Slashdot Mirror
New Calendar Proposal
belg4mit writes "An astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins is pushing for
the adoption of a new, static, calendar. The
press release is written better than his site
but a little short on details.
Interestingly he claims this should be easy to implement and points at the hoops coders must jump through for the Gregorian calendar." Nobody is taking my 10 hour day plan seriously either.
"Wouldn't it be convenient if your birthday, Christmas, and the Fourth of July--not to mention most other major holidays--all fell on the same day of the week, year after year?"
No? What if your birthday is on a Monday? Nobody wants that. Everyone wants a Friday or Saturday birthday.
"Newton Week would pop up irregularly: 2009, 2015, 2020 and 2026"
Yes, that's far easier than keeping track of months with different numbers of days... not. I'd rather have 13 28-day months, with the extra day or two rotated through the calendar. I'd also like to see if we could slow down the Earth to create 30 hour days.
Timely and semi-related riddle.
Q - Why do computer geeks celebrate Halloween on Christmas?
A - Because OCT 31 equals DEC 25.
Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.
Trolling is a art,
..you want to reorganise the entire western hemispheres calendering system because the new one is easier to code?
Out with the old....
Freakin' hopeless.
Nobody is taking my 10 hour day plan seriously either.
Actually, it was the one hour of work that your boss didn't like.
bloody good idea. 10 hours a day. 100 minutes an hour. 100 seconds a minute.
I'm going to write to my congressman and ask him to lobby the standards organizations to study this.
Straight away!
no matter how good of an idea it is, something thats been used for hundred of years won't change out of convenane, thats just the way it is
but heck, im all for metric time
I will tell you what, once he manages to drag the American government and populace over to the metric system (kicking and screaming no doubt), then maybe, just maybe the world can have a listen. But realistically I don't see this ever happening, for a few reasons:
1) It being the same time and day everywhere still isn't that useful. Sure it's 3:00pm over in China right now, because it's 3:00pm here, but that doesn't tell me that the people there are in fact awake?
2) Frequent use of the term 'forever more' on his website. I think a lot of the problems we have with systems today are caused by the failure of the original designers to see A) any other possible use or improvement for the system, and B) Not designing the system to allow for other uses or improvements because of A. Perhaps once we are jumping from one planet to another in our space ships some changes will need to be made, who knows? Will this require a change to the calendar? Will it always be the same time on this other planet that has a shorter day, shorter year?
And finally, the big one
3) People don't like change.
paul reinheimer
I'm wondering why we ever stopped using this one.
Is anyone else getting load errors from slashdot? I think we're slashdotting it.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
oh well. probably should be working anyways.
What about all those people born on Febuary 29th? What about them I ask!
:)
4.) What happens to my birthday?
If, for example, your birthday is March 7, it will ALWAYS fall on a Wednesday, for evermore.
Christmas Day will always fall on a Sunday, which will be pleasing to Christians,
but, will also be pleasing to companies who currently lose up to two weeks of work to the Christmas/New Year's annual mess.
New Year's Day will always be on a Sunday, too.
Also, I enjoy the relative randomness of my birthday changing days. Since my birthday is in January there is the occasional bonus of a snow day on my birthday (has happened twice in recent memory). I suppose you could prove that having it on one day is just as likely as having it on random days but I like my odds the way it is
-Teiresias
Unfortunately, any effort to replace the current calendar will be met with grave opposition by the hyper-religious, who seem inclined to believe that a box on a chart MUST correspond with their chosen Sabbath (be it Friday, Saturday, or Sunday). This is why I prefer the Discordian calendar with five day weeks, it screws everyone up equally. It's also why I'm supposed to eat a hot dog every Friday. :)
Mal-2
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
So view here instead.
Knowing that part of our calendar is based on religious dogma makes me a little uneasy about our current calander and the new one.
Also this guy probably should have given a bit more warning. I mean the holiday vendors don't have time to print up the modified Girls of Hooters gift wall calendars.
