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According to Kevin Tobin Julius Caesar wanted to start the year on the vernal equinox or the winter solstice, but the Senate, which traditionally took office on January 1st, the start of the Roman civil calendar year, wanted to keep January 1st as the start of the year, and Caesar yielded in a political compromise.

So our current calendar isn't really synchronized with anything: just when some ancient Roman big whigs got together every year. So, that's definitely not fit for the terran computational calendar start date.

As for the equinox, what year do you think we should sync that to? I'll see how that might work with terran computational algorithm....:
vernal equinox 1970: 6825600 seconds (79 days) after the UNIX Epoch.
Hmmm... not as round as -10 days, but maybe... What about 1977?
vernal equinox 1977: 228528000 TAI seconds (2645 TAI days) after the UNIX Epoch & 88 days after the 1977 TAI redefinition... easy to remember I guess. But then, how would leap seconds be handled? If they aren't handled then the day slowly drifts from midnight losing a full hour after about 4-5000 years (which is a pretty long time, so maybe leap seconds shouldn't really be accounted for). And maybe the terran computational calendar should simply keep in sync with TAI and then define year bases in some other way to handle leap seconds?

Calendar Epochs, in my opinion, are the most difficult things to pick when designing a calendar. I've had tons of trouble with it over the years.

And, as far as the beginning of units goes, I still like the thought of them changing when everything is in it's most dormant state.

Can you or anyone think of any other neutral accurately measurable Epochs?

According to Kevin Tobin Julius Caesar wanted to start the year on the vernal equinox or the winter solstice, but the Senate, which traditionally took office on January 1st, the start of the Roman civil calendar year, wanted to keep January 1st as the start of the year, and Caesar yielded in a political compromise.

So our current calendar isn't really synchronized with anything: just when some ancient Roman big whigs got together every year. So, that's definitely not fit for the terran computational calendar start date.

As for the equinox, what year do you think we should sync that to? I'll see how that might work with terran computational algorithm....:
vernal equinox 1970: 6825600 seconds (79 days) after the UNIX Epoch.
Hmmm... not as round as -10 days, but maybe... What about 1977?
vernal equinox 1977: 228528000 TAI seconds (2645 TAI days) after the UNIX Epoch & 88 days after the 1977 TAI redefinition... easy to remember I guess. But then, how would leap seconds be handled? If they aren't handled then the day slowly drifts from midnight losing a full hour after about 4-5000 years (which is a pretty long time, so maybe leap seconds shouldn't really be accounted for). And maybe the terran computational calendar should simply keep in sync with TAI and then define year bases in some other way to handle leap seconds?

Calendar Epochs, in my opinion, are the most difficult things to pick when designing a calendar. I've had tons of trouble with it over the years.

And, as far as the beginning of units goes, I still like the thought of them changing when everything is in it's most dormant state.

Can you or anyone think of any other neutral accurately measurable Epochs?

Completely agree - I like in the summer, it not getting dark until 8 or 9 and your sun isn't coming up at 4AM, and in then in the winter setting the clocks back so that the sun comes up at about 6-7 instead of around 8. Daylight Savings Time does exactly what it says - saves LIGHT for the DAY.

Most of us have computers, phones, and atomic (ahem really radio) clocks that update themselves - all I have to do is update the old alarm clock and the clock in my car.

Most modern calendar systems (such as Exchange) take timezones and Daylight Savings Time into effect, even across areas that observe DST at different times or across areas that don't observe DST.

So seriously, what is the worst that happens? You loose an hour of sleep? Go to bed earleir! You have to set forward or back a couple of older clocks? Boohoo, that takes, how long, under a minute per clock? You are late for work on Monday? Seriously, did you not realize that everything was off an hour on Sunday (argument doesn't hold, though, if you are like me and work on Sundays)?

I think people just like to moan and complain.

As for the original post, I am getting really pissed off at Ask Slashdot topics where the person could google the answer faster than they can type up a question to slashdot.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+many+time+zones+are+there

add that to

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=how+many+different+calendars+are+there

In particular, on the second link, I found this:

http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/lunarcal/types.htm

Which state there are over 40 different calendars in use

So, I got 40 time zones, and 40 different calendars.

Now, if you want to get technical, instead of adding them, you would multiply the two, as each calendar could be used in any of the 40 time zones.

40*40 = 1600 POSSIBLE variations across the planet.

Seriously, people, learn how to use Google!

There have been many calendar-reform systems proposed, and "leap-weeks" are a common solution. Wikipedia has an article on leap week calendars and lists five advantages and three disadvantages. It, in turn, points to a web page about leap week calendars that details nine of them.

Henry's own web page 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.

A real solution would be end to end authentication and encryption. I wonder why none of the supreme innovators have thought of this yet. But then again the NoSuchAgency wouldn't be able to monitor our inbox or product vendors spam our inboxs.

Well, it sounds like a good idea in theory, but what happens when the childporn distributors get wise and start infusing random text files into image files using steganographic programs? (an example I found within 15 seconds on google: http://www.hermetic.ch/hst/hst.htm) Wouldn't that change the hash? Perhaps not, as I don't pretend to understand the hashing process.

That's not geekery, that's comedic nonsense.

Undecimber is a real month often used in the Lunar Calendar. You'll find it in many time keeping APIs such as java.util.Calendar and the International Components for Unicode. Anyone who's done even a cursory study of alternate calendars should know that.

*huff* More geekery, indeed!

The Maya Calendar is discussed at the Calendar FAQ Section 8 and in more detail here.

The relationship between the Maya and Western Calendars called "The Correlation Problem" has been the subject of scholarly dispute for many years. The two best theories are 2 days apart and yield Gregorian dates for the end of the current cycle of 2012-12-21 and 2012-12-23, respectively.

...all those big ears: http://perso.club-internet.fr/bastien.lopes/photos .htm

On one hand, you have a small and efficient 1 watt wireless radio modem. It just works. Now, you wanna listen to the signal. You look around and find that the SETI antennaes are still in use, so you fell deseperate because you cannot borrow them right now...

But all those nice countries (http://www.hermetic.ch/crypto/echelon/echelon.htm ) made you a gift: huge HUGE HUGE antennaes that can even receive the signal of your 1 watt modem 40 miles away!!! I just hope they will provide me a truck to help me borrowing them to my home...
Thank you, America!

When (greater) Sweden was going to change from Julian to Gregorian calendar they stuffed it up, got one day out of sync with all Julian countries, so to get back in sync they added an extra leap day, creating the only 30th Feb in history.

They eventually made the change from Julian in 1753 by having (gregorian) 1st Mar 1753 after (julian) 17 Feb 1753 removing ten days.

Makes a leap second seem a bit insignificant....

If you have no idea about Julian (as in Ceasar) and Gregorian (as in pope) calendars, have a look here

I think you're talking about this. It shows the spiral construction you can make with primes and lets you set your own parameters. Also, it makes clear that 2 is prime because its only divisors are 1 and itself, the definition of prime. So 2 is *not* a weird prime because it's divisible by 2.