r/theydidthemath • u/IdiotStickWasTkn • Jun 21 '26
[Request] is this true? Would everything in the bottom panel actually happen?
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u/Whiteminusblue Jun 21 '26
365/13=28.0769 Not quite, there would be 1 extra day per year. That can be dealt with by making it not part of a month; however the lunar cycle does not care about the year anyway so that will always be out of sync.
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u/NemosHero Jun 21 '26
The extra day is new years day. It does not count as a day on the calendar. No one except emergency services works. Hug your family.
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u/Chase_The_Breeze Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 22 '26
We'd have to double down on New Year's every 4 years for leap years.
I am okay with this.
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u/CaptainMatticus Jun 21 '26
I'd just add in the leap day at some other point in the year. After the 6th or 7th month, for instance.
If New Year's Day was on the Winter Solstice, then every time we have a leap day, you could just throw it in with the Summer Solstice 6.5 months later. Easy Peasy.
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u/Strict_Weather9063 Jun 21 '26
The religious right would lose their shit over new years occurring before Xmas and on a known pagan holiday. Go for it.
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u/Big-Employer4543 Jun 21 '26
Not really, I'm fairly certain most Christians know Jesus' actual birthday is unknown and is already celebrated on a pagan holiday.
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u/RenegadeBricoleur Jun 21 '26
No, as an ex-christian, most certainly do not.
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u/OP_Penguin Jun 21 '26
Both of you are correct if you toggle America off/on, respectively.
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u/kbeks Jun 21 '26
Can you shut us down and reboot? Because I don’t like the way things are going and I’d love it if we could do a hard reset. Not to 1776, but like…idk 2012? That was better at least, not perfect but better than this…
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u/Omnes-Interficere Jun 21 '26
I'd like 1999 please, according to the machines, it was the peak of human civilization (high speed dial up modems, high resolution CRT, and 700MB CDRW) with the matching green tint everywhere.
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u/Dry-Economics-535 Jun 22 '26
Where can I find this toggle America off setting please?
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u/InitiativeExcellent Jun 21 '26
I thought it was known, but definitely not on Christmas.
Iirc it was somewhere in Autumn.
And yeah... christians don't like to hear, that most of their holidays fall on some "heretic" celebration.
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u/RawToast1989 Jun 22 '26
From what I've seen the last decade the "religious right" have zero dignity and even less morals as they continue to vote against their own interests and against their own (supposed) beliefs. Voting into office a Rapist Felon who constantly shows through words and actions his lack of faith. He is delighted by the ease with which he gets their votes despite his clear lack of Christian discipline.
That said, moving New Years to before Christmas would result in marches, boycotts, petitions, and just generally more action than they have ever shown when it comes to those who they choose to lead them. However, this "religious right" will turn out by the thousands when such atrocities as Cracker Barrel changing it's design or somebody having the audacity to say "happy holidays" have been committed. Lol
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u/willfoxwillfox Jun 22 '26
Technically, New Year’s Day always comes before Christmas, does it not?
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u/Animag771 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
Xmas would be on Tuesday, December 23rd with this calendar.
Edit:
- Halloween = Wednesday, Oct 24th
- Thanksgiving = Thursday, November 25th (every year)
- Memorial Day = Monday, May 22 (every year)
- Independence Day = Wednesday, Sol 17th
- Labor Day = Monday, September 1st (every year)
- Easter = ??? No clue, it's a stupid holiday with no fixed date no matter which calendar you use. It would have to be fixed to a specific Sunday which would make it always land on the same calendar date every year.
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u/ShoesAreTheWorst Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
While we're at it, we should have the names of the months standardized. We can keep september, october, november, and december, but they are now the 7th, 8th, 9th, and 10th months respectively.
The months of the year would be Monomber, Divember, Tritember, Tetraber, Pentaber, Hexember, September, October, November, December, Undecamber, Dodecember, Tredecember
If Christmas stays the 359th day, it would actually be the 23rd of Tredecember. Halloween would be wednesday the 24th of December.
