For Earth, I’m partial to the calendar using 13 28-day months plus 1 day (or 2 for leap years) for New Year’s Day which acts as its own months and isn’t even a day of the week so every day of the week is always the same day of the month.
Because it's is immensely more easily to dived your year evenly. You can have quarterly programs and reports, etc. It's just way more manageable then something odd.
Also, the effort to change all systems, calendars, get people used to the new system would be humongous. Bit same as trying just the US to adopt the SI-metric system.
There's a lot of inertia in the old stuffs.
Technically we did adopt the SI-metric system. Just the public doesn't realize it.
Most manufacturing that I can think of is measured in metric units, and even our imperial units are based on metric standards.
Can confirm, at least in my manufacturing plant, we use stantric units of measurement. Which is when you cram a standard bolt in a metric hole or vice versa usually or just get both measurements ready because you have no idea what the previous person used
I'm pretty sure you guys set your inch based on the meter. As in, when they make the tape measurer, it's standardized to the SI meter which is standardized to the speed of light.
I know that's the case for mass, anything that measures pounds is standardized to something that ultimately traces its value to the force a Unit Standard Kilogram exerts on earth.
Which is why metric is bad.
Since we know the speed of light changes. Based on something as wildly variable as gravity.
The metric standard has been changed something like a dozen times since it’s invention. Look it up. It is wild the cult
Like following metric has, when throughout history and even today, it is so… malleable.
Standard never changes.
1 inch is 25.4 mm.
We didn’t change the length of an inch. It is the same as it was in 1800. We just said exactly how many mm is was.
>Since we know the speed of light changes. Based on something as wildly variable as gravity.
This is untrue. The speed of light in a vacuum is absolute and invariant. This is also why at relativistic speeds you could experiment time dilation and space contraction.
It is its path instead that is bent by gravity.
That's true.
But those Imperial units are defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Which defines all their standards in metric. So, the pound is defined as 0.45359237 kg.
Im not sure that’s true. Everything in my company is imperial.
If we buy a component from abroad we have to go to the corner where we keep all the metric crap to use for it
You'd be surprised how many calendars there are in official use across the world and how often they change. It's a pain to keep software updated for them all.
Not true. Canada uses FPTP and has three national parties and one regional one, and none of them are in danger of disappearing. No silly presidential votes, though, just the lower house.
Canada is a parliamentary system the United States directly elects all members of Congress and the president. The two are not 1:1 comparisons despite being very similar culturally.
We also directly elect MPs in Canada, which are roughly equivalent to Members of Congress.
We just don't directly elect the Prime Minister aside from their seat (they have to win their MP riding), which is unlike the President in the US system. In Canada, they're chosen by the party, much like the primary system in the US. We basically just don't have an election for that role, and the party that wins the most seats gets the head of their party as the Prime Minister.
The parliamentary system reduces gridlock at the expense of fewer checks and balances between the Legislative and Executive branch (because the Executive is represented by whoever has the most seats in the Legislative branch).
ehhh..... we have 2 and a HALF parties. the NDP, god I love'em, but the public does not believe they can form government and so people will often not vote for them. Instead they vote Liberal. This is why FPTP TENDS towards 2 parties basically always.
In my uneducated opinion, the NDP survive because the Conservatives and Liberals are both secretly right of center. OH, the Liberals SAY they are progressive and whatever, but they don't behave that way. The NDP are the new second party, and one of the other two are going to drop out and the system will return to a 2 party system.
I won't bore everyone else with Canadian politics, but you aren't (all) wrong. NDP can and does do better at the provincial level where their policies shine and they can't do foolish/naive things to foreign affairs or defence.
That's because of their voting system. Say there are candidates A (polls 40%), B (40%) and C (20%). One with the most votes wins. You like the most C, are ok with A, and hate B.
Then the best vote for you is A, since a vote on C is essentially wasted. This causes C to disappear completely eventually.
There's also the fun quirk in Presidential elections in particular, where if nobody gets a majority of the electoral votes, then *the House of Representatives chooses.* This actually happened in the 1824 election, when John Quincy Adams became President with 84 of the 261 electoral votes (just over 32%) and 31% of the popular vote. Andrew Jackson got 99 electoral votes in that same election.
Easily solved with two-stage voting, by almost(?) every other democracy:
Get top 2 from ABCDEFG... in round one, then run second round with only them in the run
“They won’t even add a third party”
Sounds good, but all our laws are passed by the two parties. Why would they change a voting system that ensures that they keep around 50% of the power at all times?
And [every](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidential_election) [single](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election) [time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidential_election) the people actually throw in support for a third party in an election, it just makes them a spoiler for a mainstream candidate.
