Computing: Quasi-perfect calendar – Process

MEXICO CITY (apro).- The saying goes that “man is the measure of all things.” So, at some point in the history of man, time began to be measured in hours… Why did they decide that a day had 24 hours? Who came up with the idea of ​​using such a measure? Why not 10 hours in total? Wouldn’t it be easier for everyone? But the matter didn’t end there; they decided that an hour had 60 minutes. Why use this sexagecimal system? Wasn’t it simpler to use 100 minutes? And then this measure was maintained for seconds: a minute was sixty seconds.

However, the modern world had to invent measures that add precision to seconds. For example, in sports, tenths, hundredths and thousandths of a second are often measured. There, base 10 is used as the standard (the decimal system, then). That is, one second contains 1000 milliseconds, 100 hundredths of a second, not sixty. Why? Because it was decided that this was simpler to measure. So, when we see a measurement like 10.34 seconds, we say that the measurement is 10 seconds and 34 hundredths, which – it seems to me – already clashes with the original idea of ​​the sexagesimal system.

But of course other measurements are as arbitrary as human whim. Why do we measure years in 365 days? The reality is that civilizations discovered –somehow– that the world travels its orbit in approximately that amount of time. As day and night are something common, they calculated that it took that amount of days to go around the sun. So far so good. However, someone then defined the months, and curiously, the number of days in each month seems arbitrary. Perhaps a good way of dividing the months into the same number of days was not found… That amount, 365, is very uncomfortable. However, the idea of ​​a better calendar, more comfortable, easier to use, is going around in my head.

Let’s imagine that there are 13 months of 28 days each. That’s exactly 364 days. If we organize things this way, each month starts on a Sunday, for example.

Every day of every month always falls on the same day of the week, which would save us a lot of nasty problems, like not knowing what day of next week’s Tuesday is, for example. So, January 23, February, March, April, November and December would always fall on a Monday. Isn’t this more sensible? With the current calendar, we can’t easily tell.

But there will be no shortage of people who challenge the idea. Some will say that yes, I have 13 months with 28 days, but the number 13 is unlucky… If that were the case, then that number would have to be eliminated from each month (even the current one, not in my opinion), and that doesn’t happen, right? Another “but” is the issue of the missing day. Yes, I have 364 days but there is one day that I have left over, what should I do with it? Very easy: that would be the last day of the year and it is not on the calendar. It is like the day that is lost when one makes a transatlantic trip. Suddenly we leave on a Monday and due to time changes we are arriving on a Wednesday, despite not having traveled 24 hours by plane. When we return to our origin we will recover it. The same could be done with the final day, the one that completes the 365 days. It would be something like “the day before New Year’s Day”, or perhaps it could be susceptible to being “Women’s Day”, “Water Day”, what do I know. In other words, the day does not disappear, but is given a special name, but it does not fall on any known day of the week.

In fact, in the case of leap years, which add one more day (because in reality the earth makes a complete orbit in 365 days and 1/4 of a day), every four years we would add 2 unnamed days, which of course, could be holidays. Well, if the deputies changed the holidays to make them “long weekends”, I think that my measure is even less arbitrary and with more reasoning than the one that the deputies have imposed to give us more “long weekends” for holidays.

All that remains is to name this thirteenth month and the special day or days that complete the cycle of 365 or 366 days, if it is a leap year, in the latter case. Apart from that, my calendar seems more practical for human beings, but not only that, even for those of us who program computers, who constantly need to include a calendar in the applications we create. Yes, I know that this problem is more than solved, but always at the cost of more machine resources than if my fantastic idea were used (although I think that someone else must have already suggested it, because it seems sublimely obvious to me).

It should be noted that the arguments I give for changing the calendar to a simpler and more manageable one are not so absurd. For example, in 1582 Pope Gregory XIII promulgated the new calendar, called Gregorian because he was its promoter. The civil calendar had been delayed by 10 days with respect to the astronomical calendar; therefore Gregory XIII had to decree in 1583 the jump from the 10th to the 20th of December. That year, December had only 21 days. The Gregorian reform was immediately accepted by the Catholic countries: Spain, Portugal and Italy. France adopted it in 1582, but in December (it was changed from the 9th to the 20th of December); Denmark in 1582, the Netherlands in 1583, the Catholic states of Germany in 1584, the Swiss cantons between 1583 and 1590, Poland in 1587, and Hungary in 1590. The Protestant states did not accept the reform until 1700; the decision was taken on 23 October 1699, according to which 18 February 1700 was to be moved to 1 March. England did not adopt the calendar until 1752 (from 2 to 14 September, as an extra day had been accumulated). The last to officially adopt the Gregorian calendar were: Japan, 1873; China, 1912; Russia, 1918 (it had to remove 13 days, from 1 to 13 February); Romania and Yugoslavia, 1919; Greece, 1924 and Turkey, 1927.

As you can see, even these changes, which had a much more solid argument, which had to do with the astronomical year, were not accepted by everyone at first. Considering that the change was made in 1582, note how Turkey finally accepted the change only in 1927! Remarkable, isn’t it?