Christmas Always On Sunday? Researchers Propose New Calendar 725
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered a way to make time stand still — at least when it comes to the yearly calendar. Using computer programs and mathematical formulas, an astrophysicist and an economist have created a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity."
Not a bad idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first. It makes more sense and means more in the long run.
Way too much free time. (Score:0, Insightful)
Everything would be on the same day every year... (Score:5, Insightful)
... except equinoxes and solstices...
Re:Lunar anyone? (Score:4, Insightful)
Or we could just use a lunar calendar instead of a solar one and not have to worry about crap like leap years.
Except August will eventually be winter in the Northern Hemisphere. People like things happening in the same seasons.
And you thought Y2K bug was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
13 Months? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And you thought Y2K bug was bad (Score:5, Insightful)
You mean, "make money reprogramming everything." I wouldn't be surprised if the IT Consulting industry was behind this idea. Checking code for Y2K was big bucks . . . let's add a leap week, and break some more stuff intentionally!
Socialist pig! (Score:5, Insightful)
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first.
Never gonna happen. There are too many politically conservative idiots, like my mom, who believe attempts at converting to metric represent a "socialist" conspiracy, and almost literally scream at any attempt to remove Imperial units in favor of metric.
Socialist? The fucking metric system? Seriously?
The government already tried to phase in metric sometime in the 1970s, if I recall, emphasizing it in schools and installing additional signage on highways with metric speeds and distances. People responded to this with caterwauling and by shooting the road signs into tatters. Dave Barry summed up the final results the best:
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
Re:Again: Y2K in a bigger way (Score:5, Insightful)
The thought of going through every program looking for date logic that needs a total re-write yet AGAIN would be enough to make me change careers and take up tree farming.
There are billions of programs that need fixing, and every single one of them would need fixing by hand. There is no quick fix for date calculations and validations of dates, to say nothing of the mess that would be made of historical records and current contracts. Another monstrous boondoggle for no gain but a lot of pain.
Look, just as no one uses the metric system because of the inertia involved, no one would use this system either. We've solved all the major problems with the current system, there are no serious problems left that can't be solved with a 4 line rhyme, and a $2.95 calendar.
We all know its a goofie calendar and we've all made our peace with it, and there is nothing significant to be gained by messing with it.
How DARE the earth not revolve around the sun in even multiples of is revolution upon its axis!.
Okay, All Those Want.. (Score:2, Insightful)
..their birthday to NEVER fall on Saturday (the optimum night for a party), raise your hands.
Anyone? No one? Yeah, that's what I thought...
The government isn't willing to force it (Score:5, Insightful)
And that is what it takes. The government loves metric, all government contracts are done in metric (like surveying and so on, something I worked in for a time). However they won't ram it down people's throats which is what you have to do. People will whine and bitch. Hell my grandpa STILL whines and bitches sometimes. He's Canadian and over 80 years old so he remembers when Canada was on the Imperial system. He still uses it often when talking about various things.
I also can understand people's resistance, to an extent, because for normal activities it isn't helpful. Metric really only starts to show you how cool it is when you do things like inter-unit conversions. Things like "How much energy will I need to boil a liter of water?" and so on. For every day use, all you need is to have a sense of how much a unit is. Buying meat is no harder or easier in pounds or kilograms, you just need to have a sense for how much each is so you can ask for an appropriate amount.
Thus it remains a hard sell, and so the government has to force it if they want to make it happen. At a federal level, that is pretty well impossible.
Months will always be imperfect (Score:4, Insightful)
We just need to accept that unlike some measurements, which we can make fairly arbitrary and thus set to whatever we like, days and years are things dictated by the Earth's movement and thus don't work out nicely. Doesn't matter what we'd like it to be, it is what it is. The fact of the matter is that the Earth doesn't have an integer number of rotations in the amount of time it takes to go around the sun.
Given that, it doesn't make much sense to fuck with the calendar. Yes there's a lot of silliness, like February being so short. However since any changes we make are still going to make things imperfect, let's just not bother. What we have works, even if it isn't perfect. That's life.
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:2, Insightful)
how many mm is my 5/8" head bolt? how many meters are between my 16" on center wall studs? Why would all my roughly 1 mile apart main streets now be stuck at 2.4ish km? to me, there is just far to much that is dependent on imperial measurements that getting people to think in them is not going to happen.
Go one better ... (Score:3, Insightful)
If youre going to have Christmas on Sunday, make every day a Saturday. ... ummm ... on second thought, that kind of stinks ...
Nobody gets the "lunch-bag letdown" of disappointment Christmas day.
No big post-Christmas debts for stuff that broke within hours.
No going to work - ever - unless you work on Saturdays.
No having to take the garbage out Sunday night for Monday morning
Conclusion?
Don't you DARE! You already screwed it up enough messing with Daylight Savings Time!