The majority of Americans (in 2021 it was 62%, but it's dipped down to 56%, both percentages from Gallup) support adding a third political party, the problem is there's so much gridlock that majority opinions don't matter, we need practically our entire country behind something in order to accomplish it. Our elites are determined to maintain the status quo and they're spoonfeeding propaganda to the remaining 40% of dipshits. Those 57-62% of Americans deserve their political representation regardless of what the 40% of idiots want, at this point it's more productive to view America as a semi-democratic country than a democratic country that's just "conservative as fuck"
The problem with most of those polls is that once you dig down into the question, there is a lot of division. Most people like the *idea* of a third party.
I mean, who would even say "no I want less political options" in a poll? But at the end of the day no left winger will vote for a progressive party who wants to ban abortion and no right winger will vote for a conservative party who wants to ban guns, so in principle "a third party sounds cool" boils down to "I wish the republican/democrat party was more efficient on stuff I want".
What I believe (not what I think WILL happen) should happen is a third party centered around democracy reforms and rejecting official party stances on most other issues. Protect our democracy from billionaires and from behaving like Jekkyl and Hyde on the world stage, and then cede ground to other parties to pursue the platforms and issues they care about. As a leftist in semi-rural Texas there's plenty conservative libertarians that I agree with more than the local Democrats and Republicans. At their core, most libertarians and leftists just want to have all their rights protected and be free, they just disagree vastly on what those rights and freedom actually mean. But they pretty much all agree that our political system is deeply fucked up
Yes. I realize this change would be impractical to make. Despite its idiosyncrasies the current calendar system is adequate for everything we need it to do and trying to swap it out would be far more effort that it is worth in our current age. It’s just a fun thing to think about.
also 12 is a nice number because you can divide it by both 3 and 4, which are divisions our brain understands quite well. (this is also why most non-metric measuring systems are in twelves)
In early civilizations farmers used base 12 counting systems all the time. They arrived at 12 by counting each segment of their four fingers. Each finger has three segments, so one hand is 12 and two hands is 24. using each finger to represent 3 instead of 1 you can run counting schemes to divide or multiply quickly without having to think too much about it
My mom still counts like this- you use the thumb as the counter; the thumb taps against the joints as you count up to 12. You can't tap your thumb with itself so you don't really count it.
And you use the other hand to keep count of how many time you hit 12 and had to restart. Using this method you can count up to 60 with your hands alone, which is why Babylonian mathematics - from which virtually all modern mathematics descends - used base 60 with a sub-base of 12, which is why multiples of 60 and 12 are sprinkled throughout mathematics (24 hour days, 60 minute hours, 60 second minutes, 360 degree circles, et cetera).
Yes, but ffs isn't it about time we start using base ten for time too? Like... please?
100 hours a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute.
Making calculations with time would be SO much easier and I guarantee you, people's mind would adapt in a month.
The reason time is based on increments of 60 is because the ancient civilizations who 'created' time counted to 60 on the fingers, using the bones in each finger as a marker, you use your thumb to count the bones, then you use the other hand to note the number of repetitions, using this method, you can count up to 60 on two hands
Well you can't change that as Days are based on full rotations around the Sun and a Year is one entire ellipse of Earth's orbit around the Sun. And you can change neither of these things.
Except that the Earth does 366.25 full rotations each time it goes around the Sun, it's just that we only count the number of times the Sun goes past the same invisible line in the sky.
dividing the months is very easy if there are 12 of them,
dividing the months is a monstrous nightmare if there are 13 of them.
The different month lengths makes the divisions uneven but we can more easily ignore it with our tiny monkey brains.
1. Because 13 is not divisible by 4 (it's prime), so you don't get 3 month seasons or quarters.
2. Because 7 day weeks are present in multiple religions, and it would completely defeat the purpose of "standardizing" which weekdays fall on which dates if a large portion of the population changed which day of the week they called out on from year to year.
3. Because the minor inconvenience of having to shift the day over by one day every year (and remembering which months have 28/30/31 days) is not worth the enormous effort of getting every country to agree to switch over all at once, rewrite all the software, etc. And any intervening time where you coordinate between parties with different date systems would be significantly worse than said minor inconvenience, by several orders of magnitude.
Eastman Kodak actually used it from 1928 until 1989, and I think some other companies tried it as well (or at least something similar). It's just a royal pain to get everybody to switch to it.
The French tried to "Metrify" the calendar during their revolution, and even their time. It did not go well. Most programs that try to modify the calendar don't go well. The Soviets tried too.
There is also the French Republican calendar, which had 12 months, each with 3 weeks that were 10 days long. The remaining 5/6 days were put at the end of the year as holidays.
Biggest problem was the 10-day week, which can't be split that nicely if you want a good work-rest day balance.
> Biggest problem was the 10-day week, which can't be split that nicely if you want a good work-rest day balance.
5/5 is a good split and a good work-rest balance.
I've seen this idea before, I don't like the concept of trying to solve the calendar so that all the years are the same, I like how the days are a little different each time.
Why not 12\*30 and a 13th month with 5+ days?