Just a boy doing unproffesional IT work that's way above his head.
let's try going metric first, which is at least partially implemented in the united states. (i.e. sciences) if americans can't even switch to the metric system, i see no reason to think something as inherent as the calender system can be switched.
Could be very positive. It has lots of pros but the problem is to get everyone to use it. That's not happening. If we can't even use the metric system like 99% of the world, you really think we are going to change our calender system? THe problems that would occur when changing from American to Metric would be much worse with calender.
Only, it doesn't. About every 5-6 years or so he inserts an extra week in the calendar between June and July.
No, it's not every 5 years, and no, it's not every 6 years. It's sometimes 5, and sometimes 6. You'll just have to ask him.
So will someone tell me why this is any less difficult than what we currently use?
Interestingly he claims this should be easy to implement and points at the hoops coders must jump through for the Gregorian calendar."
.. only then I use a data converter.
I just use unix time (milliseconds since Jan 1, 1970). I heard it'll run out of milliseconds in 2038 unless I switch to 64 bits though.
So yeah I just use milliseconds since 1970 for any and ALL logging or storage (i am paranoid of when the time goes back one hour for daylight savings etc cause you get teh same hour repeating).. for displaying back to the user in an informal non offical manner
I mean no one paniced about what would happen when 1999 rolled over to 2000, so a tiny change in the calendar system such as completly altering it will just flow right through every system smoothly
Another proposal along the same lines
a r. html
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/calend
It could work, but making every day land on the same day of the week could result in some days being perpetually reserved at the country club or high school, for instance; that leaves little room for a change of dates to shake things up.
The parent is funny. Even if you think it's stupid, though, how could it get moderated "redundant"?
With all respect, I submit that the moderator is smoking crack.
Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by mere idiocy.
That would do away with the little rhyme I use to remeber how many days are in a month. :-D
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
... 13 months of 4 weeks each (13 times 28 days = 364) plus one or two extra sundays. That way you can have all months starting on the same week day.
Thank you for submitting your idea for calendar reform. However, we must reject it for the following reasons:
- ( ) It changes the seven day week or adds days outside the week.
- ( ) It has a day or days that are not in a month causing problems for writing dates, etc.
- (X) It has an unusual number of months in all or some years making it hard to divide a year into quarters.
- (X) One or more months have significantly more or fewer days than the others causing problems for monthly fees, etc.
- (X) The number of days in a year varies greatly from some years to others.
- (X) Some months are only in certain years and therefore the number of months in a year varies from year to year.
- (X) The number of days between a date in one year and the next varies form year to year.
- (X) It makes people keep clock time that does match the daytime, i.e. sunrise at midnight or noon.
Congratulations on getting 5 out of 7!google cache
Even this guy messes it all up, saying: "Whether you adopt C&T or not, PLEASE don't write dates as 01/02/03 any more! What the heck does that mean? Instead, on your check stubs, and everything else, from now on, ONLY use: 2003/01/02, if in fact you mean: 2003 January 2. This is the ISO standard!"
The page he refers to is correct, but he still goes on to ignore 2003-01-02, which is the correct ISO format.
I wouldn't be too optimistic if I were him...
Lunch hours.
Is it digitally signed?
how do you convert the new time into slashdot time?
you have been slashdotted in less than 10000 new seconds!
I think that sometimes inserting a 13th month called 'Newton', that is only a week long, is MUCH more inconvenient than anything in the current calendar.
He says that the new calendar will be good permanently... except on these years.
So whats the advantage then?
He could have at least called the new month 'smarch'
Unix is mysterious, and ancient, and strong. It's made of cast iron and the bones of heroic programmers of old -
I suppose COBOL programmers have to have SOME way to make money in Y3K...
J.R.R. Tolkein had a perpetual calendar for the Evles and Hobbits. They were outlined in some of the appendicies. Of course, there were only six days in a week, and some days fell outside of months.
I have left looking for me. If you encounter me before I do, stop me until I arrive at myself...
The bastard got rid of Halloween!! This will never work out!
