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."
Christmas (Score:3, Funny)
is not for grinches, you can't have my day off.
Everything would be on the same day every year... (Score:5, Insightful)
... except equinoxes and solstices...
Re: (Score:3)
But they're not on the same day every year now, so not a big deal.
Oh, and Easter wouldn't be on the same day every year either, due to the moon.
Re:Everything would be on the same day every year. (Score:4, Informative)
Um, you might want to check that. Equinoxes (and solstices) mostly are. The only variability is because the terrestrial orbit is about 1/4 day longer than an integral number of days, but the effects of that are kept to a minimum due to leap years. We have an approximately astronomical calendar.
That the 7-day social cycle doesn't fit into the 365 day calendar is the source of most of the perceived and actual variation in dates (eg, American Thanksgiving is always a Thursday, President's Day is always a Monday, etc., which means those dates will never be the same from one year to the next), in addition to events which are determined by lunar cycle (like Easter, Passover, or Ramadan) which also doesn't neatly fit the terrestrial orbital period.
But as for equinoxes and solstices, they're mostly stable, varying by date only between two neighboring days. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox [wikipedia.org] .
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!
Eff that... (Score:5, Funny)
My birthday would always be on Monday.
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.
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:5, Informative)
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:Not a bad idea but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Not to mention, who is actually making progress eliminating dependence on fossil fuels?
If we won't do it for the environment, at least we'll do it for national security...
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:4, Interesting)
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. I remember I read that Napoleon forced the metric system into his army because it let his artillery perform ballistic calculations faster than the enemy (*).
It should be easy to see why using only base 10 for both counting and measuring is better than mixing base 10, base 4, base 8, base 12 and maybe a few others I miss because of ignorance (I've been living all my life in a metric country).
(*) After a little googling I found the web page where I read that. It's about the physics of motorsport http://www.getfaster.com/Techtips/Physics6.html [getfaster.com] so it's not an authoritative source for historical matters but it's a clear example of why metric is better.
I quote
Plenty of examples are provided there.
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.
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Military?
I thought they were already pretty much metric.
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I have a 1986 military-surplus HMMWV. The engine and transmission have metric fasteners, while the body and chassis have inch fasteners. The engine (GM 6.2 liter V8 diesel) and transmission (GM Turbo Hydramatic 400) are based on civilian designs with minor modifications, and inherited the metric fasteners from their civilian counterparts. The body and chassis are a mix of custom-designed parts and standard stuff that's common across US military vehicles (especially many electrical components which are inter
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:Not a bad idea but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then let those standards stay. I'm working on a standard spacing of 2.54 millimeters when doing MC work, take a wild guess where that comes from.
The only drawback is that after a while some standards won't make sense anymore. Take the water pipes. Water pipes marked with a "1" were actually once 2.54cm wide (i.e. 1 inch) on the inside. Leading to an outside diameter of about 33 mms, dictated by the properties of the metal used for the pipe, and the requirement to withstand the water pressure reliably. After a century of metallurgy, we now have pipes with thinner walls at equal strength. Since all the screws and other plumbing equipment relies on the outside diameter (since, well, where do you attach the connectors?), this leads to a bigger inside diameter that has nothing to do with an inch anymore.
But that wouldn't be different if we still measured pipe diameters in inches, of course.
Re: (Score:3)
http://www.mycheme.com/technicaldata/standard-pipe-sizes.html [mycheme.com]
So I guess they must sell non-standard standard size pipes.
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.
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.
Re:The government isn't willing to force it (Score:5, Informative)
For every day use, all you need is to have a sense of how much a unit is.
Here's a handy guide [xkcd.com].
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: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: (Score:3)
"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."
What most Americans arguing against metric neglect to mention is that there is already a metric system for bolts, screws, and a million other things, working perfectly, you don't need to convert things that are working, just start new with metric equivalent as you start to build new gear.
A Gearbox is built with SAE Bolts ?, keep building it
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.
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Neighborhood streets, such as those between Baseline and the 60, are typically bent around for traffic calming. Cul de sacs are drawn in because people like living on cul de sacs; within a subdivision, there are a lot of considerations other than map simplicity. Obviously there is some deviation for geography (mountains, for example), and the highways cut across lines in many places. North Scottsdale has a lot of geography.
