To be fair, if humanity exists for 6000 years then 150 years could truthfully be called a short time at the end of humanity. It's comparable to having a 30 minute delay on a 14 hour trip to Thailand or having a 30 minute delay on a 10 minute walk to the store; the first delay is short and the second delay is long despite them having the same absolute duration.
I guess this makes sense because the year 0 was skipped.
Surprisingly (to me at least) the reason that the end months are out by two is not the addition of the two obviously roman regal months (July - Julius and August - Augustus), but the addition of January and February. The original slightly legendary 10 month year started at March, and month five was called Quintills and six, Sextills. Those two months were simply renamed by Julius Caesar after he collapsed the roman republic. The two offending months were actually added by the more democratic roman republic before him.
I'd argue that that's only simple for computers, and even then conversion into other fields need to contain all kinds of caveats and special cases to cope with the conversion, because of leap years and correction seconds and stuff. I think being able to see how many years it is since something is important too, so I'd argue that as long as people can cope with three digit numbers almost as well as they can do two digit ones, it'd be simpler to make new years day day 0 for the year, and then count up to either 365 or 366 before declaring a new year, although there perhaps are benefits in getting the leap day out of the way early in the year is the middle of a northern hemisphere winter by adding it to february, so that the year always ends on Dec 31rd, no matter if that was actually 365 or 366 days since Jan 1st.
I think that I once heard that the year was considered to start with spring because that is when life starts to grow but was then changed to be more sun-centric and thus start at a time shortly after the winter equinox. I have no idea if that's true though.
I agree. In fact, that's the only reason that I can think off.
Supposedly our current calendar has been forced onto the people by a dictator. So that did not went well. Maybe it would have been better if there had been no dictator at all. It seems like the lack of a dictator does wonders for the quality of software.
It's not about simplicity but about ease of use. Working with big numbers is not easy. So we need multiple units which are multiplications of each other. Also, the day is a very important cycle to us so it should have special significance so that the system becomes easier to work with. E.g. it's not easy to have to recalculate every day at what time you must go to work. I also think that having it be year centric is useful since the year is also an important cycle.
If we're going to even consider changing the calendar, though, we should step back and reconsider even the most fundamental aspects of timekeeping.
Personally I think that the year cycle may be too important but I'm not really sure about that. I guess some people like farmers prefer to have the year cycle reflected in their calendar. At least the day cycle needs to be in the calendar, of that I'm pretty sure. Everyone uses that.
This calendar seems nice too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Fixed_Calendar
I like the consistency, but I think that the jumps should be the same as the used base. In fact I think that a day should be our standard unit of time and all other times should be derived using the metric system extended with base 12 prefixes. That could be comparable to the binary prefixes where they just put "bi" instead of the last 2 letters; e.g. "kilo" becomes "kibi". For base 12 this could be done but with "do" instead of "bi". So 1/12 of a day would be a dedoday ("deci" become "dedo"). and 1/12^3 of a day would be a "midoday". Though either "deca" or "deci" needs to be replaced for this system because they become ambiguous when they're base 12 versions are used. The metric system is not without flaws either.
ooh, i like that one.
We'd also need absolute earth-relative timekeeping, as neither of those two have constant cycles. Days are of different lengths as are years. The ground truth there would have to be determined as temporal distance from a determined point in time as measured by one or more atomic clocks in number of elapsed periods at a specific point of observation. We already kinda do this with GPS and the like.
What about five, seven, eleven, thirteen, seventeen, nineteen, ...? I'd say, the base to use should be a power of two.