"Some things have to be believed to be seen." - Ralph Hodgson
Sorry, that should have been "Congratulations on getting 6 of 8!"
Then my birthday will always be on a Saturday. I vote yes on this.
It's not a vote... awwwww crap.
I don't want my birthday on a Wednesday every year.
What about the poor saps that have it on Sunday ( so much for celebrating)
1) Aggies (Texas A&M) would need to switch from the "12 pairs of underwear" system.
2) The once-a-year event of celebrating the arrival of the same paycheck for working 14/15th the time will disappear. The French wouldn't notice this.
3) Doesn't fix the problem of daylight savings time... As Paul Harvey once described it, it's a bit like cutting off the top of your blanket and using it to cover your feet.
I notice the 30/30/31 day trend which repeats every 3 months. It looks really convenient, and you can much more easily correspondence between day of week and date on the calendar this way.
This sig donated to Pater. Long live
Just In Time for New Year's: A Proposal for a Better Calendar;
No more "30 days hath September, April, June and November"
December 2004
Wouldn't it be convenient if your birthday, Christmas, and the Fourth of July--not to mention most other major holidays--all fell on the same day of the week, year after year? Wouldn't it make life--or at least planning--easier, for instance, to know that Dec. 17 would always fall on a Saturday or that January 1--New Year's Day--would always be celebrated on a Sunday?
Richard Conn Henry, professor in the Henry A. Rowland Department of Physics and Astronomy at The Johns Hopkins University, thinks it would. He has designed--using computer programs and complex mathematical formulas--a new calendar that would make it happen.
Under Henry's plan, each new 12-month period is identical to the one that came before. Each month has either 30 or 31 days. January, for instance, would have 30 days, as would February, April, May, July, August, October, and November. March, June, September, and December would all have 31 days.
Henry, a physicist who also directs the Maryland Space Grant Consortium, says his new calendar would have "profound economic and practical benefits" if adopted worldwide. He is waging a Web-based campaign to make this happen by Jan. 1, 2006. Henry points out that this transition date is ideal, because New Year's Day 2006 falls on a Sunday on both the old and proposed calendars, facilitating a seamless transition.
"Just ask yourself how much time and effort are expended each year in redesigning the calendar of every single organization worldwide to accommodate the coming year's calendar, and it becomes obvious that my calendar would make life much simpler and would have noteworthy benefits economically, especially for businesses and other institutions," Henry said.
"With my plan, we can have a stable calendar that is absolutely identical from year to year and which allows the permanent, rational planning of annual activities, from school to work holidays."
Called the "Calendar-and-Time Plan" (C&T) because it also advocates the worldwide adoption of a 24-hour, universal time scale (more on that later), Henry's innovation promises to improve on what he sees as the "defects" of the dozen or so rival reform calendars that have been proffered by various individuals and institutions in the past 100 years.
"Calendar reform has always failed before, and for a simple reason: All major proposals involved breaking the seven-day cycle of the week, which has always been--and probably will always be--completely unacceptable to humankind because it goes against the Fourth Commandment of the Bible about keeping the Sabbath Day," Henry said. "C&T never breaks that biblical cycle."
What's more, the C&T calendar is "far more convenient" than is the current Gregorian calendar, which has been in place for more than 400 years--ever since Pope Gregory, in 1582, modified a calendar that was instituted by Julius Caesar in 46 BC.
To bring Caesar's calendar into sync with the seasons (one of the main reasons for reforming it), the pope and his scholars removed 11 days from the calendar during that October, so that Oct. 4 was followed immediately by Oct. 15. The need for that kind of adjustment derived from the same problem that makes designing an effective calendar a challenge today: the fact that there is an uneven number of days in an Earth year: 365.2422 days, to be exact.
Our current calendar tackles this challenge by instituting "leap years" every four years. Henry thinks he has found a better solution: drop leap year entirely and institute, instead, a one-week "mini-month" between June and July every five or six years. In honor of his personal hero, Sir Isaac Newton, Henry has dubbed this seven-day period "Newton." His computer calculation ensures that "Newton Week" brings the new calendar in sync with seasonal changes as the Earth circles the sun.