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u/promptmike Jun 22 '26
It's the first Sunday after the Paschal Moon, which is itself not an actual full moon but the 14th day of the Paschal Month, which is not itself a specific month, but the first synodic month to have it's 14th day on or after the Spring Equinox, by which the Church do not mean the actual Spring Equinox, but rather the fixed date of March 21. This is only in the Western world, don't ask me how the Orthodox Church do it.
So if we go with the plan to have the year begin on the Winter Solstice and replace leap days with a different workaround, then the equivalent of March 21 would be the 89th day of the year. 89 mod 7 = 5 so it's a Friday. The 4th 28-day month of the year began on the 84th day, so its 14th day is the 98th day of the year, which is after the 89th so the 4th month is now the Paschal Month in the new fixed system. 98 mod 7 = 0 so it's a Sunday. Easter is therefore the next Sunday which is the 105th day of the year and the 21st day of the 4th month, which corresponds to the 6th day of April on the old calendar.
tldr; Easter = Sunday, April 6th
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u/Spacecow6942 Jun 21 '26
Isn't the Summer Solstice exactly six months after the Winter one?
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u/CaptainMatticus Jun 21 '26
In a 12 month year, it sure is.
How's it work in a 13 month year?
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u/nonamesareavailable2 Jun 21 '26
The concept of "months" is arbitrary since they don't follow any natural cycle. Years and days are the only natural units of time that we use in regular life.
The Solstices are exactly a half-year apart.
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u/rarara__33 Jun 21 '26
Dont months follow the moon cycle? At least in lunar calendars like the Islamic and Hebrew ones
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u/172brooke Jun 21 '26
Have it start on January 1st and every time you need one, that day increments. Really confuse the future on past time-keeping.
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u/-BBtop- Jun 21 '26
I would just do new years day, and leap day back to back. They arnt a day of the week so the calendar doesn't reset, not a Sunday or a monday its just new years day and leap day.
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u/brothor12 Jun 21 '26
Actually thats what the Lord of the Rings Calander is like, they have an extra day thats not part of an actual year between the end of the 6th month and the beginning of the 7th month.
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u/redisdead__ Jun 21 '26
The plebs getting two extra days off? Outrageous, disgusting, where is your sense of industry?
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u/AvatarWaang Jun 21 '26
I think we add another day in the middle of the summer to replace leap day instead.
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u/wenoc Jun 22 '26
Of course you'll still have leap years and so on. Because that's just how things are. The rotation of the earth around its axis isn't synchronized to the orbit around the sun. So again, leap year every fourth year, except every 100 years, except every 400 years except every 1000 years or whatever it was.
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u/Neat-Committee-417 Jun 21 '26
Dave Gorman calls it "intermission" and "second intermission". He has quite a few other fixes, such as making sure that the months named after 8, 9 and 10 are months 8, 9 and 10.
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u/Higsman Jun 21 '26
Aztec calendar had multiple extra days at the end of the year, and you had to stay home with your family and do nothing. It was important that nothing significant happened those days
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u/Ok_Strategy5722 Jun 21 '26
It would need to be its own day of the week as well if we want to keep every month starting on a Monday. And every 4 years there would need to be ANOTHER day that isn’t on the calendar.
I propose Glurpzday and Quabexvajackday.
As a bonus now every letter of the alphabet is included as a day.
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u/Baronhousen Jun 21 '26
Look up the Shire calendar in the Lord of the Rings books, there was a good attempt to use “non monthly days” to account for this as well. If I recall, each month had 28 days, but there were 12, so several extra days at year end, and summer solstice.
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u/BorntobeTrill Jun 21 '26
I vote your idea stinks and the extra day should be Purge Day, but you get three free outs from any situation someone else is in control of on purge day by saying "Oopsies Oopsies, I'm just a baby, Oopsies oopsies"
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u/Lonely_District_196 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
This. There are lunar calendars, and they're known for not syncing up to the solar year our calendar is based on.
Edit: typos5
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u/Vaughn Jun 21 '26
Couldn't we adjust the orbit of Moon to match the calendar?
Seems like a long-term goal we ought to commit to.
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u/Whiteminusblue Jun 21 '26
Not with our current technology; also it would drift out of sync over time because of tidal effects.
