KD^3C^3 - 20250316 Practice Trumpet Every Day
Another week. Still March
Do you ever have trouble remembering how many days are in a month? Maybe you've got a mnemonic like that poem, or the thing with your knuckles (which is what I use personally) or some other esoteric way of remembering that some months have 31 days and some of them have 30 and then there's one that has 28 or sometimes 29. Does that ever strike you as weird? Does it seem like there's got to be a better way?
I don't know why there are the months that divide up into inconsistent numbers of days. I could probably look it up, but I'm not going to do that right now. Instead I'm just going to speculate that, like so many things in human history, it's an amalgam of people making relatively reasonable choices with incomplete information. I know one of the Caesars added July and August because thy wanted to show off or be remembered or something (I guess it kind of worked) which is why September, October, November and December aren't the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months anymore. So maybe that one wasn't particularly reasonable.
But momentum is a powerful force. We've had this calendar for at least a few hundred years now, and it has seeped into every aspect of our lives. The world has been connected more and more to each other through computers and even as different cultures use different calendars, it feels like there is a general consensus as to what the calendar is shaped like, and what its months look like too.
Which makes the fact that there is probably a better way all the more frustrating. This idea/solution isn't mine originally, I first heard it from science communicator/author/youtuber/inventor of 2d glasses Hank Green.* And I should warn you, that despite a solution existing, it will probably never be implemented. So this is sort of cursed knowledge. Once you know it, you'll be stuck knowing it with no addtional recourse except for maybe telling other people about it. Like I'm doing now. You can stop reading now. I would not blame you if you did.
So here it is: 13 months that are 28 days long. 13 times 28 is 364. That is almost exactly a year long. The month would always start on the same day of the week, and each day of the month would always be on the same weekday for the same reason. Of, the 17th? That's a Tuesday. It's always a Tuesday.
Maybe you, like me, love that the dates of February and March line up (barring leap years) so you know that, for instance, Feb 16 this year was on a Sunday. I know that because today is the 16th and also a Sunday. It's nice and orderly. But we could extend that to the rest of the year too!
You're probably wondering about the bonus day at the end of the year. As you are smart people you have noticed that 624 does not equal 365, which is the number is days in the year. You are right! But we can deal with that. We already shove an extra day in the year every 4 years (with some exceptions, but we don't have time for that now) so why can't we just have a bonus day that is outside the calendar entirely? One day a year (two in leap years) we can just all agree that these days exist, but are not a day of any week or month. They do not have dates. We will still experience them linearly, but the day after the 28th of month 13 (we can work on a name later) will just be an extra day. We know it's there and sometimes it's 2 days. We'll skip days of the week for that day, and there will be an extra day between Saturday and Sunday once a year, and then January will start up again.
But it's not going to happen. I know it's not going to happen. There is a balance between the amount of work required to solve a problem and the actual scale of the problem. The calendar we have works well enough, and we have mostly muddled along with it as is. It's a problem of aesthetics rather than one of practicality. There are much larger problems in the world with an amount of necessary work to achieve them much smaller than what it would take to update all the calendars in the world. We should solve those first.
*Note: I think Hank green originally proposed 12 months of 30 days, with 5 bonus days at the end of the year, rather than my 13 months of 28 days. I like 28 days because then dates line up, which would not happen on the 12/30 structure, although the downside is we get fewer bonus days. If you can wave a wand and et either accomplished, though, I wont mind.
Do you ever have trouble remembering how many days are in a month? Maybe you've got a mnemonic like that poem, or the thing with your knuckles (which is what I use personally) or some other esoteric way of remembering that some months have 31 days and some of them have 30 and then there's one that has 28 or sometimes 29. Does that ever strike you as weird? Does it seem like there's got to be a better way?
I don't know why there are the months that divide up into inconsistent numbers of days. I could probably look it up, but I'm not going to do that right now. Instead I'm just going to speculate that, like so many things in human history, it's an amalgam of people making relatively reasonable choices with incomplete information. I know one of the Caesars added July and August because thy wanted to show off or be remembered or something (I guess it kind of worked) which is why September, October, November and December aren't the 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th months anymore. So maybe that one wasn't particularly reasonable.
But momentum is a powerful force. We've had this calendar for at least a few hundred years now, and it has seeped into every aspect of our lives. The world has been connected more and more to each other through computers and even as different cultures use different calendars, it feels like there is a general consensus as to what the calendar is shaped like, and what its months look like too.
Which makes the fact that there is probably a better way all the more frustrating. This idea/solution isn't mine originally, I first heard it from science communicator/author/youtuber/inventor of 2d glasses Hank Green.* And I should warn you, that despite a solution existing, it will probably never be implemented. So this is sort of cursed knowledge. Once you know it, you'll be stuck knowing it with no addtional recourse except for maybe telling other people about it. Like I'm doing now. You can stop reading now. I would not blame you if you did.
So here it is: 13 months that are 28 days long. 13 times 28 is 364. That is almost exactly a year long. The month would always start on the same day of the week, and each day of the month would always be on the same weekday for the same reason. Of, the 17th? That's a Tuesday. It's always a Tuesday.
Maybe you, like me, love that the dates of February and March line up (barring leap years) so you know that, for instance, Feb 16 this year was on a Sunday. I know that because today is the 16th and also a Sunday. It's nice and orderly. But we could extend that to the rest of the year too!
You're probably wondering about the bonus day at the end of the year. As you are smart people you have noticed that 624 does not equal 365, which is the number is days in the year. You are right! But we can deal with that. We already shove an extra day in the year every 4 years (with some exceptions, but we don't have time for that now) so why can't we just have a bonus day that is outside the calendar entirely? One day a year (two in leap years) we can just all agree that these days exist, but are not a day of any week or month. They do not have dates. We will still experience them linearly, but the day after the 28th of month 13 (we can work on a name later) will just be an extra day. We know it's there and sometimes it's 2 days. We'll skip days of the week for that day, and there will be an extra day between Saturday and Sunday once a year, and then January will start up again.
But it's not going to happen. I know it's not going to happen. There is a balance between the amount of work required to solve a problem and the actual scale of the problem. The calendar we have works well enough, and we have mostly muddled along with it as is. It's a problem of aesthetics rather than one of practicality. There are much larger problems in the world with an amount of necessary work to achieve them much smaller than what it would take to update all the calendars in the world. We should solve those first.
*Note: I think Hank green originally proposed 12 months of 30 days, with 5 bonus days at the end of the year, rather than my 13 months of 28 days. I like 28 days because then dates line up, which would not happen on the 12/30 structure, although the downside is we get fewer bonus days. If you can wave a wand and et either accomplished, though, I wont mind.