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by drostie
4214 days ago
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Well, we already do math in a crazy-radix system for time, and the not-easily-divisible unitless variable of (1 year / 1 day) means that we can't do too much better -- we can reduce the problem to about one crazy radix, but no smaller; that radix will probably always depend on the value of the more-significant number in the date (the year). But yes, we probably should quash the "variety is fun" argument early in the discussion. The problem is that it's a persistent low cost in the back of everyone's heads. Sure, when you think about it you might like it a lot, but it will then stress you out in hard-to-perceive ways during the rest of the year, with no real benefit to show for it. The huge error that Eastman made was to keep the same month-names for the other months. This is a bad idea; if two systems are going to exist in parallel they need to be disambiguated in practice. |
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The problem is, you'll find, that naming things is an incredibly political act. Agreeing on a new name for anything is a terribly complicated process, and when you're talking about something every single person has a stake in... well, it would have never happened. He tried very skillfully to bypass all that, and basically succeeded.
No, his mistake was to underestimate the clout that religious tradition still had on large sectors of the ruling elites. Even now, when we pride ourself in the "scientificness" and rationality of our societies, we're still enslaved by stories written by agrarian priests at the dawn of civilization -- in many ways, it's worse now because nobody would even entertain proposals as bold as modernizing a system we've been using, almost unchanged, for two millennia, no matter how broken it might be.