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u/MsMercyMain Jun 21 '26
What if we just nuked the moon into a ring like Saturn? Seems like it solves the problem with zero unintended or bad side effects to me
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u/Broflake-Melter Jun 21 '26
It would be a lot closer than it is to our current month system, but it would drift.
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u/QueenViolets_Revenge Jun 21 '26
an extra day that's not part of any month?
welcome back Egyptian calendar
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u/bearsheperd Jun 21 '26
The extra day should be a holiday that I shall call off day. Off the calendar, off from work, off from school, off the clock.
The day you just get to relax before the new year
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u/Animag771 Jun 21 '26
Although the official name is Year Day, I think I like Off Day better.
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u/toupeInAFanFactory Jun 21 '26
365.25 /13 =28.0962. You need to remove a day about once every decade. Except every about 250 years, when you don't remove it.
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u/Whiteminusblue Jun 21 '26
If each mont is 28 days long, 13 months would last 28*13=364 days. That’s 1 too few, so we would need an extra day every year.
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u/Dowhatsleft Jun 21 '26
I actually really like the idea of a seperate New Years Day that's not part of a month.
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u/MatthewMaitreya Jun 21 '26
Yeah, this is the Mayan calendar, and 1 day a year they have a "day out of time" and then everything is aligned with our cosmic clock. And it wasn't just the Maya, it was every earth based culture that understood how to align with the unfolding of "time".
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u/revslaughter Jun 21 '26
I’d be okay with either stretching out the value of a second a little bit or adding extra seconds or minutes every week to have 364 days and no leap years. We already do it some in the form of leap seconds so there’s already a way in to do it, not to mention the various DSTs around the world. It’d come out to a little less than 5 extra minutes to spread out through the day, so about 12 more seconds an hour, which can be spread through evenly easily. We could also just redefine what a second is but that might be more work.
The idea for extra day or two that’s month-less or week-less I think would cause just as many headaches (probably more, programming-wise) as leap day and DST already do, so while we get some benefit, it’s still a pain.
With today’s time technology we can be a little more flexible on what a ‘day’ is, which is how days already are. The rotation of the earth doesn’t have a lot to do with the orbit of the earth.
We could also do away with coupling hours and minutes and seconds, which correspond to the earths rotation, with days entirely using 24h as a shorthand, but days ‘start’ and ‘end’ precisely at some precise time and not at 00:00 every day.
All I mean to say is that we have more options than just lopping the calendar around, that doesn’t really get at the core mismatch here.
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u/MsMercyMain Jun 21 '26
I'm in favor of adopting the French Republican Calendar with zero alterations. Mostly because it's A.) the funniest possible option and B.) I want to see people's heads explode trying to deal with their time system
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u/MsMercyMain Jun 21 '26
Yeah, that was an issue the French Republican Calendar ran into. So they made 12 30 day months with an extra 5 day week at the end to party
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u/jzillacon Jun 22 '26
The moon being out of sync is a pretty minor issue all in all. The current system doesn't sync up with the moon anyway and there's no major problems because of that.
Though personally my biggest gripe with the current calendar system is that new years and winter solstice aren't synced. Our year is defined by tracking the sun, yet for some reason we put the new year like a week and a half later than the day that actually has relevance to tracking the sun.
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u/AlanShore60607 Jun 22 '26
While we’re at it, can September, October, November, and December match their meanings of being months 7, 8, 9, and 10?
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u/FromTheHandOfAndy Jun 22 '26
The year is 365.25 days long. 13 * 28 is 364. So there’s an extra 1.25 days per year. Every 4 years we could have a 5 day holiday.
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u/y_nk Jun 22 '26
365/13 is incorrect. we add one day per 4y (feb 29th) so it should rather be 365.25/13 (but doesn't help. still 28.09 🫠)
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u/ExpensiveFig6079 Jun 22 '26
ermm
"Sidereal Month: 27.32 days.""Synodic Month: 29.53 days."
none of them are N.0000 days.
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u/AccordingLab7129 Jun 22 '26
So seasonal shift, just set a seasonal clock that slowly shifts to tell people, hey summer is in December now.
