this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2024
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So they nailed it with the 28 day calendar and we are stuck with this one
well yes, but 28 day months dont divide nicely into 365/366 days, so it would not have worked well.... uh, hang on. i'm being handed a note. huh. apparently our current calendar also doesnt solve this neatly at all, and is in fact a patched monstrosity more batshit than anything any single malicious person could come up with. well.
Anyone working with dates and times was cursed in a past life. Timezones are a pain to work with. Daylight savings sucks. Some countries change daylight savings at different times. Some countries change timezones sometimes. Go further back and some countries had their own leap days. Different calendars don't form neat cycles and must be manually synchronized every few years. Did you know Easter, for about 300 years, needed to be announced by the Pope each year because it was a lunar holiday based on a Jewish calendar but the Christians followed a different one? Also, every now and again we throw a leap second into the computers because the Earth's rotation is gradually slowing down and 365/366 days isn't quite precise enough anyways.
I once read that when Sweden decided to switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar they didn't do it all at once, disliking the idea of jumping so many days forwards/backwards (I can't remember which way the Julian is out of sync). Instead they opted for a plan to move their calendar one single day every year over several decades. I remember the place I read about it saying that it just confused everyone and the plan was scrapped after a few years.