#calendar refactor

We've always had this conflict between organic growth and designed things. At what point do we try and organise the organic? I grew up in the UK in the 1980's and this was the post-decimalisation period. Britain had officially adopted the metric system however all the adults who had lived most of their lives dealing with the Imperial system had a hard time breaking their habits and use the new system. Consequently I learned neither system properly. I knew there were 1000 grams in a kilogram and 1000 metres in a kilometer, but this was "head knowledge" and I had no idea how heavy a kilogram was or how far a kilometer was. Neither did I have any concept of how many pounds went into a stone of weight, nor how it felt to hold such masses. The same for how long a yard or mile is and how I couldn't apply them to the distance between landmarks important to me: my mum's house, my gran's house, my school, the shops, the local tube station. I measured those distances in minutes taken to travel them.

Eventually I learned the metric system but was baffled as to why we still talked about height in feet and inches, weight in stones and distance in miles (and therefore speed in miles per hour).

Later in my life I went back and learned the Imperial system. I was rather surprised people were not happy to ditch Imperial in favour for a system where the numbers scale sensibly. Bearing in mind metric money is 100 pence in the pound, metric weights were 1000 grams in a kilogram, 1000 kilos in a tonne. Compare to the clownshow of imperial units: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_units

So Imperial vs Metric is a good example of an organic system versus a designed system. The thing is I love the Imperial system because it tells a story of people creating a practical system that has a direct relevance to them, and you can see how horses and carts, the industrial revolution and automation gave people such increased capability that they had to tack on units of a higher scale to the end of their hand-rolled system. The downside is after a century of accumulating cruft the system was complex and unintuitive. The numbers make no sense, the names of the units make no sense. Compare to the other system where, if you learn the word "kilo" means 1000, then you intuitively know a kilometer is 1000 meters or a kilogram is 1000 grams. The name literally tells you what it is and its relationship to smaller or larger units.

Here we come to the crux of my idea. The calendar. It's old and has cruft because it grew organically. There's no intuitive way to know how many days are in a month. You have to memorise it, often people do this with some sort of mnemonic like the "30 days have September, April, June and November..." but most people have to repeat it to themselves all their lives because we just don't need that info often enough. Typically you only care about how many days are in a month once a year! How about we make all the months the same length? How about we move a day from some of the 31-day months and give them to February? We started with four 30-day months, now we have 7!

I propose we move the 31st day from the remaining five months in to a special five day long year end/new year festival period. Mandatory public holidays. Six days long on a leap year.

So this is what it would look like:

Bonus points for moving July and August so they're the 11th and 12th months, since "Octo" means 8 so October should actually be the 8th month if you think names should mean something (and Nov = 9, Dec = 10)