A Calendar for 10-Fingered Humans
It happened sometime in September.
I was lying in bed and thought: "Why the hell is September the 9th month of the year ?"
I mean, in almost every language 'sept' means seven, sieben, 7, sept, sette, siete, zeven ...
And why the hell is October supposed to be the 10th month of the year ? if in any language I know of 'Okto' means eight, 8, acht, otto, ocho and November means nine, 9, neun, nueve, nove, neuf
And December means ten, 10, dix, dieci, diez, tien, but December is still supposed to be month No. 12 ?!?
Or there must have been a time, when the year was divided into 10 months instead of 12 months.
And ... by all means, humans with 10 fingers would always divide one year into ten months. Everything else would be plain stupid.
So why 12 Months a year ?
Why does a word like 'Dozen' even exist ?
Why 12 hours a day ?
Why 60 minutes ?
Why 60 seconds ?
I thought "This does never make any sense, except .... at some time ... ... humans with 12 fingers must have existed."
Now this is a strange thought, and I left it pondering for some time, but then it became too much, so I jumped out of bed, and walked right to my computer in order to google "6-finger hand" (I think you can do that yourself).
If you have 6 fingers on each hand, the dozen becomes very familiar for you, as well as the half-dozen.
And you would likely divide the year by 12 months instead of 10, and you would give the day 12 hours instead of 10.
Then I found out that 'decimal time' (you can google that yourself) existed during the french revolution, and that watches were made, that divided the day into 10 hours, the hour into 100 minutes and the minute into 100 decimal seconds.
But I think this decimal time system must have existed before the french revolution, because else there would be no reason to call the unit of time the 'second'.
Do you understand ?
Second means 2nd, which means that the second is just the 2nd unit of time, and there must be the first unit of time too, perhaps the prime.
If one day has 200.000 decimal seconds (primes), then 1 prime = 0,43200000000 seconds and one second = 2,3148148148148 primes.
Okay, then I thought how a calender would look like if it were created by 10-fingered humans, instead of 12-fingered humans.
You can find my calender here: Altmann_Calendar.pdf
If you divide the year by 10 months, then one month does have 5 weeks, and I was really surprised how simple everything would become.
Every year starts with a monday. Every month also always starts with a monday and has either 36 or 37 days (including leap years). The insertion of extra holiday(s) at the end of each month make day-of-year, or calender-week calculations very easy, almost obvious.
There is a downside of course: it looks very regular, almost boring ...