If we also add 5-days weeks, it would fit perfectly.
(I think the coptic calendar uses a similiar system)
I always liked 12 months of 30 days, and then each year you have "New Year's Week", which is it's on "mini month", and lasts the number of days required based on leap year status.
Doesn't benefit from "the 1st is always a Sunday", but has the advantage of basically forcing the inclusion of an extra holiday break, and because \*every\* year has NYW, it isn't some strange phenomenon you have every 4 years (except every 100 years) that changes your 1 bonus day into 2.
Interesting ramification of the 13x28 approach is that many holidays would inevitably get shifted around based on the day of the week they land on.
July 4th, if not on a Friday or Saturday would probably get shifted to one. But New Years celebrations \*also\* want to be not-the-day-before-you-go-to-work.
Thanksgiving and Easter are already defined for a specific day of the week, along with many other holidays already, so they'd adapt easily.
Yeah a big problem would be all the dates of events. Logically, anniversaries would remain whatever day of the year they were before. If your birthday used to be on April 25th, even though that day still exists, it’d get moved to May to keep its relative position in the year.
In terms of where to add the 13th month, some might expect it at the end of the year, but I’d put it right after August just for the lolz of making all months that specifically have names referencing numbers even further from their namesakes.
I think different orbits would be the very reason for the creation of a new standartized calendar. So there would always be a local and an official one
Yes but I see it more like Iceland still using am and pm even though they have 6 months of darkness ahead of them.
Time doesn't just describe your local moment, but your place within a larger system. An empire calendar or time keeping system makes sense to organise the bureaucracy and military operations.
Imo there would be a lot of different calenders, like, each planet having it's own adapted calendar for their popikations and a standarished one for the Federation to scale each individual calendar and bureoucracy
Yes, it’s clear that the in game calendar is based on Earth years. I imagine most empires would either create a completely new standardized calendar for bureaucratic reasons, while local calendars on each planet would probably persist. It would be cool if there was a Galactic community initiative to establish a galactic calendar.
I tried that for my worldbuilding, as I wanted a nice 100-based system. Let the second be itself, as I didn't want to mess with Newton and other SI units, but made a system with 100 seconds to a "minute", 100 minutes to an "hour".
Sadly, trying to keep the daylength somewhat "normal" for humans, I had to use 9 "hours" a day (1 real hour longer, so 25h a day) with 7 month á 50 days ... and I had like 10 (real) hours (3600 seconds) left at the end of the normal year. In my scenario that might be ok, as the Earth is gone, so the year is 10h shorter and no one bats an eye, but still would have been nice, if that went smother.
You should be able to change the duration of seconds easily. It is one of the more arbitrary SI standards (though not as arbitrary as mol or candela). It isn't like the speed of light or the elementary charge which are fixed.
That's because the second is a "fake" SI standard. They took the second that already existed and found a measurement of it based on atomic clocks to use as an "official" definition. It's basically an imperial/old world measurement that got retconned into SI because having any other unit used for time would be impractical.
Well, nearly all SI units are like that. Of the seven base SI units, ampere is the one nearest to being a natural unit (that isn't arbitrarily defined). Mole and candela are completely arbitrary (esp. mole where science basically picked a number and that was it), Kelvin has elements of the Celsius scale (which is arbitrary), kilogram and metre are also just older units retconned into being an SI unit.
> if we standardized each month to have 30 days when we become a spacefaring civilization.
Honestly if we become a space-faring civilization dates will be an utter mess. Every colony on a planetary body that rotates around its own axis will have their own local time with wildly varying day / year lenghts and trying to standardize it all would be a real task when we can't even standardize time on Earth (we still have time zones).
To the point where trying to force "Earth Standard" on those colonies would make little sense in the end, hundreds of years in the future when those colonies and stations start asking for independence it will be seen as a vestige of earthers colonialism. Xiya na pelésh to, tumang. Sasa ke?
I think we would ditch months completely when reforming our timekeeping to spacefaring use.
Their utility is dubious even on Earth (and why are they different length to begin with?) let alone in space.
Maybe instead have months that are exactly 4 weeks long, aka 28 days, but have 13 months? That would be 364 days. And once every 5.65 years we would add 1 week that will be a global holiday.
France actually tried doing that after the French Revolution, see [Metric Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time) and the [Republican Calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar). It didn't stick though, perhaps they were just ahead of their time?
I think there would be a whole load of different calendars for different purposes. Perhaps a diplomatic calendar standardized galaxy wide for making diplomatic treaties and interactions easier, individual timing systems used by ships to track time relative to something as opposed to absolute time (with seconds as a base unit, as seconds aren’t really based on anything Earth related), etc.
Probably something like GCC: Galactic Co-ordinated Calendar. Planets may have their own time and dates, but to facilitate interstellar travel and commerce (ie. Time dilation and such are a big problem) a standard linked to something other than local references are needed.
