Recently I added two fields to the header here: the current time as a decimal fraction of the year gone by, and the current date in a calendar I proposed 2 years ago, which dates the years since the American revolution, and has 13 months of 28 days, with one or two intercalary days depending on leap years, in which the months are named for the 13 colonies in the order they ratified the constitution.

First, decimal time

At the time of writing this explanation, the time is 5:33 pm in my timezone, and the date is January 4th, 2010. If we spread the year out on a number line, we would be 3 days and 17:33 hours past the beginning of the year. In fact my time calculation is carried out to the second, so that what is really being counted is the number of seconds since the year began. There are 31536000 seconds in a standard 365 day year (discounting leap seconds, but since leap seconds are added at something less than 1 a year, and since I truncate my decimal time to 4 decimal places anyway, these should never affect the calculation much), and another 86400 in a leap year, and by dividing the number of seconds elapsed into the number in a year, I can reach the percentage of the year that has gone by. So when I said it was 5:33 on January 4th, I could also have said that .0102 of the year (slightly over a percent) has elapsed. And this is exactly what I do when I say that it is now 2010.0102.

A New Calendar

First, the big confession: I do not expect my calendar to be adopted, ever. It is Americocentric, and functions very differently from the calendar we are used to today, and really, it is neither more accurate nor more convenient than the current Gregorian Calendar / Anno Domini / January 1st Year that we are used to. It is a novelty.

There are 365 days in a standard year, and 7 days in a week. 365 is tantalizingly close to 52 * 7, so that there are 52 weeks plus one day in a standard year, or 52 weeks plus two days in a leap year. 52 also happens to be 4 * 13, so that 13 4-week months would come very close to filling out a year exactly. Instead, however, we use 12 months. That’s fine, and no one is confused particularly, once they learn the rules, but my calendar opts for 13 months of exactly 28 days each. The months are named for the 13 original states, in the order: Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Georgia, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maryland, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Virginia, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island.

There are two days that do not, properly, belong to any year. They are Leap Day, when it occurs, and July 3rd, which would be a national holiday as well, in my system. Leap Day would fall between New Hampshire 16 and New Hampshire 17, which is no doubt confusing, and after Rhode Island 28 there would be a Holiday, before the next new year began on Delaware 1.

The year begins on Delaware 1 (formerly the 4th of July), and the year number is obtained by subtracting 1776 from the common year number. This has the unusual side-effect that 1776 would have been year 0, if this calendar had been in use then. It also means that a day in the year 2010 may belong to one of two years in the calendar, depending on whether it falls before or after July 4. Thus today is January 4, 2010, but this becomes 17 Maryland 233, for me only, and only when I have a chart to look at for translation. I will continue to provide the translation in the header for my own amusement.

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