All of the *major* streets and most of the minor ones, from Litchfield Park to Apa
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Exactly what kind of standards do you think street-straightness is held to? ;-)
Picture this: there's a grid of lines covering this state. The lines are 6 miles apart (north-south, east-west). The north-south divisions are called townships, the east-west divisions are called ranges. Each of these squares is divided into 36 sections (square miles, 640 acres). Each of these sections is divided into quarter (160 acre) and 'quarter of quarter' (40 acre) sections, and so on. This is why "40 acres" is/was su
Re:The government isn't willing to force it (Score:4, Interesting)
I think it could be done if it was done unit-by-unit. Start with volume - we already buy 2 liter sodas, replacing the lingering pint, quart and gallon items shouldn't be hard.
Then, distance. Most people use it in terms of speed - miles per hour - to stay within (or mostly within) speed limits. Simply change all the limits to metric, the other uses of the mile will follow.
Temperature will be the hardest, since there's few personal reasons to switch. Save it for last, so you can make the argument that "this is the last one holding us back".
Remember, the US has been teaching kids metric for decades. Most of my generation would be fine with metrication. It would take some getting used to, but we know the theory at least, even if I don't know how to estimate in it well. It's just the older generations that are more reluctant, that are holding us back. Once the baby boomers start dying off, I bet we'll see quite a bit of progress being made on this front.
Re:Socialist pig! (Score:4, Funny)
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?
How about approaching it by telling those same people that using Imperial units is propagating the British rule over America and until it is dropped, the US will never be truely free?
Re:Socialist pig! (Score:4, Insightful)
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: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: (Score:3)
British roads (and railways) are funded, designed and constructed in millimetres. Both are only signed in Imperial. The design standards even state things like positioning a new road sign 300m from a hazard and labelling it "300 yards", presumably with the intention to change it, eventually.
Beer and cider in pubs is sold in multiples of a half-pint, but in shops it must be labelled in mL, common sizes are 568mL (1pt), and 500mL.
Wine in pubs is metric (some multiple of 25mL, I can't remember exactly -- 175
Re: (Score:3)
Good god, temperature is the *worst* part of the metric system. I mean, WTF. How often does anybody genuinely *care* that the freezing point of distilled water at sea level is exactly zero degrees, and the boiling point of the same is exactly 100?
It's the other way around. When snow does not melt on the grass but turns into a morass on the street - I know it's about -1 to +1 C. In other words I can use nature as a thermometer because nature consists of a lot of water.
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.
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Nonsense. A can of Coke in the US is 12oz; it's the 355ml which is the secondary label. Milk is packaged and sold in customary units; again, it's the metric unit which is the secondary label. Gasoline is sold exclusively in customary units. True, liquor is metric (though we confuse things by c
Re: (Score:3)
Metric won't happen without a really big stick. Fuel pumps would probably change in less than 24 hours if there was a 1% tax on sales measured in gallons.
RE: Binary is the way to go.... (Score:5, Funny)
Wow, you're right. In binary I can count to 1023 on my fingers and 1,048,575 if I use my toes...
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Binary is the way to go.... (Score:5, Funny)
Besides it was a man who said "640K ought to be enough for anybody". Compensation anyone?
Re: (Score:3)
Re: Binary is the way to go.... (Score:4)
Ooops, you'll hit a problem when you get to 4 (00100).
Re: Binary is the way to go.... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, but it is prone to misunderstandings. Last time I ordered four beers for me and my buddies, we were thrown out.
Says you.... (Score:5, Funny)
Binary is the way to go; it is the only irreducible base system.
Pfffft....maybe if you're an ignorant plebe. You'd be amazed what I can do with my unary counting system. It beats binary hands down.
Look at that, it's one o'clock again. Time for another beer. You know, just one....
Re: (Score:3)
Time for another beer.
Are you sure that's not the urinary system you're counting on?
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: (Score:3)
How many fingers are on a normal human hand? The answer is 1111111111.
On one (1) hand? You should see a doctor (or drink less).
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Actually, unary works great with addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Seriously. It helps legibility if you use the comma every five places, which matches the common form of unary math, the tally mark [wikipedia.org] system.
1111 * 11 = 1111 * 1 + 1111 * 1 = 1111+1111 = 111,11111 [ 4 * 2 = 8 ]
11111 * 111 = 11111+11111+11111 = 11111,11111,11111 [ 5 * 3 = 15 ]
1,11111 / 111 = 1001, but there are no zeroes, so = 11 [ 6 / 3 = 2 ]
That all this works doesn't so much reflect anything magical about the unary syste
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: (Score:3)
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.
More to the point, aside from compatibility with the rest of the world (may or may not be overrated depending on situation), what does it really get us?
