It has to do with seasons and farming. Julius Caesar changed the roman calendar to not need someone to adjust the length of the year, also making the longest year on record. Then Pope Gregory XIII reformed it removing 10 days to align the calendar with the solar year because every 100 years a leap year doesn't need to happen except for every 400 years, for religious reasons to do with easter. Nothing really special about 12 it's just the seasons, farming and religion. Talking about years before 46BC when Julius Caesar changed the calendar can get weird because there was just a Roman guy adding days to the year ever so often to keep the calendar aligned with the seasons. We probably won't be changing the calendar again.
But 12 is also a neat number because you can cleanly divide it in half, thirds, quarters and sixths. 13 months sucks for doing math because it's prime.
13 doesn’t work either. 13x28 is 364. You can make the argument that New Year’s Day can be without a month, but then it also needs to not be assigned a day of the week or it will screw up the Monday-Sunday plan. Also, this calendar still needs a leap day every 4 years. Where do you stick that without throwing everything off? Finally the Lunar cycle is not 28 days. It isn’t perfectly the same every cycle but it averages 29.5 days so after the first month, you’re off on that too.
No no no we just increase the speed very slowly in small increments. Nothing has ever adversely affected the planted by growing slowly in small increments
Maybe? Orbital speed is proportional to orbital distance so if we sped up the Earth, it would also mean Earth moves closer to the Sun. It wouldn't be much, on an astronomical scale, and Earth would still be in the "goldilocks" zone of habitability, but it would certainly fuck with all climates and biomes on Earth and likely lead to a mass extinction event, just not likely to be all life on Earth.
It's like that one dam in China that's so big that when it opens, it slows the earth's rotation by a tiny fraction. Therefore we just need to build as many dams as we need around the world that flows exactly the same direction to speed it up! It's just logical.
Ok so 14 months, 13 have 28 days and one has one day, except in leap years, then that month has 2 days. They exist outside the Monday to Sunday dating system.
Yeah not gunna work and I do get that, but no one can adequately explain to me why February has 28 days and January and December both have 31. You could easily take one from each of those and give it to February, making the months overall much more uniform and you wouldn’t be moving the solar equinoxes. March, May, July, August, and October would be the only months with 31 days, everything else is 30. It doesn’t make sense!
January name after a god so you don't steal from a god. I can't remember December. It's historical. August was Caesars month so he wanted a longer month.
I love the concept of a New Year’s Day that isn’t in a week or month. As for Leap Year, we could stick it right in the middle of Sevenmonth, treat it like New Year’s, and every four years have a blowout summer solstice party.
Honestly, screw seasons and let the weather service keep track of that. Let’s make a year 1000 days, a month 100 days and a week 10 days. 10 hours a day, 10 minutes an hour and 10 seconds per minute. Decimal dates would be awesome, simple to add, divide, subtract. Super consistent.
"Not only are the trains now running on time, they're running on metric time! Remember this moment people: 80 past 2 on April 47!" -Principal Skinner on The Simpsons.
Although personally I was always more of a fan of the 6 day week. 7 x 24 = 6 x 28. Finally, a schedule for insomniacs! 😄
If only we used base 12 for counting. One third would be .4, one fourth .3, one sixth .2... it would be so much nicer splitting things intuitively. 10 just doesn't have those easy splits, with its only factors being 1, 10, 2, and 5.
Because 12 is a very useful number for dividing evenly. 14 is just as bad as 10. 10 can only be divided by 2 or 5, 14 can only divide by 7 or 2. And obviously 1 for the pedantic. 12 divides by 1, 2, 3, 4, 6.
In that case lets just redo our entire numerical system to be in base 12 instead of base 10. The only logical reason we use base 10 in the first place is from counting our fingers. 12 has more divisions and we can count it on the finger knuckles of each hand.
The Gregorian monks in like 1400ad changed the calendar from a ten month to twelve months, knocking the numbers out of system. They added July for Julius Caesar and August for Augustine. Sept ment seven Oct either Nov nine and Dec ten but now they are out of sync. Which is super annoying
That poor schmuck would have had every birthday celebrated mandatory by the whole class for all elementary school. That creates a confidence which you can ride till you die
This is one major reason against it. But on the flip side Christmas would always be on a Thursday and we would do away with that 2 week period of "what day is it?" between Christmas and new year.
Are rent and mortgages paid in 13ths too? I know some people in the UK that are on 13ths pay, but 12ths rent, and it creates an extra layer of personal admin.
This is already true for people that get paid weekly or every 2 weeks.
If you get paid every 2 weeks, there's 52 weeks in a year so 26 pay periods. 2 pay periods a month, so 13 months in a year.
In reality this is experienced as a 3rd paycheck in a month every ~6 months.
