13 Months

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.
  
  The first should be a Sunday. Then we can align with Stardew Valley time.

Yay for The Human Calculator Calendar. Boo for not crediting sources. A missed opportunity to replace Jesse's name with, "Scott."
Double boo for not explaining the extra day every year, not to mention leap year. (364 / 28 = 13.)
Final boo for conflating the real world ~29.5 day imprecise lunar month with the 28 day English common law lunar month.
- "not crediting sources"
  Anyone that's able to do math and that takes 30 seconds to look at our calendars can come up with the same reflection, nothing special with the "human calculator".
- "The simple idea of a 13-month perennial calendar has been around since at least the middle of the 18th century. Versions of the idea differ mainly on how the months are named, and the treatment of the extra day in leap year."
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
  
  treatment of the extra day in leap year
  Duh, that's the purge day.
  
  I had no clue. Thanks for letting me know. :)

- LAN party
  
  It's Time For A LAN Party
  
  When the comment is better than the post. And I liked this post.
  
  Hell yeah sign me up!
  
  That's... old
- New Year’s Day. The next day is Monday. And every four years there is a second New Year’s Day
  
  I like this. That day that has no day.
  
  This.
  And also, it should still be 12 months, just 4 months (December, January, June and July) should have 5 weeks while the other months have 4 weeks.
  The last weeks of December and June and the first weeks of January and July then form a special kind of "half months", where you get a half month salary and pay a half month rent, etc. Christmas and New Years nicely fit in the Jan/Dec two week holiday, which would be 15 days instead of 14.
  In a leap year, the June/July half month would be 15 days instead of 14
  This way each season/quarter is still equal to 3 months with 13 weeks. And a half year is 6 months with 26 weeks.
  Someone mentioned seasonal regression, this solution should solve that.
  And the irony of this all... This is very close to how our current calendar started before Caesars fucked it up.
- Have a "liminal day" that serves as New Year's Day, and then every leap year put the extra day as the last day of the leap year after the last month.
  The big trouble is that there isn't a subdivision between the month and the year, 13 is prime, there isn't a whole number division of months that can be used to mark say a fiscal quarter for example.
  So I say instead of a 13th month, split those 4 weeks to be an extra week at the end of every 3rd month, so March, June, September, and December would all have 35 days instead of 28.
  Kinda what Caesar was going for originally too, having the months alternate between 30 and 31 days, but he fucked it up because Romans were superstitious about February for whatever reason.
- Just shorten the earth's path around the sun. Duh!
- Every new years day and leap day exists as its own thing outside of any particular month. So every year we get a full new year holiday and about every four years it's a full blown 2 day event. It doesn't need to even be a named day of the week or part of a named month. It can just be it's own thing. We can number it as the 0 month if it makes you feel better and to help sorting dates. If we're feeling sentimental, maybe we can call it Friday the 13th because those won't be a thing anymore otherwise.
- Partay!
- Intermission
  
  Intermission
- Also, how to you tell the Moon to ignore it and stay in sync?
  
  Each year, the moon phase would shift one day (and an additional every four years for a leap day), then sync with that day for the next year. That sounds much better than what we have now.
- Count them and insert a week at the end of the year every now and then
- Party like crazy for a few hours and then wake up

- I can tell you're a programmer, you autocorrected to sprint instead of spring lol
  
  Must not be a Java dev!
  
  [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- As a programmer, I kindly ask you not to mess with time and date definitions, ever
  Obligatory Computerphile video
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  Obligatory Computerphile video
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Aren't the definitions just a client side issue these days? When times are compared it's unix or unix msec.
  
  [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
  
  Not everything can be done client side. Sending notifications or emails: server side. Basically anything that's automated.
- I've heard that Augustus wanted "his own month just like Julius" and that's how they took 2 days from february for july and august. That way we ended having less months with 30 days. Never did look it up if it's true.
  
  [This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
- I don't like the idea of my birthday being on the same day of the week every year. Based on the IFC Calendar, mine would be on a Tuesday every year and that would suck.
  
  So track your birthday on the old calendar. Religious folks will be using old calendars to track important days
  Which day of the week your birthday would fall on in the new calendar would depend on which year the new calendar came in.
  My birthday is the 31st day of its month, it's erased by all the 4 week month calendars
- But what if we decimalised time?
  
  No. Base 12 and base 60 are significantly better for things that are commonly divided into halves, thirds, fourths and so on.
  A "day" is 86400 seconds. Changing the length of a second is a non starter, so you'd end up saying a day doesn't line up with a day night cycle, or something weird like "a day is 8.64 hours long", which doesn't feel better than 24.
  
  Didn't the French try that after the revolution?
- December was the last month. January and February were added later.
  
  Calendar of King Romulus:
  
  Martius - 31 Days Aprilis - 30 Days Maius - 31 Days Iunius - 30 Days Quintilis - 31 Days Sextilis - 30 Days September - 30 Days October - 31 Days November - 30 Days December - 30 Days
  All credit and mistakes may be attributed to history.stackexchange.