Newton Weeks would bring with them benefit
Many of the same arguments could be made for the US adopting the metric system. I am sure that there are many applications that would be easier to code if we did. It would make alot of people's professions easier, would make us in sync with the rest of the world and would have saved certain Mars-bound space craft if we would have done it by now. Yet the US hasn't done it and likely never will. And that is a system of weights and measures that we have shown can be at odds with the rest of the world without too much trouble. Can you imagine some countries changing the calendar while others didn't? That sort of all or nothing proposition for changing something that is universal over the entire human race and has existed in it's current form for centuries with so little benefit is never going to happen.
What's the difference between having the newton week and Leap years on the current calandar? Seems more complicated to me.
You're new here, aren't you?
No.
Please.
Laboratree - Scientific collaboration based on OpenSocial.
This guy hasn't a prayer of getting his calendar implemented. He's a nutcase, and his calendar is riddled with practical problems (which he even notes on his site amongst the "FAQs", and then brushes aside with illogical retorts). As further proof of his unfitness as an architect of serious systems for human use, in another part of his calendar site, he gives code examples in Fortran. Anyone who, when given the chance to write a code example in order to explain a simple calendar concept, immediately goes for Fortran as his language of choice, is not someone I want designing anything that might affect my life.
11*43+456^2
This whole 30 day calendary is silly.. if you're going to re-shuffle everything, make it a simple 13 month, 28 day calendar.
;)
the month is exactly 4 weeks
There is only 1 spare da a year (a real new-years-day)
You still probably need to do leap-years.. but that's less of a big deal, just make new-years 2 days.
You also get the bonus of being more in-sync with lunar changes. (which is easier to keep track of my gf's moods
Many Resturants use a 4 week, 13 month calender to watch there sales from year to year. Every few years, Month 13 had 5 weeks instead of 4 weeks.
just make sure it's on a bun with no condiments, or Hank won't be best pleased.
-michael
for you all who're having trouble getting to the actual info page, here it is.
To give you some inside information, the guy behind this idea is kind of a crackpot -- he's a guy who has lots of weird thoughts, but hasn't exactly done much serious research in a while.
And that's why although this may make a good press release, any professional astronomer (or even amateur) knows why we have the calendar we do -- so that each year, the calendar days you are familiar with correspond to approximately where the stars lie in the sky, and the weather season, etc. Ie. every September, the vernal equinox coincides with the rising parallel, the length of the day, etc. etc. Leap days are the way to distribute the extra 1/4 of a day per year into a reasonable interval (once every 4 years).
This scheme of having one calendar with a leap "week" is just another way of shifting around the leap days, and is exactly what an astronomer would NOT want! And his rationale for not having to print different calendars is obviated by having to remember that leap "weeks" occur in years 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, etc...
The current calendar gives some consistency and familiarity -- you can predict how long the day is, what stars are in the sky (within a day or so b/c leap days), and approximately if you're going to need a heavy jacket to go outside in the cold. Under this crackpot new calendar, you have to recompute all these things based on what year it is. Crackpot.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
That's stupid.
For more information on calendar reform in general check Calendar Reform. I'm partial to the World Calendar.
Software Wars
"Wouldn't it be convenient if your birthday, Christmas, and the Fourth of July--not to mention most other major holidays--all fell on the same day of the week, year after year?"
I was born on Dec 25th, I was raised catholic. Every time we got our new calendar when I was groing up, I frantically checked the day my bday fell on, hoping it wasn't on a sunday. Catholic Christmas mass sucks holy balls, and it's even worse when it's on sunday. You spend half of your friggen bday in church, yawning, smelling old people, and trying to get away from your family.
When I lived in Denver, it was nice that there were actually bars open on Christmas, but now I live somewhere where they are not.
Anyways, you can static your calendar, just don't put dec25 on a Sunday, I wouldn't wish that bday on any kid. BTW: I am no longer christian.