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:4, Insightful)
You're forgetting unary. How many fingers are on a normal human hand? The answer is 1111111111.
Unary is great for adding, you don't have to do anything at all. What's 11111+111? Just remove the '+' and you have the answer.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:4, Insightful)
they should have called it "Smarch" instead of "Xtr"
"Lousy Smarch Weather!!" Homer Simpson
Re:Fix the real problem... (Score:5, Insightful)
The moon is doing that for us, at a rate of 15 microseconds per year... you'll just have to be patient. ;)
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)
"how many mm is my 5/8" head bolt?" - 15.875.
"how many meters are between my 16" on center wall studs?" - 0.4064
"Why would all my roughly 1 mile apart main streets now be stuck at 2.4ish km?" - for the same reason all your streets which are now about 1.25ish miles apart will now be a nice round 2 km apart.
Any other pointless questions I can help you with?
Just how do you think every other country in the world, with a handful of exceptions, converted to metric? By JUST DOING IT, that's how. Funny. It didn't hurt any of them, or overtax people's brains there.
Just think how superior anyone with a halfway working sense of math is going to feel for a few years until everyone gets used to the new way.
Re:Socialist pig! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's funny. The military, in some ways, is the most progressive part of the American government. Where was metric first widely adopted? Where was racial integration first introduced? Where did we first phase out the use of pennies?
Cut the politicians out of the bureaucracy and you can actually make some progress.
Re:The government isn't willing to force it (Score:4, Insightful)
Just out of curiosity, are you Canadian? And was Canada surveyed entirely using metes and bounds? Because I suppose I could see an SI conversion being made with that sort of system.
While the US government also specifies most things in SI (and in fact, SI is the law of the land), surveying will probably be the last bastion of the old Customary system.
The PLSS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Land_Survey_System) was an extremely forward-looking and rational surveying system for its era, and almost the entire continental US uses it. All real estate, all farm and ranch development, all city and suburb development follows the grid established by the PLSS. County maps in most of the midwest look like a checkerboard because of it. In Phoenix, for example, all of the streets are laid on the original survey lines. This grid is so firmly established as a part of our economy and legal system, that there's not a snowball's chance in hell of it being switched to SI in my lifetime, and I'm a rather young man.
Even if GPS uses SI internally, it's hardly any effort for a computer to make the conversion for its human user. It would, however, be an exercise in masochism to require surveyors and the government land offices to stop using increments and fractions of 1 mile and pretend that the grid is actually based on increments of 1609 meters.
Re:I was with them until (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately people are a lot dumber than you'd expect. A surprising high number of otherwise intelligent technical folks don't know what timezone they're located in at all (although they usually can figure out what state they're in or they can tell me the current time and I can figure it out -- Or just assume EST, since most everyone else knows they're not the only timezone in North America)
Even when working with specific individuals on a regular basis, timezones confuse them. One day they'll schedule a meeting at 2pm their time and email me about it, the next time they'll mean 2pm my time. Then to improve things they'll fire up Outlook and invite me to a meeting, but instead of using Outlook's timezone functionality they'll schedule it at 2pm meaning 2pm my time, which Outlook converts into my timezone automatically giving me a meeting at 12pm.
Oh and to make it more annoying, my current contract has a habit of adding a time-zone: field on internal notes discussing customer communication, but it's +/- the number of hours from their timezone (which is +0100) rather than basing it on GMT/UTC.
Now try it with daylight savings time when you have different regions changing on different weeks. Imagine trying to figure out when a conference call will happen when you have participants in California, Phoenix and someone in Germany? Sadly, not a made up example. (For those who don't see the difficulty in this, Phoenix doesn't observe DST, California and Germany do but starting/ending on different weeks of the year, so you can't even rely on adding or subtracting the number of timezones)
How about when you call a toll-free 1-800 number in the US or Canada and are told their hours are 8:30am-4pm and to call back then, followed by a click. Now what?
Either way people will need to figure out schedules are different depending on region, but at least if we ditch timezones and all talk about the same clock, we won't have to first guess at the other person's mindset, location AND local legislation to determine what they mean by "2pm"
Re:Socialist pig! (Score:4, Insightful)
the world is metric and so should be the USA. Inch, miles, feet, oz, liquid oz, Fahrenheit...etc. Just ridiculous.
The world apart from the USA isn't metric; go live in the UK a while and see units what they measure road distance in, and what unit of volume they use to measure beer at the pub. Ask them how much they weigh too: they'll give you a number of rocks as their unit of weight.
Re:Time Zones... (Score:5, Insightful)
With most cities daylight hours aren't actually enough anyway. A large enough percentage of the population works non-standard schedules that you need their specific waking/working hours.
Same for business. Lots of cities have restrictions on activities during the day and only take deliveries overnight.
