Not sure if you’re serious, but the 7-day week as so entrenched that no system that breaks it will see any adoption. Maintaining the 7-day week and the 365 day year is non negotiable for any kind of calendar reform.

While we obviously can't change the length of the year in days, is there any actual reason to have a 7 day week beyond "that's what we've always done"?

That’s really a strong reason, is it not? I have no idea for how long humanity has tracked the seven day week, but suspect it’s been well over 2000 years.

That’s a lot of tradition to discard.

Goes all the way back to the Babylonians, 4000 years ago, at least

Alot of religions kinda use the week for weekly prayer (all Abrahamic religions) so you kinda stuck with it since you need to take that into account

Yeah, momentum. I can't think of what authority would be able to change it and make it be globally followed. A tradition of thousand years, with roots in religious texts. I don't think it is within anyone's power to change it.

7 days for the moon to go in half a cycle. Full to half. New moon to half moon. A pretty good demarkation of a period of time between one day and a month (full lunar cycle).

The moon cycle is approx 28 days, which is 7x4.

The height of tides are rooted in this but have 7 day periods of increasing, decreasing, increasing, decreasing.

I don't know if thats reason enough to continue with it, but possibly part of the history

This is a pretty common approximation, but the average lunation is closer to 29.5 days.

But those 365 days don't have to all fit into weeks. Take 364 days, divide those evenly into 7-day weeks, and then have the one (two if leap) new days be not part of the weeks. Call it Caturday or something. Hold a contest.

The fine article talks about that---there was Jewish resistance to the idea because they felt that the Sabbath was always the 7th day and that would get out of sync.

I always figured the funnest thing would just be not to give it a name, and then when people ask be like, well yesterday was Sunday and tomorrow is Monday.

But the more reasonable proposal I heard was just to call it New Years Day/Weekend, depending?

Day’ymcdayface. That’s how that will go down.

Referring to “boaty mcboatface”

Or 365.25 one-day months.

Just plain day number as the calendar is worse than weeks imo. We want to optimise for the common case, and wanting to know the day of week and number of weeks from today is much more common than day of year.

For example, “our next meeting is w48.3” is much more understandable than “day 339”.

It's indeed harder to compute the time difference, but maybe it's also an indication that mental calculation should be practiced more.

I don't see how. You are making assumptions and claims for others with no support. To me that week.day number looks more complicated and less meaningful than plain days.

Perhaps weeks seems to make sense since we sometimes use them for offsets and ranges, like "this project will take 6 weeks" and figuring out how many days that is is inconvenient. But if we were using days then we simply wouldn't use groups of 30 or 7 for things like that, we would use groups and multiples of 10 or 5. We'd probably end up using kilodays and millidays too instead of years or minutes, and years would be arbitrary, but 51.9something weeks is already arbitrary anyways.

And as that # of weeks example just showed, .day is ambiguous with decimal fractions of a unit.

All in all I see no special obvious rightness here. It's kinda crap actually.

Mr. I-Can't-Recognize-A-Joke here to explain in painful detail why your proposal won't work...

>Or 365.25 one-day months.

or 365.2425 one day months and no squabbles every 400 years. (we will however be squabbling the entire rest of the time)

If you put Christmas in month 0.24 I'm sold.