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:5, Funny)
Barbarian.. here in the REAL civilized world, a glass of coke at a restaurant is about 5 Liters. usually coupled with a 3 meat patty burger covered in gobs of crap and fries dipped in salt and sugar.
We are the the most civilized, I would strike you down but I can't reach my sword anymore and get get up from this couch.... I stab at thee with my sausage fingers....
BRING ME MORE SUGAR AND FAT!
Re: (Score:3)
BRING ME MORE SUGAR
Did you mean to write "high-fructose corn syrup"?
Re:Not a bad idea but... (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know if it's true, but I heard once that in the 70s, the gas stations (here in the USA) tried to switch to metric, but at the same time they jacked up the prices hoping no one would notice because of the unit change to liters. People found out and got really pissed off, and the metrification movement got the blame for this and it became politically unpopular.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Or star trek like translators that convert units in real time, so each of us can be maximally free to use whatever system we choose.
Apparently NASA [wikipedia.org] didn't get that memo.
In a nutshell: (Score:5, Informative)
Jan 1 = Sunday, 30 days
Feb 1 = Tuesday, 30 days
Mar 1 = Thursday, 31 days
Apr 1 = Sunday, 30 days ...
May 1 = Tuesday, 30 days
Jun 1 = Thursday, 31 days
Then every 5-6 years, there's a leap *week* at the end of the year after December called Xtr, so Xtr 1, 2015 through Xtr 7, 2015 would exist as valid dates (in whatever order your country uses).
Re: (Score:3)
I believe that is what the Egypt- based cultures do already. Typically they have 28 day months, with a catch-up month every 7 years when the constellations are a whole month early.
Of course in almost all the cultures that do that the extra month is timed so that it can be a "celebration" month... Our current culture would never handle 4 whole weeks of shutdown like that.
Re: (Score:3)
Our culture can't even seem to handle an entire day anymore. That's a real shame considering that it REALLY needs to take some time to reflect once in a while.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:5, Informative)
Contrary to what some would like you to believe, Christmas is not necessarily a "Christian" holiday to everyone.
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Ethiopian calendar has thirteen months, with the thirteenth month being variable length and only a week or so long, IIRC, in order to do this.
They also are on a different year number than the Gregorian calendar, about seven years behind I believe. I went there in 2008 and found that Y2k had been the previous year in Ethiopia.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:4, Informative)
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Fix the real problem... (Score:5, Funny)
Simply adjust the earth's orbit so we have exactly 360 days on a year!
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That would cause some nasty global warming. How about slowing its spin?
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:Fix the real problem... (Score:4, Funny)
that's what 'wind farms' are for. One day they will reverse the power and the fans will slow the earth so that time will be adjusted for commercial interests, and not the public good. sorry, my tin foil hat slipped off.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:4, Insightful)
they should have called it "Smarch" instead of "Xtr"
"Lousy Smarch Weather!!" Homer Simpson
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Xtr? What the heck kind of a month name is that? Was this made by C programmers or something?
Call it Undecember (following the September, October, November, December pattern) or Obam (following the July, August pattern) or Jeez (following the gods pattern) or at least spell out Extra.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:5, Informative)
I remember a lecture where they went over why the months have the number of days they do. I'm not sure this is entirely accurate but at least it helps me remember what months have how many days.
It was a 10 month calendar where it alternated between 31 and 30 days and started in March (Mars) which was the start of nice battle weather and ended in December and they just didn't bother counting the days in winter and waiting for spring to arrive. Eventually January and February were added to the end. to get this.
1 March 31
2 April 30
3 May 31
4 June 30
5 Quintilis 31
6 Sextilis 30
7September 31
8 October 30
9 November 31
10 December 30
11 January 31
12 February 28 basically whatever was left over.
Notice the first 4 months are named after Gods. So when Julius Cesear came to power he renamed the 5th Month July after himself. Then they also changed the order so it started with January.
Then Augustus came to power and took the 6th month. But he didn't want his month to be shorter so he changed it to 31 days and changed the rest of the months
to alternate from 30 to 31.
So that is why the months have the number of days they have.
Re:In a nutshell: (Score:4, Informative)
They appear to have discovered the World Calendar [wikipedia.org], a calendar proposed almost a century ago. The only noticeable difference is that they shifter which month had the 31 days.
I don't know how anyone goes about researching something new without first exploring what has been done before. It's not a great show of research prowess on their behalf.
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: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"
And you thought Y2K bug was bad (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!