He wants a change for 2006. Forget it. It is not going to happen.
So, I don't see the calendar changing at all. I definitely do not see it changing to this method. Firstly, I don't have outstanding confidence in someone who answers questions like this: "Aww....you've spotted the big defect in the new calendar. Isn't it terrible?" (question #8)
Secondly, what problem is this calendar solving? As other slashdotters have pointed out, maybe getting America to move to the metric system would be a good first step. That would solve more problems than the changing current calendar.
3rd: People aren't very smart. I think Slashdot can agree with me here, the majority of our neighbors are dumb. This new calendar means changing something that few people will want to bother learning.
4th: This one really gets me. Each date falls on the same day every year. Now I like to drink. As do many other people. I like looking forward to having my birthday on a weekend. It may never happen for some people.
The whole "newton year" thing is kind of silly as well. Anyway. Let's just change to stardates. They tell the day and time with only 5 or 6 digits!
the Muslim world already does not follow a gregorian calendar....
so, you were saying?
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
What a fucking twat.
I particularly love the arbitrary list of years that have "newton weeks" in them. Yep, that huge list is definitely going to make coding a lot easier (certainly easier than the length 12 list of days per month). And inserting a "special week" in the middle of a year is going to be easier than inserting a day in february. Let's hear it for this inspired new calendar!
</sarcasm>
Two thoughts come to mind:
1. How would this affect people whose birthdays, anniversaries, etc. fall on the 31st of a month that no longer has a 31st? How about Halloween?
2. Personally, having my birthday occur on a Wednesday for the rest of time is tremendously unappealing to me. I enjoy having the occasional weekend birthday so that I can laze around all day, go out and get drunk, and just generally get spoiled by friends and family. The thought of having to work on my birthday for the rest of my life up until retirement isn't exactly heartwarming.
Oh, and of course, his model doesn't appear to be TimeCube compliant, and thus will be met with a lot of protest.
JeeZ that would suck. I like friday the 13th, even though it was quite bad for the Templars.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
Who discussed the Shire calendar in the appendices.
And it isn't Newton, it is Lithe and Yule.
here's my calendar idea, for all to see:
;-P
10 months, 36 days each
each month has 6 weeks, of 6 days each (4 for working, 2 for play)
every other month, 1 extra day for holiday
so there we have it: 365 days in a year
my idea will be adopted when hell freezes over i think
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The Bible clearly makes the Sabbath the last day of the week, but does not share how that corresponds to our 7 day week. Yet through extra-biblical sources it is possible to determine that the Sabbath at the time of Christ corresponds to our current 'Saturday.' Therefore it is common Jewish and Christian practice to regard Sunday as the first day of the week (as is also evident from the Portuguese names for the week days). However, the fact that, for example, Russian uses the name "second" for Tuesday, indicates that some nations regard Monday as the first day.
In international standard ISO-8601 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has decreed that Monday shall be the first day of the week.
So, actually, it depends rather on you (your beliefs) and how the people from your country choose to go ... BTW, here's a helpfull link to discover who choose what :)
I don't claim I know more than I know, and if you know you know more than I know, then by all means, let me know.
The real answer lies within.
FOREVERMORE
what about people born on Feb 29th? They can't tell people they're only 10 when they've lived 40 years.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Just like the present Gregorian Calendar, the C&T Calendar Fully Respects the Fourth Commandment of the Bible.
You mean it fully respects, "Let the earth put forth grass, herbs yielding seed, and fruit-trees bearing fruit after their kind, wherein is the seed thereof, upon the earth." (Genesis 1:11) Or did you perhaps mean the fourth commandment of the ten commandments?
I know, I know, geekery, pedantry, and religious knowledge can be a dangerous mix. :)
Just to be really pedantic, the fourth commandment of the ten commandments isn't given to calendars at all, but to people (and people of a different ethnicity than myself, at that).
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
If we go up to 13 months, will the "Women of AARP Field Hockey" calendar come with an extra picture?