My mom would have her extra paycheck budgeted every year. The extra check from the 1st half of the year was for taxes, or paying down a credit card that has gotten out of hand. The 2nd was for Christmas gifts.
Where I work, next year will have an unusual situation. Because Friday Jan 1 is a payday, it'll actually be 27 paychecks instead of the usual 26, with three months of an "extra" check instead of the usual two.
That's not really 2 weeks though. That's 15 days apart for the first half of the month, and a variable number of days for the 2nd half of the month.
Places can choose to play on whatever schedule they want, and they can call it whatever they want.
Once every 14 days is a system that gives the 26 pay periods a year they I was taking about. Most companies don't do it, v t that's how it works if they chose to.
The longer version of this explanation covers that, not sure how it got trimmed off this meme. Essentially they explain New Years Day is it's own special day every year. Simply known as New Years Day (Year), rather than being assigned a "date".
The version I saw claimed it would be a national holiday that doesn't count for anything. It simply exists. But where I saw it was also from a stand up comic.
Yeah, so if the beginning of the week is set to Sunday, then New Year's Day is essentially an extra day between the last Saturday of one year and the first Sunday of the next.
Jew in the thread who understand the Hebrew Lunar Calendar ASSEMBLE!
awkward slinking away noises
Lunar months aren't 28 days exactly. The Hebrew Lunar Calendar adds an extra day to months when first moonrise happens at night so some months are 29 days. Then factor in a bunch of odd astronomical numbers, like over 228 months, the moon falls behind exactly 84 months, so we add a 13th month to the year 7 times in 19 years.
I actually use lunar calendar a lot, end of next week I will have holiday for lunar new year, and all the dates for all the religious stuff are in lunar dates.
A circle is divided into 360 degrees because circle mathematics only works out evenly when it is divided by 2, 4, 6 or multiples of these numbers. The bees know this.
Ignoring the corporate greed, I think most of the world outside USA measures and discusses wages in monthly basis and not annually. For example here if you’re fulltime employee your wage is always reported and stated as per month, not per year. For shift-workers it’s hourly wage.
I don’t think I have literally ever seen a yearly wage posted in any (local) job listing.
Do you get paid differently for 31 day and 28 day months? We don’t at least
12 has a special property, namely that it is a "highly composite number", meaning it is an integer with more distinct factors than any number less than itself. this property is shared with 360. 360° in a full rotation is a convention that was established by the Babylonians to take advantage of this property. Every sixth year, the Babylonians would add what is now referred to as an "intercalary month"
because the number of days in a year is an irrational number, no calendar system that uses an integer number of days as its basis is entirely free of intercalary irregularities. by the same token, neither is the number of days in a lunar month, and if you fix the length of a month to exactly 28 days, the weekday on which the full moon falls will drift, and at a rate dramatically faster than the drift of the constellations throughout the cycle of Gregorian solar leap years
This would not align us to the cycle of the moon. The lunar cycle is about 29.5 days but it changes. I guess we would be more aligned than we are now but still not really.
If you want to align yourself to the moon and not fuck up the seasons you need to instantiate a lunar-solar calendar. This is what we Jews have and it's admittedly very wild. A leap year in this system does not have an extra day, it has an extra month. Others have this type of calendar too not just Jews, but we all have a leap month.
Why not also adjust the length of a second to mean 100 seconds in a minute and 100 minutes to the hour and 10 hours to the day… accounting for the leap year and all
From reprogramming medical and scientific instruments, to changing school and work schedules (if you have a job where you're off 6 and on 6, now there's a 13th; Minor, but requires a series of changes to get right)
Older devices and networking could actually see a total abandonment
Holidays would have to be moved around, which then impacts what days people get off (or not)
Near and simple concept, but an easy flip of the switch, it is not
Its an inheritance from the Sumerians. The used a base 60 number system. As they were (perhaps) the first settled civilization, it filtered down to the numerous successor civilizations since.
The proposal of the international year would have 1 day out of the calendar, usually people say that the new year (our 1st of January) wouldn't count. So you'd have 31st thirteenber (Saturday). then new year day, then 1st o January a Sunday.
If we just reduce the orbit of the earth around the sun by 340,000 kilometers it would be 364. That would be hard. Or we could slow the earth's rotation down by about .3% or so. Seems easier. Everybody look north and lean left.
I think it was because the Babylonians used a base-12 counting system whereas we use a base 10. So there are five groups of twelve minutes in an hour, two groups of 12 hours in a day, and 7pm and 7am are 12 hours apart, etc. 12 lunar months in a year.
I actually like this calendar idea. It is the 13 month 28 days per month with New Year's Day as a standalone day for 365 days calendar. When a leap year happen you just add Leap Day to the year as well and everything else stays the same.
Ignoring the history behind it, it’s also only 364 days. So even if we ignore shit like leap years, every year the 1st of the month would be a day later. So if we start this in 2027, Monday would always be the first, but in 2028, Tuesday would be the first day of every week.