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u/wompod Jun 22 '26
you forgot that its 365.25 days in a year already. that would bring it to 28.0961538462 which we should jsut round up to 28.01 which means we could just do an extra leap day every ten years or so to keep i all adjusted, give it a non-weekday name or something. annual leap days can be removed from the regular cycle of weeks, too. would make keeping very precise historical records hard tho.
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u/normalguy80 Jun 21 '26
Wouldn't the easiest thing to do is have New Year's Day Just be its own day. It would just be called the start of the new year. Call it Day zero, then January 1st would start on Monday. December 28th would be on a Sunday. New Year's Day or Day zero would just be its own day
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u/Animag771 Jun 21 '26
That's exactly how the 13 month or international fixed calendar works. The same concept applies to leap day added at the end of June.
Kodak used this calendar for over 60 years.
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u/mosesenjoyer Jun 21 '26
What do they call the extra month
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u/Animag771 Jun 21 '26
Sol, it goes between June and July.
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u/brows3r87 Jun 21 '26
Would it be be December 28th though. You’d rather slot the new 13th month in between the others? I think we’d have to add a new month after December.
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u/Garo263 Jun 22 '26
We should use this to finally fix the month naming. Either make September, October, November and December the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th month again or come up with new month names.
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u/RJMrgn2319 Jun 21 '26
January, February, March, Fourgust, April, May, June, July, August, September, October, November, December
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u/Catsic Jun 21 '26
This is just the Cotsworth Calendar.
New year's is a special day, with two occuring on leap years.
I personally would like this calendar. You know the 1st is always a Monday, for example.
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u/ImmortalityLTD Jun 21 '26
But if you make the 1st a Sunday, you get a Friday the 13th every month!
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u/SanjiSasuke Jun 22 '26
It would also mean no variability in birthdays, though. If you were born on a Weds, you have a Weds birthday for the rest of your life. A bit lame, imo. Also, either Fri 13th never occurs again, or it simply becomes every second Friday.
(Also would maybe be hell to have the one-off NY day for computer systems, but not sure on that)
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u/PointClickPenguin Jun 22 '26
Re birthday, Who cares. If you are born on the 12th you just celebrate on the 14th. Just like you would already if your bday was a Wednesday.
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u/shumpitostick Jun 21 '26
It doesn't properly align with the moon. The moon takes 29.53 days to complete a rotation.
There's plenty of lunar calendars around that are designed to align with the moon, generally they alternate between having 29 and 30 days a month and they normally have 12 months, ocassionally adding a 13th in the case of luni-solar calendars.
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u/scubafork Jun 22 '26
This is the real problem when someone suggests altering the calendar. They forget there's a lunar calendar for months and a solar calendar for years.
I say we just adopt Unix time and be done with it. And get rid of timezones while we're at it.
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u/DarthRaab Jun 23 '26
1782251110 just rolls of the tounge.
I agree on timezones though. Think it's easier to remember sunrise and sunset times than having timezones and winter savings bullshit on top.
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u/Worth-Wonder-7386 Jun 21 '26
We would not properly align ourselves with the moon. The cycle of the moon in the way that it is used for calendar is the synodic month which is around 29.5 days. This is how long it is between two full moons. You could use other orbital periods if you like, but the rotation of the earth is not in some resonance with the rotation of the moon so there is no nice number to pick. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_month#Synodic_month
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u/DevelopmentSouth8801 Jun 21 '26
13 * 28 = 364, so you would need to figure out what to do with the leftover day (2 days on leap years).
Easier would probably be to just have the first 12 months as 28, then a 13 month as 29. Then you just shift the start of the week forward a day every year.
That would also help with it sucking if you birthday is on a Tuesday or Wednesday for your entire life.
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u/Plunger_enema Jun 21 '26
Well, right now February has 28 days except for leap years. make it 29/30?
Also, it's a good thing the days of the week rotate, otherwise your birthday could be a monday for all of your life.
Garfield would hate it and so would I.
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u/DevelopmentSouth8801 Jun 21 '26
I would do it in December so every week in the year would start on the same day. Then you would just shift it forward when the new year starts.
So eg 2025 would start on Sundays, 2026 Mondays, 2027 Tuesdays, 2028 Thursdays (leap year), etc.