1) The current calander isn't that hard to use, every intro to a programming language I've taken has forced us to deal with leap year crap, etc. 2) We here in Indiana still dont have Daylight Savings Time. If we switch to 10 hours days, how are the cows going to know when to sleep? 3) My bithday occasionally falls on Superbowl Sunday, and would forever more be on a Sunday. Do you know how hard it is to have a birthday party on Superbowl Sunday?!?!?
You call it excessive, I call it ambitious.
There is more economic disadvantages to this than advantages. Imagine all the code rewrites that would have to occur, etc. HELLO!
This calendar will fail miserably because time and date are based on the sun...
Um, I hate to break it to you, but even though we're all computer nerds here, (nerdz rool) somebody has to make my hot-pockets and salsa.If you want standard date/time, you've got it: GMT. Use it, record historical events with it (like hackers in your zoneAlarm log), but don't run everyday life with it.
Would be my idea of having 13 months of 28 days each (4 weeks), with one day tacked on to the end of the last month (two on leap year). Advantages of such a system:
1) Although every year shifts by a day or two, every month is the same throughout a given year (eg. the 14th would be the same day of the week in each month).
2) Calculating the number of days between days in different months would not be burdened by having to figure out how many days the intervening months have.
3) You don't have to figure out how to prorate things in "Newton" in those years when it pops up, nor whether to treat it like a separate month, or to bill or otherwise treat it like an extension to the previous or following month.
and so on.
Convert RSS to HTML - integrate webfeeds into your website
- wikipedia explaination
- Time and Date explaination
(and it was based on Biel, not Zurich, being the place of Swatch headquarters)Build it, and they will come^Hplain.
... that the Earth isn't perfectly circular, doesn't orbit the sun in a perfectly circular orbit, at right angles to its axis, and at a distance that ensures that measurements of human time correspond to base-10 multiples of the oscillations of cesium atoms. Proof that $deity wasn't a hacker.
perl -e 'foreach(values %SIG){$_="IGNORE";}while(){}'
some months with 30 days, some with 31? a "mini-month" every once in a while? that's easier for the average joe?? this fella needs to go into retail customer service for a time, me thinks.
i'm for the metric system in USA. even open to a base-10 time table. but that calendar is just one man's delusional lust for immortality.
proving, once again, that charisma can overcome reason.
he should just admit that his hidden plan was to "deal with" the black, yellow, & red skins as they just introduce too many "variables" into his "perfect" calendar plan...
This is just what we need. More confusion when the previous system worked fine.
I wanted to make some Candy for the holiday season this year, and all of my recipes are in English units: Ounces, cups, etc. Well, when I went to purchase ingredients, I found that many of the ingredients at the store were now given only in metric! It didn't say anywhere on the bottle how many cups / ounces / teaspoons were in the container anymore! I had to go buy a Snapple so that I could convert ounces to milliliters and cups and find out how much I needed.
The moral of the story is, even though the metric system is more convenient for science, we're definitely not ready to make the jump to "no English units provided" - metric is not compatible with old recipe books!
~Ben
This work was supported by NASA's Maryland Space Grant Consortium.
I could think of a few dozen better things for NASA to spend its money on. And another quote from the same page.
The economic benefit that astronomers could provide the world through shepherding this simple reform would easily and indeed more than repay all that the world has kindly spent on astronomical research.
Year-over-year comparisons will be thrown off by this calendar system. He says it'll only be a little bit off but if you're going to be seasonally off year-on-year by almost a week, then it makes it really difficult to have accurate year-on-year time-series regressions. Think about how weather could really throw off any of the calculations... hurricane season being off by a week... instead of some guy scratching his head trying to think what date it is today, you have some guy scratching his head trying to figure out why store sales jumped year-on year.
If this guy was trying to make the calendar system more complicated then he succeeded. The "Newton week" sounds like a huge pain in the ass, and as far as the dates never changing that's only true in the sense that May 1st will always be on a Tuesday. Not that the first of a month is always a Sunday, or whatever.