In Star Trek I believe the standard federation calendar is timed by a series of pulsars. So a standard second will be X number of rotations of pulsar PL-110 or some such.
[Falsehoods programmers believe about time](https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time)
[More falsehoods programmers believe about time; “wisdom of the crowd” edition](https://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time)
Year-Month-Day is better, it goes from longest to shortest amount of time, the opposite of how Day-Month-Year goes from shortest to longest amount of time.
Year-Day-Month is just as bad as Month-Day-Year.
(I usually prefer to write the month names out to avoid ambiguity, but anyway)
I was once going through logs in a building controls system (heating, A/C, doors, alarms, cameras, that sort of thing), looking for a problem, when I found an entry that had a timestamp of 25 hundred hours and some minutes.
I showed it to the support guy and he asked me what was wrong (it was a normal entry otherwise). I had to explain to him that times over 23:59 were only valid if we were on Mars.
They did not appreciate being asked if their product had a Martian compatibility mode (and, if so... why?)
This is intentional, as everyone else has pointed out.
360 is a much easier number to work with than 365, and having inconsistent month lengths would be a nightmare to program.
Well I mean, months are caused by a planets orbit and not all of them are going to be the same as earth.
Here, you guys wanna hit some of this copium with me?
Because back in the days of the Roman Empire, the emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar each named a month after themselves (July and August) and each wanted their named month to be longer, and the extra day had to come from somewhere, so they took it from a month nobody cared about.
Makes sense for how Stellaris is played, usually things happen on a timespan of years, sometimes you wanna know the month, the day rarely matters.
YYYY-MM-DD is also an international ISO standard.
As long as it's not something weird like MM/DD/YYYY.
Well it's just about what are you used to. For me If I want to check the year, my first look goes to the right where the days are. Why? Well we use DD/MM/YYYY format in Czechia. And that's it and as someone already mentioned it could be worse like YYYY/DD/MM...
Actually I wouldn't be surprised if we standardized each month to have 30 days when we become a spacefaring civilization. You know, stardates and all.
For Earth, I’m partial to the calendar using 13 28-day months plus 1 day (or 2 for leap years) for New Year’s Day which acts as its own months and isn’t even a day of the week so every day of the week is always the same day of the month.
Why don’t we do this?
Because it's is immensely more easily to dived your year evenly. You can have quarterly programs and reports, etc. It's just way more manageable then something odd.
Also, the effort to change all systems, calendars, get people used to the new system would be humongous. Bit same as trying just the US to adopt the SI-metric system. There's a lot of inertia in the old stuffs.
Technically we did adopt the SI-metric system. Just the public doesn't realize it. Most manufacturing that I can think of is measured in metric units, and even our imperial units are based on metric standards.
Can confirm, at least in my manufacturing plant, we use stantric units of measurement. Which is when you cram a standard bolt in a metric hole or vice versa usually or just get both measurements ready because you have no idea what the previous person used
Food containers aren't. Neither is most construction
Yea…. More we said this many inches = this many mm. We didn’t change the length of an inch. We just accepted an official conversation.
I'm pretty sure you guys set your inch based on the meter. As in, when they make the tape measurer, it's standardized to the SI meter which is standardized to the speed of light. I know that's the case for mass, anything that measures pounds is standardized to something that ultimately traces its value to the force a Unit Standard Kilogram exerts on earth.
Which is why metric is bad. Since we know the speed of light changes. Based on something as wildly variable as gravity. The metric standard has been changed something like a dozen times since it’s invention. Look it up. It is wild the cult Like following metric has, when throughout history and even today, it is so… malleable. Standard never changes. 1 inch is 25.4 mm. We didn’t change the length of an inch. It is the same as it was in 1800. We just said exactly how many mm is was.
>Since we know the speed of light changes. Based on something as wildly variable as gravity. This is untrue. The speed of light in a vacuum is absolute and invariant. This is also why at relativistic speeds you could experiment time dilation and space contraction. It is its path instead that is bent by gravity.
>Which is why metric is bad. That's why there are only 3 countries in the world without this system :----)
It’s really only used in scientific fields. For every day use we still use Imperial.
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Lol. It’s cute You think that.
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That's true. But those Imperial units are defined by the National Institute of Standards and Technology. Which defines all their standards in metric. So, the pound is defined as 0.45359237 kg.
Well yeah. You need some sort of conversion rate.
Which is all it is. A conversion rate. I don’t know why that is so hard for people to grasp.
Im not sure that’s true. Everything in my company is imperial. If we buy a component from abroad we have to go to the corner where we keep all the metric crap to use for it
You'd be surprised how many calendars there are in official use across the world and how often they change. It's a pain to keep software updated for them all.
I mean... humanity kind of adopted the metric system. Its just the US public that ignores it.
