this post was submitted on 05 Aug 2024
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I hope questions are allowed here. I am curios if there is a different sort of scientific calendar which does not use the birth of Jesus as a reference like AD and BC. For example Kurzgesagt's calendars use the the current year plus 10000 as this represents the human better or something like that.

Would there be a way to do this more accurately? How could we, in a scientific correct way, define a reference from where we are counting years?

Also I have read about the idea of having 13 months instead of 12 would be "nice" because then we could have a even distributed amount of days per month.

Are there already ideas for this? What would you recommend to read?

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[–] TootSweet@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (3 children)

I don't know of any books I can recommend, but I'd definitely be down for 13 months with one being short. We could do 12 months of 30 days each plus a 13th month of 5 (or on leap years 6) days.

As far as anything that exists today, there is the Unix Timestamp which is defined as the number of seconds since (the entirely arbitrary time of) midnight January 1st 1970 UTC. Of course, "1970" only makes sense in the context of the Gregorian calendar which still has to do with the birth of Jesus. So, it's not exactly what you're looking for. But maybe it's at least more removed from "the birth of Jesus" than the Gregorian calendar we all generally use.

I guess if you're interested in this stuff, you might be interested in learning about ISO-8601, a standard way of representing dates/times in text. And also the concept of "leap seconds" and things like Leap Smearing.

There's also a great short story about someone trying to explain to an alien with no familarity with earth how our calendar works, but I'm having trouble finding it now. I'll edit this post with a link if I can find it.

[–] HubertManne@moist.catsweat.com 2 points 11 months ago

Id rather intersped the days as out of month days. 4 for the equinoxes and solsti but not sure where to put the fifth although I lean toward an extra one after the winter solsctice as the new year.

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[–] AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)
[–] stardustpathsofglory@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

Very interesting. Thank you!

[–] someguy3@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

Chinese calendar?

[–] anticurrent@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

The one I am looking for counts the remaining days to total nuclear annihilation.

[–] m3t00@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

now could always be zero with future positive and past negative. serious refactoring

[–] stardustpathsofglory@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

That is one interesting approach. I like it.

[–] jpreston2005@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

13 months would be great for salaried employees too (so long as the pay per month isn't reduced, which, well, of course it will be, but a man can dream)

[–] oleorun@real.lemmy.fan 1 points 11 months ago
[–] m3t00@lemmy.world 1 points 11 months ago

ask ntp. they breath this stuff. https://www.ntp.org/

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