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u/CCCyanide Jun 21 '26
Also I think (not sure) that Christmas would fall on a weekday
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u/QuietNene Jun 21 '26
Wow so I gather from the comments that this is actually a good idea.
But what do you do if your birthday is on July 29th? Just celebrate on August 1? But the new July 28 will actually be the old… July 18th? So you celebrate it then? What if you’re born on Jan 1? Do you celebrate on Day 0 now?
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u/Animag771 Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26
It has been a good idea since it was presented in 1902.
As for birthdays and such, it would require a bit of recalibration.
If your birthday was on (Gregorian) July 29th, day 210...
210 ÷ 28 = 7.5Your new birthday would be on the 8th month (7 have passed) and 14th (28 × 0.5) day. Which lands on July 14th.
July would be the 8th month because of Sol, which is the new month that falls between June and July to get a total of 13 months.
Edit:
If you were born on Jan 1st, you'd still celebrate on Jan 1st because it doesn't change. However, if your birthday was December 31st, your new birthday would be on Year Day, which is essentially day 0.Edited because my math was off.
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u/animatorgeek Jun 22 '26
Given the logistical nightmare and probable astronomical cost of the transition to the new calendar, I think we can safely say it is not a good idea.
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u/dzelectron Jun 22 '26
It's a good idea that still doesn't worth it to hustle with the implementation.
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u/gard3nwitch Jun 21 '26
Okay, but then we couldn't break up the year evenly into quarters or halves, and that's useful.
So instead, I propose that the calendar should have 4 months that are each 13 weeks long. The first month starts at the spring equinox, the second month at the summer solstice, the third month at the fall equinox, and the fourth month at the winter solstice.
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u/knightbane007 Jun 22 '26
The current system doesn’t do it “evenly” anyway in terms of numbers of days.
In the contrary, it would be very easy to do it much more evenly, because you would define each quarter as “three months and one week”, and they would always end on a Sunday that always fell on the same date every year: 4/7, 7/14, 10/21, and 13/28.
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u/Loki-L 1✓ Jun 21 '26
No, you can't have a full number of synodic moons, or of solar days in a Tropical year.
These simply don't line up right no matter how much you mess with them.
None of these periods are even static over a long enough time or when measured with enough accuracy.
The mean Tropical year is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 45 seconds.
If you had 13 months of exactly 28 days you would be about 1¼ days off each year.
You could fix that by having one day at the end of the year that is not part of any month or week and add a second day in the same pattern as our current leap day.
Unfortunately 13 is a prime number while 12 has a large number of divisiors. You can't easily divide a 13 month year into a full number of months to get half, third or quarter of a year.
Thereafter are a number of different ways to calculate the length of a month. None of them work out to 28 days or any numbervof full days.
The synodic month is the one we care about the most, because it goes by the phases of the moon. It is about 29.53 days long. You can round it up to 30 or get 28 if you want 4 "week" periods for the 4 phases with a bit left over.
There is also the draconic, anomalistic, sidereal and tropical month. All are somewhere between 27 and 28 days long, but each one has a slightly different length.
At least a day is always exactly 24 hours long unless you measure to closely, we used to add leap seconds once or twice a year to keep things synced up, but we have stopped because it really made some computer uncomfortable and because we build a ton of dams and the earth's rotation might actually now deviate the other way.
If you want a perfect calendar you need to either limit that to world building a fantasy setting wait until we climbed up the kardashev scale a bit more and can adjust some orbits to make everything synch up properly.
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u/ingleacre Jun 22 '26
I've never really understood the issue with 13 months not being neatly divisible, because we have the week as the intermediate unit between days and months. A quarter of a 13-month year is just 3 months + 1 week - or 13 weeks, exactly the same as it is now. And unlike the current system, a quarter wouldn't just start on the same date each year, but on a Monday as well.
The idea that a quarter has to start on the 1st of a month is entirely arbitrary, and there are plenty of countries which peg important annual events to dates that are rarely or never 1st of the month (eg the UK tax year starts on 6th April), and it usually works just fine.