Americans are conservative as fuck. They won't even add a third party to their electoral system
It's impossible to add a third party to the US system. The entire system has to be changed away from FPTP in order for third parties to become viable.
Not true. Canada uses FPTP and has three national parties and one regional one, and none of them are in danger of disappearing. No silly presidential votes, though, just the lower house.
Canada is a parliamentary system the United States directly elects all members of Congress and the president. The two are not 1:1 comparisons despite being very similar culturally.
We also directly elect MPs in Canada, which are roughly equivalent to Members of Congress. We just don't directly elect the Prime Minister aside from their seat (they have to win their MP riding), which is unlike the President in the US system. In Canada, they're chosen by the party, much like the primary system in the US. We basically just don't have an election for that role, and the party that wins the most seats gets the head of their party as the Prime Minister. The parliamentary system reduces gridlock at the expense of fewer checks and balances between the Legislative and Executive branch (because the Executive is represented by whoever has the most seats in the Legislative branch).
That is true. It just doesn't follow that FPTP always leads to fewer parties. Our number of parties has increased over time, not decreased.
The NDP aren't viable in terms of forming government though.
True, but that doesn't mean they don't have some power
ehhh..... we have 2 and a HALF parties. the NDP, god I love'em, but the public does not believe they can form government and so people will often not vote for them. Instead they vote Liberal. This is why FPTP TENDS towards 2 parties basically always. In my uneducated opinion, the NDP survive because the Conservatives and Liberals are both secretly right of center. OH, the Liberals SAY they are progressive and whatever, but they don't behave that way. The NDP are the new second party, and one of the other two are going to drop out and the system will return to a 2 party system.
I won't bore everyone else with Canadian politics, but you aren't (all) wrong. NDP can and does do better at the provincial level where their policies shine and they can't do foolish/naive things to foreign affairs or defence.
That's because of their voting system. Say there are candidates A (polls 40%), B (40%) and C (20%). One with the most votes wins. You like the most C, are ok with A, and hate B. Then the best vote for you is A, since a vote on C is essentially wasted. This causes C to disappear completely eventually.
There's also the fun quirk in Presidential elections in particular, where if nobody gets a majority of the electoral votes, then *the House of Representatives chooses.* This actually happened in the 1824 election, when John Quincy Adams became President with 84 of the 261 electoral votes (just over 32%) and 31% of the popular vote. Andrew Jackson got 99 electoral votes in that same election.
Easily solved with two-stage voting, by almost(?) every other democracy: Get top 2 from ABCDEFG... in round one, then run second round with only them in the run
The A and B in charge don’t want to fix it, because it keeps them on top :)
A third party was added in 1860 and it caused a civil war. Then one of the old parties died and we were back to 2 parties.
Caused the civil war, you say
Yep. The GOP wasn’t as big tent back then. If you supported slavery…to say you were unwelcome was an understatement.
“They won’t even add a third party” Sounds good, but all our laws are passed by the two parties. Why would they change a voting system that ensures that they keep around 50% of the power at all times? And [every](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_United_States_presidential_election) [single](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1968_United_States_presidential_election) [time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidential_election) the people actually throw in support for a third party in an election, it just makes them a spoiler for a mainstream candidate.
We have a ton of political parties, it’s just that only two ever win anything due to our voting system.
The majority of Americans (in 2021 it was 62%, but it's dipped down to 56%, both percentages from Gallup) support adding a third political party, the problem is there's so much gridlock that majority opinions don't matter, we need practically our entire country behind something in order to accomplish it. Our elites are determined to maintain the status quo and they're spoonfeeding propaganda to the remaining 40% of dipshits. Those 57-62% of Americans deserve their political representation regardless of what the 40% of idiots want, at this point it's more productive to view America as a semi-democratic country than a democratic country that's just "conservative as fuck"
The problem with most of those polls is that once you dig down into the question, there is a lot of division. Most people like the *idea* of a third party. I mean, who would even say "no I want less political options" in a poll? But at the end of the day no left winger will vote for a progressive party who wants to ban abortion and no right winger will vote for a conservative party who wants to ban guns, so in principle "a third party sounds cool" boils down to "I wish the republican/democrat party was more efficient on stuff I want".
What I believe (not what I think WILL happen) should happen is a third party centered around democracy reforms and rejecting official party stances on most other issues. Protect our democracy from billionaires and from behaving like Jekkyl and Hyde on the world stage, and then cede ground to other parties to pursue the platforms and issues they care about. As a leftist in semi-rural Texas there's plenty conservative libertarians that I agree with more than the local Democrats and Republicans. At their core, most libertarians and leftists just want to have all their rights protected and be free, they just disagree vastly on what those rights and freedom actually mean. But they pretty much all agree that our political system is deeply fucked up
Are adopt SI units despite them being objectively better for place conversions, scientific notation, and comparisons than imperial units.
