16 years ago today I wrote up and posted a proposal for a new calendar: newcal.org
Having long been frustrated by unnecessary unevenness and other quirks of the Gregorian calendar, I designed and wrote up a more ordered, mathematically simpler, and more continuously consistent calendar.
Building up from the atomic calendar unit of a 'day':
* five day weeks
* six week (30 day) months
* two month (60 day) + a sync day bims¹
* six bim years (minus a day for non-leap-years)
After giving it an obvious name, “New Calendar”, and somehow getting a short speakable .org domain (newcal.org), I wrote code to do all the calendar computations and conversions.
The simpler calendar computations made me realize I had invented something that would help solve a completely different problem I was working on: an efficient date-based storage format for my new blog.
It‘s rare that an invention, or reinvention of something inelegant, actually serves a useful purpose. This was one of those rare exceptions.
I also taught myself and have kept practicing the use of ISO 8601 Ordinal dates for my own personal calendaring, which literally gave me a new perspective of time. A much smoother and more linear progression of time across the duration of a year.
Previously: https://tantek.com/2019/015/t1/10-years-ago-today-new-calendar
¹ https://tantek.com/2015/228/t3/bim-definition
² https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Ordinal_dates