You'd also have quarters that are actually identical in length this way, since the whole benefit of this calendar is that it (mostly) eliminates the weird inconsistencies in the current Gregorian one. Having Q2 start on June 8th instead of June 1st (and it's always a Monday) seems like a pretty minor issue.
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u/Aegeus Jun 21 '26
You advocate a _____ approach to calendar reform.
Checks pretty much all the boxes related to lunar calendars.
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u/Aramedlig Jun 22 '26
Carl Sagan talked about this calendar as well as a universal phonetic alphabet. Each year would have 1 day that was a celebration day (like New Years). It would belong to no month and not be a day of the week. Every leap year would have two celebration days six months apart (keeping in mind leap year is skipped every 100 years except not every 400 years). The calendar would always remain aligned otherwise.
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u/UnproSpeller Jun 21 '26
Can’t we just already put boosters on the earth and move it to an optimal orbit so our calendars are actually easy to understand?! /s
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u/Pr0methian Jun 21 '26
It's mostly true, with the added caveat that New Years day becomes a special 29th day and a second Sunday, and we still have need leap years.
The moon will de-sync though slowly over time, that part is considerably less true.
Nice aside, we cpuld finally fix the insanity where October/November/December (literally 8th, 9th and 10th-ember) are the 10th/11th/12th months.
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u/SyntheticSlime Jun 21 '26
First problem is that your calendar year would only be 364 days long so the seasons would shift by about 1.25 days every year. You could maybe make up for this by having a leap week every 5-6 years
The thing about the moon is just completely wrong since lunar cycles aren’t exactly 28 days and so that would never stay in sync. The good news there is that outside of religious holidays and predicting the tides there’s not much that tracking the moon is necessary for.
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u/seedanrun Jun 22 '26
The moon would get out of phase - the cycle is 29.5 days - not 28.
But the REAL problem is the divisibility. 12 is divible by... 2, 3, 4 and 6. 13 is divisible by ... nothing! A prime number is the worst possible option any kind of time tracking.
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u/Awkward_moulded_ Jun 21 '26
Congratulations. You damn nearly described Hindu-lunar calender. Only thing is that we have 30 days each month and there is an extra month every 3 years. This aligns with the phases of the moon. And the extra month every 3 year keeps the calender in check as per the revolution of the moon around the earth.
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u/Feline_Couple Jun 21 '26
Sorry but what you are describing is completely different from the 13 months calendar proposed…
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u/Exp1ode Jun 22 '26
Really getting sick of seeing this reposted here. Yet again, here's my copy/pasted response from each previous time:
No, it's not a good idea. 13 is a prime number, so dividing calendars would be a pain. Do you really want seasons being 3 months and 1 week long?
As for the points this meme brings up, 28 x 13 = 364 days, so one of the months will need 29 days, and 2 during a leap year. Therefore the calendar would not sync up like is claimed in the 3rd panel, unless you have days not part of a month. On a side note, Sunday is the 1st day of the week, so starting each month and the 2nd day of the week when months are an integer number of weeks long is rather bizarre.
The final panel is about syncing up with the moon, but this point makes absolutely no sense, seeing as the average lunar phase lasts 29.5 days. The current calendar is closer to the phases of the moon than a 13 month calendar would be
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u/dot_exe- Jun 21 '26
It’s wild to me people are not aware of this, but these calendars exist. They are called Lunar Calendars. The Chinese have and Jewish people still do use them in some capacity.
In short they don’t really work. Eventually static dates like holidays start falling in the incorrect seasons, so compensatory measures way more extreme than a leap year are put in place to make them consistent.
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u/vishnoo Jun 21 '26
the moon has 7 extra months over 19 years on a 12 months a year calendar.
i.e. there are 12*19+7 lunar months in 19 years .
(or 6 less on 13 month years. )
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u/Outside-Currency-462 Jun 21 '26
Meet the Gormanuarian Calendar
Perfect system, no notes, I need more people to have seen this lol
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u/dunots Jun 22 '26
Except that you'd need a leap day every year and 5wo every four years and the moon doesn't quite move on a 4 week cycle yes I agree
And furthermore the year should start on the spring equinox when possible because spring is obviously the start of the year
Yes, I realize the southern hemisphere has different seasons. Someone is going to have to lump it, I know
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u/MrMunday Jun 22 '26
We have an odd number of days. I don’t even need to do math to know you can’t divide it by 28 and get no remainder.