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...
- 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.
  
  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.
- 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

Every birthday you have, for your entire life, being on a Wednesday.
Sounds great.
- I got a Friday, not the best but I can work with in
- 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
- Huh, so this + Human Era dating is now my new favorite calender (there's a sentence lol)
  
  I love human era! It aligns well in my human head when I think of human dates.

- Not a calendarologist, but I'm pretty sure lunar calendars were tried and rejected for a reason. Other than the places that still use them for traditional reasons.
  Of course, maybe they just didn't have the concept of leap days?
  
  It only comes out to 364 days so you'll still need to handle that 1.25 extra days in a year otherwise it'll drift. You could just add December 29th as a special day past Saturday, but then you lose sync with the moon, eg.if New moon was on Sunday the first in the previous year, New moon would be on December 29th instead of on Jan 1st the next year and all new moons would be on the 28th.
  You can keep your calendar in sync with the moon or the sun but not both.
- As someone who has proposed this system myself, I feel the need to point out that the meme is glossing over a couple key points:
  First and foremost, 1328 is 364 days, so to avoid slippage you'd need an extra day appended to every year, either as part of a month, which breaks symmetry, or on it's own. You'd also still need leap years.
  And in order for the days of the week to be immutably aligned with dates, these extra days would also have to not be part of any week. Which is a big problem if you want to get anyone who practices an Abrahamic faith on board with the plan.
  
  What exactly would be so troublesome with having a "special day" outside of the usual week/month cycle? You can still go worship on whatever day of the week applicable to your faith. Just make the last day of the year its own thing. We can call it "New Years Eve" and party together.

Well if the 1st is on Sunday then every month would have a Friday 13th.
- This is Jason Voorhees propaganda
  
  ki ki ki, ma ma ma
- 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.
- My favorite day. 🖤

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.
  
  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.

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.
- Hmn...
  You'd need to redefine the derived SI Units, or take new measurements for newly derived units. Newtons, joules, pascals, hertz, coulombs, watts, volts, ohms, farads, siemens, webers, teslas, henrys, becquerels, grays, sieverts, and katals.
  Also not to mention motion and heat.
  You could say there's a large amount of pressure to not change, or that it's a high "bar"...
  I hope you smiled, because that is one joke I will not be making again.
  
  You don't need to redefine any of them if you don't change the length of a second though, right? Because the SI unit for time is the second?
  As long as you just change the definition for non-SI units, sure kilometers or miles per hour changes, but that's not SI, so nobody cares.
- 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
  
  Base 12.
  
  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.
- 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.

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.
- you can omit the unit now
- We'll call it "Longpork's Law"

Let this mofo cook.

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...
  
  Nah, just have a double leap day every 4 years.
- 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.

Smarch of course
- Lousy Smarch weather.
- Febtober gang

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
- Brian
  
  Right between April and May with the other months that are also names
- Smarch, naturally.
  
  I just dread the weather.
  
  Lousy Smarch weather!
- I vote for cramming a "hextember" between August and September. Then all the numbered months can be off by even more!
- 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
- Gormanuary
  https://youtu.be/vunESk53r5U?feature=shared
  
  Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  https://piped.video/vunESk53r5U?feature=shared
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.
- Funuary.
- Eleventer but in latin of course

I like this one:
Dekatrian Calendar (translated to english)
Calendário Dekatrian (original)

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.
  
  Found the software engineer
- 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.

I adore this shit lol

Pretty sure this is what the Mayans used.
- Really? I don't see it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_calendar

And we dont have to worry about the lousy Smarch weather.
- Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
  lousy Smarch weather
  Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
  I'm open-source; check me out at GitHub.

What would we call the 13th month?
- Monthy McMonthface
- Elevenber
  
  Twelvemper
- 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.
- Triskaidekatember
- Jessember
- What about another month after May called Maytoo?
- Febtober.
- Krankenwagen
- Why not Eightuary, let's keep the trend of bad naming going!
- Hendecember. We could also move Easter and Xmas to both be in that month.
- 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.

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
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  Now rip to people who have birthdays on weekdays because that will never change. People who have birthdays on weekends would hugely luck out.
- There would be a leap day every year, and two every four years.
  
  Aka New Years Day!

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.
- Personally I think you're looking at the wrong direction, it's hard to keep mental track of because the calendar doesn't reflect the time of seasonal change in most places where that matters. Doesn't have to be the exact equinox but roughly saying "the first day of the year marks spring" and "October 1st means the start of fall" would probably help folks remember seasons more easily.

I've definitely thought about this.

Lousy Smarch weather.

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.
- 364/28 = 13
  The Human Calculator Calendar by Scott Flansburg: https://calendars.fandom.com/wiki/Human_Calculator_Calendar
  As thewitchslayer says, the lunar month has 29.5 days. English common law has a "lunar month" which is 28 days though.