As people move more and more to a non-farming schedule timezones become less relevant because "daylight hours" simply don't matter. Knowing that they are available from 17:00 to 9:00 is enough. You don't need to take their 12:00pm to 4:00am then convert to your local time.
Re:3L 2L (Score:4, Insightful)
Was thinking the same thing. I never bought 3L bottles anyway, they went flat before I could finish them.
Now that I think about it, we already use metric for lots of stuff like colas and water (most are now metric, litres, half litres, 2 litres) Many can foods are done in metric (they have to have both by law anyway). Even car speedos are required to have metric. I love cruising the highway at 120kph. (and so does my lawyer). All medicine is metric. All science is supposed to be in metric (oops NASA!).
If you want to get us Americans to use metric, all you have to do is require the most important thing we deal with to become metric: gasoline purchases. Everything else will follow. Gas is the most important thing to us, it is what we spend half our income on, and what we bitch about the price of most. As to temperatures, I really don't see C being that much better than F (the degrees are too fat in C) but that isn't that hard to get used to. Rate cars only by litres per 100k, and change the laws so it has to be sold by the litre, and within 10 years, problem solved. Besides, the old die hards that insist on using Imperial...well, they don't die that hard, and they are getting older.
Speaking of metric, I have noticed that different European countries use metric differently as well. Some will list a 6+ ft item as 2m, some will call it 2000mm. Yes, it is the same thing, but each country seems to have a preference for the default.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:4, Insightful)
Works great, except for those pesky solstices and equinoxes.
Oh, and that leap week every 5th-6th December, is that a work week? Will New Years be 2 weeks after Christmas some years?
And then there is that pesky problem of birthdays. If you were born on Jan 31, May 31, July 31, Aug 31, or Oct 31 (Gregorian), what is your birthdate on the new calendar? What about people born during a leap week? How do you determine their ages for legal purposes?
When would we celebrate Halloween?
And what about interest calculations when there is a leap week? That's gonna mess with some mortgages and other loans. They claim it solves the interest problem, but clearly it doesn't.
As another said, "Simply adjust the earth's orbit so we have 360 days in a year". Well, actually, 364 days a year would work better. And while we're at it, adjust the moon's orbit to exactly 28 days. Those would solve the real issues and give us a truly consistent calendar. Until then, let's live with the messy calendar we have.
As for eliminating time zones, that's an even bigger mess. At least now when you calculate that it's 1am in another time zone, you know with some level of certainty that it's not a good time to phone. Meal times, work schedules, etc would all change with what we now call "time zones", so it would be more confusing, but wouldn't eliminate time-zones at all.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:4, Insightful)
Then every 5-6 years, there's a leap *week* at the end of the year after December
Which is why everybody above about 40 degrees north would hate this calendar, and instead want the extra days at the end of June.
Re:3L 2L (Score:4, Insightful)
What people here neglect to mention is that for a lot of things, like bolts or screws and a million other things, there really aren't good conversions available at all.
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
Even in Europe, ostensibly metric, they haven't really made this transition at all.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:2, Insightful)
Actually, the World Calendar is a far better proposal than this new one. Adding Worldsday and Leapyear Day makes a better system than adding a week every 5-6 years.
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed, it's hardly just the military. We have a huge amount of previously existing infrastructure that would have to either be torn down and replaced or cobbled together out of a mishmash of metric and customary measured components.
Every other country in the world has converted, and they all had a "a huge amount of previously existing infrastructure". In Australia, for instance, which converted in the 1970s, first they did "soft conversion" where instead of a pint of milk you got 560 cc. Eventually most quantities shifted to round metric equivalents. Milk, for instance is now 1/2, 1 and 2 litre cartons. In the building industry, they just went from the arcane mishmash of feet and odd fractions of an inch to millimetres. The few things where the tolerances really did matter, like screw threads, you can still get SAE standard as well as metric. Nothing was "torn down" just because it wasn't metric. Things just were replaced as they wore out. There's no Thought Police forcing everyone to purge old measures from their daily lives.
Re:Socialist pig! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously... The UK isn't part of the world. They even drive on the wrong side of the road. You can't trust a system that is that much fucked up ;-)
Re:Socialist pig! (Score:4, Insightful)
For answering the specific question, "How hot (or cold) is it outside?" Fahrenheit is damn near perfect. 0F isn't just cold... it's the point where it genuinely starts to become *dangerously* cold.
No, Fahrenheit is just what you're used to. 0F is no more "the point" than 5F, -5F, 3.42F, etc.
In weather terms, 0C is almost meaningless...
Well, it means water will freeze. There's quite a lot of it outside, it freezing marks an important change in the weather as far as I'm concerned.
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:4, Insightful)
The military (in any country) are driven by matters of life and death which trump merely economic matters. If the US military goes metric it's a hint that metric is superior to imperial units..
"Superior" doesn't enter into it--it's because of NATO.