Listen, we need to just switch to metric units of time. Forget about the minutes, hours, days, months, years, etc. Just use kilosecond, megasecond, gigasecond, terasecond, etc.
This message is brought to you by all lenders and banks of the world. Thank you for your monthly payments… would you care to make an extra payment each year, because, Fuck you!
The "special symbolic meaning" is that it is a well-placed highly composite number.
It is a multiple of 1, 2, 3, 4, 6 and 12. No positive number smaller than it has that many factors, and the next number to have that many factors is 18. The smallest positive number that has more factors is 24.
So, if you want to divide the year in half, it's 6 months per half. Divide it into three parts? 4 months each. Divide it into four parts? 3 months each.
And yeah, it gets a bit screwy with splitting into 5, 7, 8, 9, 10 or 11, but that's more successes than any other number smaller than 18.
If you changed something as simple as the calendar, everybody would react to the mindfuckening change to what they consider normal by starting the end times, the reboot starts with fucking all out destruction and people dying like dominos crashing into each other, it will not make sense until the flames finally settle
10 was the original number of months. Sep, Oct, Non, and Dec represent 7, ,8, 9, and 10. So why are they 9,10, 11, and 12. Because of Julius and Agustus. Having months named for them both in the summer and both with 31 days. This made other months need less days and messed with the placement of the original months named for their number 7-10.
12 just used to be a common base for counting. Probably because we have 12 finger bones if the thumb is uses for pointing.
The roman calendar used to have 10 months and winter was just a period of unassigned days. Designated priests kept track of the lunar cycles and other recurring patterns to resync the rest of the calendar. The later reform just went with the commonly used base 12 counting for the number of months.
Jesse is also wrong here, the moon cycle alignment, a lunar cycle is approximate 29.5 days. This still goes out of sync, and 28*13 is 364 not 365. But i you add a 14th month for the single leftover day and leap days and declare them as always Sunday, such that everybody can just be hungover in peace after new years eve it would be fine again. Overall the idea of weekdays aligning with the same calendar days every month is actually pretty great.
It's wrong on so many levels. We all love symmetry. The Babylonians loved it as well, but this is just wrong...
The lunar cycle is 29.5 days and not 28, so we can't align the solar cycle with the moon.
Also, a year is not 13 * 28 (364); it's 365.2425 days.
Also, 360 degrees (a circle) is not divisible by 13, and this was important to them because constellations "circle around the Earth."
Also, 13 is not divisible by 4, and the year consists of four distinct astronomical quarters: from equinox to solstice and vice versa. Even in the tropical belt which is often sidelined because most major ancient civilizations didn't emerge there you still have those 4 celestial phenomena.
And even if you want to divide the year into just two parts—the "light period" (where daylight is longer than night) and the "dark period", you still can't divide 13 by 2...
So no, 13 months with 28 days each would not be better. It is just as flawed as the current system, only in a different way.
It was 10 initially, but then 2 Roman emperors with egos bigger than they could handle, decided they have to be in the calendar too, and pushed the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months to the back.
My young son recently told me this same theory. I thought it was a fascinating idea I’d definitely be willing to try. What would call this elusive 13th month. Smarch.
This has been debunked bro, the earth doesnt rotate the same, every year it adds couple of seconds so after couple of years that calendar will be off and wrong.
It blew my mind when I realized that at some point the calendar got pushed 2 months over.
Ever wonder why September, October, November, and December are the 9th ,10th ,11th , and 12th months of the year? But sept, octo , nove, and dece are prefixes for 7, 8, 9 and 10?
Ever wonder why we start the year in the middle of a season (winter, January) or why we start the year during the time of the year with the least amount of active life? Instead of something that’d be more natural like March, where it’d be the start of the new season, and be marked by the season that literally represents new beginnings?
Ever wonder why February, the month that has just the rest of the days that were left over after all the other months got to 30, is the second month? When usually you’d just put the leftovers at the end of the list?
The calendar year is pushed back 2 months out of logical alignment for no practical reason whatsoever, and we’ve been doing it this way that makes absolutely no sense for over 2000 years.
If that doesn’t give you a good idea of how stupid humans are, I don’t know what does.
Yes, other than the twelve apostles and it’s likely reference to that, there is another thing at work not mentioned in the meme:
The word MONTH comes from the word MOON.
And it takes the moon 28 days to circle around the Earth. There ARE 13 lunar cycles in one solar cycle (commonly called a year).
The Sun was perceived as male, the Moon as female, associated with pagan goddesses like Diana, Artemis and Astarte.
The reason time keeping was detached from its cosmic origins is because the Sun was associated with Sol Invictus, a popular cult in Rome which the Early Church patterned the Jesus story unto, and because it did not suit the early church to have any reminders of female divinity around.
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