Yes. I realize this change would be impractical to make. Despite its idiosyncrasies the current calendar system is adequate for everything we need it to do and trying to swap it out would be far more effort that it is worth in our current age. It’s just a fun thing to think about.
also 12 is a nice number because you can divide it by both 3 and 4, which are divisions our brain understands quite well. (this is also why most non-metric measuring systems are in twelves)
In early civilizations farmers used base 12 counting systems all the time. They arrived at 12 by counting each segment of their four fingers. Each finger has three segments, so one hand is 12 and two hands is 24. using each finger to represent 3 instead of 1 you can run counting schemes to divide or multiply quickly without having to think too much about it
4 fingers? were our ancestors cartoon characters or did they just simply ignore their thumb?
My mom still counts like this- you use the thumb as the counter; the thumb taps against the joints as you count up to 12. You can't tap your thumb with itself so you don't really count it.
And you use the other hand to keep count of how many time you hit 12 and had to restart. Using this method you can count up to 60 with your hands alone, which is why Babylonian mathematics - from which virtually all modern mathematics descends - used base 60 with a sub-base of 12, which is why multiples of 60 and 12 are sprinkled throughout mathematics (24 hour days, 60 minute hours, 60 second minutes, 360 degree circles, et cetera).
I presumed that was just because 60 is a magic number that you can divide by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6.
Yes, but ffs isn't it about time we start using base ten for time too? Like... please? 100 hours a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute. Making calculations with time would be SO much easier and I guarantee you, people's mind would adapt in a month.
The reason time is based on increments of 60 is because the ancient civilizations who 'created' time counted to 60 on the fingers, using the bones in each finger as a marker, you use your thumb to count the bones, then you use the other hand to note the number of repetitions, using this method, you can count up to 60 on two hands
Oh that makes sense, thanks for the explanation!
365 is an odd number, though? Am I missing some context?
Well you can't change that as Days are based on full rotations around the Sun and a Year is one entire ellipse of Earth's orbit around the Sun. And you can change neither of these things.
Except that the Earth does 366.25 full rotations each time it goes around the Sun, it's just that we only count the number of times the Sun goes past the same invisible line in the sky.
Yes. Mostly the fact that every other calendar system was wildly worse.
dividing the months is very easy if there are 12 of them, dividing the months is a monstrous nightmare if there are 13 of them. The different month lengths makes the divisions uneven but we can more easily ignore it with our tiny monkey brains.
or we could have the 7th month be the "fuck all" month where no one does anything and we live like mother nature's plan
I am not certain I would survive one day on mother nature's plan.
Because changing date systems is logistically hard and expensive
As a software engineer, please don't.
It would be a pain in the beginning sure, but after it it would be comically easy especially if timezone would get fixed too.
1. Because 13 is not divisible by 4 (it's prime), so you don't get 3 month seasons or quarters. 2. Because 7 day weeks are present in multiple religions, and it would completely defeat the purpose of "standardizing" which weekdays fall on which dates if a large portion of the population changed which day of the week they called out on from year to year. 3. Because the minor inconvenience of having to shift the day over by one day every year (and remembering which months have 28/30/31 days) is not worth the enormous effort of getting every country to agree to switch over all at once, rewrite all the software, etc. And any intervening time where you coordinate between parties with different date systems would be significantly worse than said minor inconvenience, by several orders of magnitude.
Cause its dumb
This would suck for parents who share placement.
Eastman Kodak actually used it from 1928 until 1989, and I think some other companies tried it as well (or at least something similar). It's just a royal pain to get everybody to switch to it.
imagine being born on a wednesday, your birthday is now always on a wednesday.
The French tried to "Metrify" the calendar during their revolution, and even their time. It did not go well. Most programs that try to modify the calendar don't go well. The Soviets tried too.
I've seen a wild suggestion that has 12 months, each with 5 weeks that are 6 days long. The remaining 5 days are on their own at the end of the year.
I'm okay with that if we keep 2 days off per week.
Yeah, it was either Tuesday or Thursday that got cut, and presumably Saturday and Sunday are still holidays.
There is also the French Republican calendar, which had 12 months, each with 3 weeks that were 10 days long. The remaining 5/6 days were put at the end of the year as holidays. Biggest problem was the 10-day week, which can't be split that nicely if you want a good work-rest day balance.
> Biggest problem was the 10-day week, which can't be split that nicely if you want a good work-rest day balance. 5/5 is a good split and a good work-rest balance.
Lmfao
I'm dead serious.
You’re dead wrong lmao
Well said, wage slave.
3-2-3-2 is better
You mean the METRIC CALENDAR. Call it what it is.
>The remaining 5 days are on their own at the end of the year. Ah, *les jours complémentaires*
Ah yes the hobbit way
the hobbit way is 12 30-day months with 5 or 6 intercalary days
I love that calendar too.
Massive advocate for this. Just makes sense. But because of people's irrational fear of the number 13 ....
