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by jowea 918 days ago
About understanding, we're used to it but you can't trivially know whether 02/05/2026 is a Monday. Even remembering whether July has 30 or 31 days can be a chore. Irregular months also can have some small annoying effects since "in a month" is not always the same amount of days. There's even the 360 day calendar for that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/360-day_calendar

Just one more in the long history of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_reform#Proposals

2 comments

Actually there are trivially easy ways to calculate DOW off the top of your head. No one bothers because it was never a real problem. People used to carry their calendar books on them to keep track of their engagements. Now we carry a smartphone.

Nevertheless, my colleague bothered to do it and he could tell you the DOW without pausing. He is of average intelligence maybe a little more intelligent than I (though I was better at mental math)

Actually there are trivially easy ways to calculate DOW off the top of your head.

Then what are they?

Year 2, month 5, day 2026?
I guess we could solve the "is it DD/MM/YY or MM/DD/YY?" problem while we're at it, but ISO8601 already did.
You appreciate that no calendar can get around the mod 365 and leap year adjustments? That's baked into the Earth orbit around the Sun