7date dashboard widget
Download the widget!
This post is about a mac os x dashboard widget I wrote. It shows the calendar date in a new measurement system: download it here. (Unzip & double-click the widget to install it.)
I use a different calendar system than most people, one that I made up, but that I think is extremely practical. I call it the 7date because it’s essentially the number of days passed in a given year, written in base 7. Any single number-of-days system is much better than the current month/day system, which is much worse than, say, the imperial metric system (inches, feet, etc) versus the SI metric system (centimeters, meters, etc). Because, for example, a single month is not a standardized unit of measure!! WHAT?!?! In the future, people will either laugh or just scratch their heads in bewildered amusement at our archaic measurement standards with respect to time.
I think it makes sense to use base 7 to measure days of the year. Why? Because weeks have 7 days. Weeks are very deeply ingrained into our culture. We are used to working Monday through Friday, and have many traditions of what to do on Saturdays or Sundays, etc. If I were a pure scientist trying to devise a universal system of time measurement for use on any planet, by any society, I would not use weeks. But I’m not being that abstract. I’m trying to be very, very practical. If we use a base 7 calendar, then we always know what day of the week a day is by the date itself, since the last digit is 0-6, each one corresponding to a given day. In the current system, the mapping changes at the start of each year, but we could alter the first day of the week to always be a Saturday, so that days ending in 0/1 are Saturday/Sunday, and then we would immediately know the day of the week of any date – for any year – based on this system. We could have a slightly altered idea of a month as 7 weeks (call it a 7month), and we would immediately know the 7month (and week-within-month) by looking at a single date — the month would be any digits excluding the rightmost two digits (e.g. May 3rd is 233., so we know 2 full 7months have passed).
The notation also becomes less ambiguous than current notation. Consider the date 03/04/02, which could by written by someone in Europe thinking of April 2nd, 2003, vs 116.2003.
This system has the added bonus of giving us slightly more weekend time every year.
There are some difficulties with using any new system of measure. Primarily, conversion. No strongly superior system of calendar measurement will be easy to convert with the current system, because the current system is so crazy. So, to be realistic, I admit there’s little chance of many people actually using the new system. However, I think that nerds would enjoy it, and I can personally enjoy the new system. I’ve used it for almost a decade now, and it works well.
However, partially since no one else uses the system, I sometimes find it hard to remember the date (I think most people forget the Gregorian date from time to time, so I think this is just human nature, not a shortcoming in the calendar system). It’s useful to have some tools to work with any calendar system, and so this post introduces a free dashboard widget for mac users. Just download from the link at the top of the post and double-click to install. It’s easy to remove from your dashboard if you don’t like it. It displays the 7date for today, like this:
PS In case any readers remember my old posts about 7date, I actually changed one small thing. I used to consider the first day of the year as 1.2011 (e.g.), but I changed it to 0.2011. The first minute of every hour is 00, the first hour of every day is equivalent to 00, the first second of every minute is 00, so it just made sense. There are a lot of other benefits of starting at 0, which I won’t go into here.