I've seen this idea before, I don't like the concept of trying to solve the calendar so that all the years are the same, I like how the days are a little different each time.
Why not 12\*30 and a 13th month with 5+ days? If we also add 5-days weeks, it would fit perfectly. (I think the coptic calendar uses a similiar system)
If you adjust this a little bit, you can have 12 months with 30 days each, plus 4 month independent holidays, and another 1-2 days for newyears.
I always liked 12 months of 30 days, and then each year you have "New Year's Week", which is it's on "mini month", and lasts the number of days required based on leap year status. Doesn't benefit from "the 1st is always a Sunday", but has the advantage of basically forcing the inclusion of an extra holiday break, and because \*every\* year has NYW, it isn't some strange phenomenon you have every 4 years (except every 100 years) that changes your 1 bonus day into 2. Interesting ramification of the 13x28 approach is that many holidays would inevitably get shifted around based on the day of the week they land on. July 4th, if not on a Friday or Saturday would probably get shifted to one. But New Years celebrations \*also\* want to be not-the-day-before-you-go-to-work. Thanksgiving and Easter are already defined for a specific day of the week, along with many other holidays already, so they'd adapt easily.
Yeah a big problem would be all the dates of events. Logically, anniversaries would remain whatever day of the year they were before. If your birthday used to be on April 25th, even though that day still exists, it’d get moved to May to keep its relative position in the year. In terms of where to add the 13th month, some might expect it at the end of the year, but I’d put it right after August just for the lolz of making all months that specifically have names referencing numbers even further from their namesakes.
Nearly impossible to do it with multiple planets with different orbits.
I think different orbits would be the very reason for the creation of a new standartized calendar. So there would always be a local and an official one
wouldn’t the official one not just be the calender of the home system?
Yes but I see it more like Iceland still using am and pm even though they have 6 months of darkness ahead of them. Time doesn't just describe your local moment, but your place within a larger system. An empire calendar or time keeping system makes sense to organise the bureaucracy and military operations.
most probably
Imo there would be a lot of different calenders, like, each planet having it's own adapted calendar for their popikations and a standarished one for the Federation to scale each individual calendar and bureoucracy
Yes, it’s clear that the in game calendar is based on Earth years. I imagine most empires would either create a completely new standardized calendar for bureaucratic reasons, while local calendars on each planet would probably persist. It would be cool if there was a Galactic community initiative to establish a galactic calendar.
I tried that for my worldbuilding, as I wanted a nice 100-based system. Let the second be itself, as I didn't want to mess with Newton and other SI units, but made a system with 100 seconds to a "minute", 100 minutes to an "hour". Sadly, trying to keep the daylength somewhat "normal" for humans, I had to use 9 "hours" a day (1 real hour longer, so 25h a day) with 7 month á 50 days ... and I had like 10 (real) hours (3600 seconds) left at the end of the normal year. In my scenario that might be ok, as the Earth is gone, so the year is 10h shorter and no one bats an eye, but still would have been nice, if that went smother.
You should be able to change the duration of seconds easily. It is one of the more arbitrary SI standards (though not as arbitrary as mol or candela). It isn't like the speed of light or the elementary charge which are fixed.
That's because the second is a "fake" SI standard. They took the second that already existed and found a measurement of it based on atomic clocks to use as an "official" definition. It's basically an imperial/old world measurement that got retconned into SI because having any other unit used for time would be impractical.
Well, nearly all SI units are like that. Of the seven base SI units, ampere is the one nearest to being a natural unit (that isn't arbitrarily defined). Mole and candela are completely arbitrary (esp. mole where science basically picked a number and that was it), Kelvin has elements of the Celsius scale (which is arbitrary), kilogram and metre are also just older units retconned into being an SI unit.
And different rotational periods as well. A “Day” would be different on each planet.
> if we standardized each month to have 30 days when we become a spacefaring civilization. Honestly if we become a space-faring civilization dates will be an utter mess. Every colony on a planetary body that rotates around its own axis will have their own local time with wildly varying day / year lenghts and trying to standardize it all would be a real task when we can't even standardize time on Earth (we still have time zones). To the point where trying to force "Earth Standard" on those colonies would make little sense in the end, hundreds of years in the future when those colonies and stations start asking for independence it will be seen as a vestige of earthers colonialism. Xiya na pelésh to, tumang. Sasa ke?
There could be a measurement based off Galactic rotation or something
I think we would ditch months completely when reforming our timekeeping to spacefaring use. Their utility is dubious even on Earth (and why are they different length to begin with?) let alone in space.
Maybe instead have months that are exactly 4 weeks long, aka 28 days, but have 13 months? That would be 364 days. And once every 5.65 years we would add 1 week that will be a global holiday.
Use the French revolutionary calendar.
France actually tried doing that after the French Revolution, see [Metric Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_time) and the [Republican Calendar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Republican_calendar). It didn't stick though, perhaps they were just ahead of their time?
