Has anyone created a binary calendar?

score:10

Accepted answer

The core issue is that the purpose of a calendar is to track astronomical events, and in particular, their relations. The three that are universally tracked are the three that are obvious to anyone:

  • The rotation of the Earth
  • The movement of the Moon around the Earth
  • The movement of the Earth around the Sun.

The issue is that these time periods do not relate to each other in powers of two. The second is roughly 29 times the first. The third is roughly 13 times the second and 365 times the first. None of those ratios is remotely a power of two. This means that any calendar that uses powers of twos isn't going work for tracking these cycles, and thus would be basically useless on Earth.

(For units of time less than a day, it would work as well as anything as everything less than a day is fairly arbitrary.)

Upvote:-1

Just make a year be 225 seconds long. It matches well with the amount of seconds in a Gregorian calendar year. It's not useless. If it was, I wouldn't have mentioned it. It's purely binary and mathematically efficient. There is no leap year, day, second, anything.

This is purely just time since a specific date (ie. AD/CE 0001 Jan 01 @00:00:00 AM, UTC). My friend wanted me to recreate the calendar system, and I did it with relative ease.

64 seconds, 64 minutes, 16 hours, 32 days, 16 months (Binutes, bhours, bidays, bieks, bonths, beasons, byears, for example)

The year starts off at 0, like age. You're not 1 year old when you're born, so it waits a year until it says year 1. It's the same with the other measurements.

I used a spreadsheet to recreate the system, so I can easily enter an amount of (regular) time and it'll convert for me (I find minutes the most accurate when copy-pasting. More on that if you need).

Since the binary year is 33,554,432 seconds long, it closely matches a Gregorian calendar year averaging in 31,556,952 seconds.

I am aware of Leap years, so I accounted for that. I am NOT referring to a tropical year. And even if I'm still wrong, it's only up to a day off.

A binary year is NOT a Gregorian year, although they are both very close. If you still have anything to argue about, please tell me. I'll do my best to clarify anything as needed.

The link to the spreadsheet is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1jOofsyw50huVG3bKXyGGfpfcMWqqsH2jCBZKa1-uTFY/edit?usp=drivesdk

The link to the current time since aforementioned epoch: https://www.timeanddate.com/countdown/to?p0=0&year=1&month=1&day=1&hour=0&min=0&sec=0

Upvote:1

Yes. Time in UNIX relies on a measure based on the seconds elapsed since the UNIX epoch. This measure is natively described using a datatype called time_t, which is an integer, originally 32 bits wide and now 64 bits wide in order to avoid the Year 2038 problem. By my calculation, the current time is 1011110001110111001110011101111.

Upvote:2

Question: Has anyone created a binary calendar? Wondering if anyone has ever tried to make a calendar where everything is a power of 2, so maybe the day is divided into 16 and the hour is divided into 64, etc.

Short Answer:
Yes, Swedish-American engineer John W. Nystrom in 1863 as part of his tonal system proposed a universal system based on hexadecimals. The tonal system was a hexadecimal system for not only time and dates (including your calendar) but distance, weight, measurements, volume, geography and even coinage.. It was on the same scale and proposed as an alternative to the metric system. The Metric system was invented during the age of reason (1799) and based on 10's, as humans have 10 digits on their hands and feet. The motivation of the tonal system was to create a universal system based upon natural phenomenon of human discernible sound, which breaks down into 8 octaves, rather than being motivated by the digits on the human hand. The tonal system was developed in a time when the world was becoming obsesesed with sound. To that end, hexadecimal tonal system evolved independent and prior to computers.

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Detailed Answer
I think what you are asking is has anybody created a hexadecimal time system / with the resulting calendar. As you know binary is just a way to represent numbers as is Hex as is the decimal system. There is no inherent accuracy or inaccuracy as previous answers have intuited due to the numbering system as all three can represent any number positive or negative which the others can render. While Humans with 10 finger and 10 toes perhaps have an easier time counting using the decimal system, computers which think in on/off binary circuits handle binary better under the hood regardless of how the number is eventually represented. But really who wants to write long string of 1's and 0's to describe the date? So the happy medium between the two numbering systems is the hexadecimal. The sixteen based numbering system. 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,A,B,C,D,E,F

We all know the Romans used their own rather non intuitive numbering system which gave way to the wide spread arabic numerals (10 based). Similarly the old non intuitive imperial systems(which is still used in the US) evolved from the amalgamation of different local systems has largely been replaced by the 10 based Metric system invented 1799. Metric system coming out of the age of reason. The tonal system of the 1863 reflected a time when the world was obsessed by sound. The first telegraph(1830s), first phonograph(1857), and the first telephone(1876).

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