost column of every single month. Read a damn book, kids.

I’m on board, but I’m not sure I can use a calendar that doesn’t put Sunday as the first day of the week.