Each 12-month period is not identical (Score:4, Informative)
...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.
and then later in the article
This adjustment was necessary in order to deal with the same knotty problem that makes designing an effective and practical new calendar such a challenge: the fact that each Earth year is 365.2422 days long. Hanke and Henry deal with those extra “pieces” of days by dropping leap years entirely in favor of an extra week added at the end of December every five or six years.
So it does not remain consistant from one year to the next.
Uhhh... yeah.... (Score:3)
But then they go on to say:
Sounds like they're just shifting the complexity.
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Sounds like they're just shifting the complexity.
Exactly! The complexity of the solution is dependent on the complexity of the problem. Therefore, if the solution is simpler than the problem, there will be edge cases that are unaccounted for, and the solution will fail in areas. The solution to the calendar year depends on the complexity of the revolution versus the rotation, and no amount of attempts to simplify a fractional response will result in an integer response. (Not completely obligatory xkcd [xkcd.com]...)
What, ANOTHER "leap week" calendar? (Score:5, Informative)
There have been many calendar-reform systems proposed, and "leap-weeks" are a common solution. Wikipedia has an article on leap week calendars [wikipedia.org] and lists five advantages and three disadvantages. It, in turn, points to a web page about leap week calendars [hermetic.ch] that details nine of them.
Henry's own web page [jhu.edu] doesn't mention the existence of other leap week calendars. It merely says the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar is better than the Gregorian calendar, not why it is better than the nine other leap week calendars. And it doesn't seem to present any particular plan for getting it adopted, beyond saying "It CAN be done, folks, and the decision is YOURS, not mine. Each of you," and the proof that it's feasible is that his mother has adapted to quoting Celsius temperatures. But what's needed is not a better calendar, but a better plan than anyone has heretofore come up with for getting it adopted.
13 Months? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Why do we even need months?
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Which is the problem: the whole point of leap week calendars is to push calendar reform that starts each year on the same day without running into resistance from major world religions (e.g., Christianity, Islam, and Judaism) that are attached to a seven-day weeks with no breaks in between and which would presumably be unwilling to adopt a calendar for business purposes which caused their regular observances to rotate around the general week (though similar r
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You are aware that not all religious groups that have a day of observance that is fixed with regard to the week of the Gregorian calendar have it fixed on the same day as all other religious groups that have such a weekly observance, right?
And
Simpler solution. (Score:5, Funny)
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What about Wednesdays? (Score:5, Funny)
What about all of the poor schmucks whose birthday always winds up on a Wednesday, every year, for the rest of their lives?
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Just get rid of months (Score:3)
We don't need months. Just use quarters and call them seasons. Months were traditionally periods of lunar cycles, and aside from certain religious calendars, is really no well aligned with lunar cycles at all. Fundamentally, we just don't need them.
Time Zones... (Score:5, Informative)
Eh, not bad at first glance, but I can't be on board with zapping time zones. As someone who deals with international locations across the globe every single day, its a ton easier to find out "oh, they're 8 hours behind us" vs "Hmm, its 0900 Global. We just had lunch... what are they doing in New York at this time? Its 0900 there too - I think its still dark, but I don't know if its close to dawn or if they just woke up."
Sounds good in theory, but god it would suck.
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.
no authority (Score:4, Interesting)
Who, in the modern world, has George Carlin's ("I have as much authority as the pope; just fewer people believe it.") moxie to force a calendar change? The Muslim, probably conservative Jewish, and other lunar calendar followers aren't going to change (what if THEY all got together and proposed a "universal" calendar?). Americans still aren't rational enough to switch to the metric system of measurement, so they're going to use a more-rational calendar than their current?
The Shire Calendar (Score:5, Interesting)
The most elegant solution to the calendar I've seen is JRR Tolkien's (yes, him) Shire Calendar [wikipedia.org]:
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.
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: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!.
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No one uses metric Time or Dates is what I meant to say. see here: http://zapatopi.net/metrictime/ [zapatopi.net]
Hell, even the French rejected it and it was a French invention.
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We add a leap day about every 4 years in the current one, so it's not perfectly working by that metric to start with.
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Its sort of a sign of the arrogance of mankind that they are willing to say screw the facts, lets make it easier to count on our fingers.
Indeed, using complicated calendars is the only way to show appropriate deference to the universe. Seriously, what?
Or maybe they're aping the BMJ (Score:4, Interesting)
The British Medical Journals do a spoofy article around Christmas every year, in which they pick an absurd subject and whomp up serious-looking studies on them. They do it at Christmas I guess because April 1st is just so obvious.
Examples include
This article would fit right in to that tradition.