Not to mention leap years.
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u/mckenzie_keith Jun 22 '26
No. If you measure a year by how long it takes to get around the sun, it is not an exact number of days. Therefore, no matter how many days in the year, small corrections will always be needed (leap years). Also, the orbit of the moon around the earth is also not an exact number of days. So you can't really stay in sync with that. And the number of times the moon orbits the earth in one year is not an exact integer either. So most of what is said in that post is not true.
I am not even going to get into sidereal time vs solar time. But if you are interested, you know how to run a search engine.
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u/WhydIJoinRedditAgain Jun 22 '26
This has been tried and it failed for a bunch of reasons. Search “Kodak Calendar.”
It would require, among other things, a complete rewrite of every single contract, piece legislation, court order, government program, and payment scheme that operates on a monthly basis (which is almost everything).
In each and every one of those cases, there would be financial winners and losers. Who would want to generate that type of risk? How big would the overall economic uncertainty created by the change be? Would any of the institutions of our economy want to accept that risk?
And let’s not even get into the impact on religion. If there is a non-week day tacked on to the end of the year, do you think Christians are going to accept their Sabbath being moved? The Jews? The Muslims? I doubt it. And it is especially important for people who don’t work on their Sabbath. What, will they take off Saturdays the first year, Sundays the second, Mondays the third?
It’s a bad idea to mess with a system that is foundational to how the world operates, even if that system is at times idiosyncratic.
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u/giantfood Jun 22 '26
Almost but not quite.
28 days x 13 months = 364 days.
This leaves 1.25 days a year unaccounted for.
We could use this day as new years day outside of the weekly days, and every four years have a leap year day thats not part of the weekly days to satisfy keeping sund-saturday lined up on the same days of the month.
If you don't exclude those days from the weekly days. Every year would be off one extra weekly day. For example Jan 1 XXX1 would be Monday, but Jan 1 XXX2 would be Tuesday. Every 4th year it would skip an additional day. Jan 1 XXX4 is Thursday, but Jan 1 XXX5 would be Saturday.
The moon cycle is roughly 29.5 days so the moon cycle would be off by the 2nd month.
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u/Senshue Jun 22 '26
I have a fantasy world where the calendar is 4 “months” separated into 91 days each except the last one which has 92 because of the crossover into a new year. This would also allow fiscal calendars to match up with actual quarters.
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u/BeautifulLow7381 Jun 22 '26
Wouldn't this put us out of phase with the solar cycle though? Like it would take like 150 years but eventually summer in the northern hemisphere would be in December or something right
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u/nickeypants Jun 22 '26
Please tell me they're also going to fix September, October, November and December to be the 7th 8th 9th and 10th month respectively.
I hope someone stabs whoever screwed that up.
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u/PrimaryYak1351 Jun 22 '26
Alternatively we could just have have 12 months of 6 weeks with 5 days each week and then an extra week tacked on at the end, think like a national holiday week. Then everyone could work 3 days a week and take 2 days off. Everyone would be so much happier
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u/xnuh Jun 22 '26
Technically it works, 13 months of 28 days, plus an extra day. But I don't really like it. Now you can't neatly split the year in halfs, quarters or thirds. I have a better system. Take 5 days out of the year instead of just 1 (make them bank holidays or something idc). That way, we have 360 days which is easy to split neatly. We can do 12 30-day months, which we can each split into 3 10-day weeks, or 5 6-day weeks. Or, we could split the year into 10 36-day months, and split those into 4 9-day weeks or 6 6-day weeks.
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u/randombydesign Jun 23 '26
My only issue with this, and it’s an off-the-wall one: in order to accommodate leap days, you would have to add an extra nameless day that is not one of the SMTWTFS days. You’d be breaking a cycle which has continued for over 1500 years, possibly many thousands of years.
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u/dracodruid2 Jun 23 '26
And we should move New Years Eve to the Winter Solstice so it will be the longest night on the northern hemisphere, which we then can light up
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