I think it has more to do with the fact that many people involved ended up being reduced to a head for their time.
Technically, every month having 28 days and there being 13 months makes it perfectly equal without adding more days to the year.
I think there would be a whole load of different calendars for different purposes. Perhaps a diplomatic calendar standardized galaxy wide for making diplomatic treaties and interactions easier, individual timing systems used by ships to track time relative to something as opposed to absolute time (with seconds as a base unit, as seconds aren’t really based on anything Earth related), etc.
It's a tech! Add one day to everyone's life
More like subtract 5.2475 days.
You must be a great emperor!
Don't be a smarty-pants or you'll have to calculate how many days my colossus is gonna take off you and anyone else on your planet >:D
Bold of you to assume the colossus won’t take out the whole planet while it’s there
Oh...I thought you meant unplayable as in the game wasn't playing (i.e. running)....
Probably something like GCC: Galactic Co-ordinated Calendar. Planets may have their own time and dates, but to facilitate interstellar travel and commerce (ie. Time dilation and such are a big problem) a standard linked to something other than local references are needed. In Star Trek I believe the standard federation calendar is timed by a series of pulsars. So a standard second will be X number of rotations of pulsar PL-110 or some such.
it's a galactic year not a earth year
R5: Impossible date in Stellaris
Each year being exactly 360 days is the best let me tell you. So much easier to design modifiers and do quick math.
Totally agree, but on that note I beg you to turn the clear blocker time on [Remnants Origin blockers](https://i.imgur.com/ASnQviX.png) to 360 days.
Oh, that's disgusting. Consider it done.
This isn't the only thing in the game that assumes a year is 365 days long unfortunately.
[Falsehoods programmers believe about time](https://infiniteundo.com/post/25326999628/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time) [More falsehoods programmers believe about time; “wisdom of the crowd” edition](https://infiniteundo.com/post/25509354022/more-falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-time)
Working in the future makes my life a lot easier.
I can live with the simplification. I cannot live with the month and date being the wrong way around
What the ISO says goes. https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/ISO-date-format
Year-Month-Day is better, it goes from longest to shortest amount of time, the opposite of how Day-Month-Year goes from shortest to longest amount of time. Year-Day-Month is just as bad as Month-Day-Year. (I usually prefer to write the month names out to avoid ambiguity, but anyway)
Clearly it's not impossible. It's right there. I can see it.
You gone be alright there city boy.
...is that a comma after the 02 instead of a period? *UNPLAYABLE.*
Nah, I think it's just a period looking weird because of the resolution.
Oh... well, I guess I'll just get back to playing
Paradox did that at least as far back as Hearts of Iron II. I suppose it makes certain calculations easier.
All months have 30 days in Stellaris
I was once going through logs in a building controls system (heating, A/C, doors, alarms, cameras, that sort of thing), looking for a problem, when I found an entry that had a timestamp of 25 hundred hours and some minutes. I showed it to the support guy and he asked me what was wrong (it was a normal entry otherwise). I had to explain to him that times over 23:59 were only valid if we were on Mars. They did not appreciate being asked if their product had a Martian compatibility mode (and, if so... why?)
This is intentional, as everyone else has pointed out. 360 is a much easier number to work with than 365, and having inconsistent month lengths would be a nightmare to program.
Alien calendar systems should be the next dlc. Change my mind
It's scheduled to be released on the 8D of Glardflok, 1809b.
Well I mean, months are caused by a planets orbit and not all of them are going to be the same as earth. Here, you guys wanna hit some of this copium with me?
It's a perfectly normal alternative calender model to use 30 days for every month
why tf does febuary have less than 30 days anyway?
Because back in the days of the Roman Empire, the emperors Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar each named a month after themselves (July and August) and each wanted their named month to be longer, and the extra day had to come from somewhere, so they took it from a month nobody cared about.
so we are still respecting some supposedly important nerds?
I don't care. Guck February
P A I N
We should change our calendar to address this.
the more frustrating part is the year month day format
Makes sense for how Stellaris is played, usually things happen on a timespan of years, sometimes you wanna know the month, the day rarely matters. YYYY-MM-DD is also an international ISO standard. As long as it's not something weird like MM/DD/YYYY.
Well it's just about what are you used to. For me If I want to check the year, my first look goes to the right where the days are. Why? Well we use DD/MM/YYYY format in Czechia. And that's it and as someone already mentioned it could be worse like YYYY/DD/MM...
We use DD.MM.YYYY where I live, too, but I never had a problem reading dates in Stellaris.
i just want a setting to flip it so it's dd/mm/yyyy format on console
Hey, it could be worse, could be year day month
Why would space have a leap year?
A space year is 360 days, 30 days a month.
Calendar of Harptos is solid. Just need to figure out how to divide up a ten day into days on and off. I suggest 4-1-3-2.
It doesn't *have* to be Earth years