this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2025
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submitted 4 days ago by gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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Alt text: They're up there with coral islands, lightning, and caterpillars turning into butterflies.

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[–] Walk_blesseD@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (2 children)

plus 5 days every year that's not part of any month?

Just add a leap month every six years

You'd have 12 30-day months most years, and an extra in the sixth! While we're at it, we can redefine a week to be six days, so there's a perfectly rounded number of weeks per month/year! Days, hours, minutes and seconds are already fine, but maybe we should also replace units shorter than a second with something more dozenal/hexal(?), too…

[–] ReluctantMuskrat@lemmy.world 7 points 3 days ago (1 children)

While a novel idea, a leap month would throw the concept seasons and therefore agriculture off significantly. Relatively predictable seasons and being able to track our place in it with calendars was a great help to agrarian communities, helping them know when to plant and harvest most effectively.

[–] stabby_cicada@lemmy.blahaj.zone 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

Only if you measured agriculture by the calendar instead of other signs.

For example: Hesiod's Works and Days, a Greek poem about farming and right living from about 800 BC, includes a poetic agricultural calendar that has nothing to do with months - plough your fields when the cranes are migrating and the Pleiades are no longer visible over the horizon, harvest when the Pleiades appear again; cut wood for tools when Sirius is high in the sky; prune grape vines sixty days after the solstice; etc.

So the calendar could say whatever it wanted. Farmers - who were generally illiterate anyway - knew when to plant and harvest without it.

Fun fact: the earliest Roman calendars had only ten months, 305 days, from March to December. The days between December and March didn't belong to any month and could be as many as the Romans wanted to make March start appropriately in spring.

[–] psud@aussie.zone 3 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Every 7 or 6 years for a leap week 12 month calendar, it would be four times longer for a leap month, and the formula is a bit too complex for people to do in their heads, but we all refer to computer calendars anyway

A 364 day calendar with 13 even months, or 12 months alternating between 35 and 28 days or whatever would also let you use the same calendar every year (as opposed to my tea towel that has a calendar that is only useful in leap years that start on a Tuesday — the last was 2008 when it was bought, next is 2036)

Though it would be too expensive to change the calendar, and a 364 + leap weeks calendar doesn't track the seasons as well as 365 + leap day calendar, I really like the symmetry 454 calendar