Benjamin Franklin proposed a 13 month calendar with each month having 28 days, exactly 4 weeks. That gets you to 364 days and then you add one, or possibly two extra days (in the case of a leap year), at the end of the year to make up the difference. Every month then starts on the same day and is numbered the same. That's simple. And you know that the makeup day is always the last day or two of the year. You could even turn those days into holidays. They basically are already.
Netcraft confirms it! Gregorian calendar is dead! And... In Korea, only old people use Gregorian calendar...
The French attempted to implement a logical metric calendar system during the French revolution -- and it went away in spite of beheadings and other forms of terror used to enforce it.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
4.) What happens to my birthday?
If, for example, your birthday is March 7, it will ALWAYS fall on a Wednesday, for evermore.
Christmas Day will always fall on a Sunday, which will be pleasing to Christians,
but, will also be pleasing to companies who currently lose up to two weeks of work to the Christmas/New Year's annual mess.
New Year's Day will always be on a Sunday, too.
Ah yes... that's pleasing to christians. Because if Christmas falls on a Tuesday they have to sit through 2 masses in a week.
What's the big deal with standards, anyway? He mentions that we should all adopt UTC. Personally, I don't care about adopting it. Even if we did, the business implications face the same challenges. Yes, we'd all be on the same time schedule, but you'd still have to remember when Turkey and India's business hours were.
Mercy was given to me by Christ...I must give the same to others.
If no one tries to explain the joke.
If you find something as the current calendar difficult, then you have much greater problems in your life to deal with than figuring out what day it is. If you atre that stupid that you can't keep track, use a calendar, then tperhaps you are more of a threat to our society than Osama Bin Laden's clan. Can you walk in a straight line? Can you chew gum and ride a bike? Can you even ride a bike? Heavens! If this is the state of our populous, then we deserve to be screwed with.
Our current calendar tackles this challenge by instituting "leap years" every four years. Henry thinks he has found a better solution: drop leap year entirely and institute, instead, a one-week "mini-month" between June and July every five or six years.
I don't know about anyone else, but it doesn't sound any better than the leap year solution.
Wouldn't it be convenient if your birthday, Christmas, and the Fourth of July--not to mention most other major holidays--all fell on the same day of the week, year after year?
365-day week, duh.
Intelligent Design: because MATH is HARD.
...if his new calendar allows for "Slashdotting time."
The only surefire protection against Microsoft infections is abstinence. - The Onion
Every third month has 31 days, the rest have 30. That is in fact way easier to remember than the stupid little rhyme I never actually learned.
Slashdot Patriotism: We Support our Dupes!
nevermore.
Dogma - "let's just say we'd like to avoid any empirical entanglements."
Checked his calender, and it turns out this story was posted on the 20th of December...
"A goldfish was his muse, eternally amused"
Are you serious ?!? This thing would be so outgrageously idiotic for the masses, and for the future of the world. First off, instead of a one day fix every four years, there is a one week fix ! Second, for us in the computer knowhow, that would take YEARS (like, 2010) before it could be thought about ! Bah, maybe just me with my cup of coffee ranting on, but come on, at least I don't slip cocaine in my drinks like this guy.
Decrease the size of the Earth's orbit until a year is 360 days long. We can then have 12 months of 30 days and no leap years!
Since the week has not particularly useful connection to months or years, it could easily be modified.
I'd like to see a ten day week, with six work days. This results in a 16% reduction in the total work week. This would be offset by higher productivity, since increasingly work being done is of an intellectual nature. People I know who've had to curtail their work days from five to four have found they are 90% as effective in 80% of the time. In many jobs, there'd be a net productivity gain in my opinion.
However, in jobs such as manufacturing or simple labor, there would clearly be a reduction in productivity, if not 16%. However, there are reasons to think it would not be that bad. First, the number of "mental health" days people take would be reduced. People would be more rested and have fewer accidents. People would get more opportunity to exercise and be healthier. People would have more time to recreate and to do their household chores, so their quality of life would increase relatively more than a slight salary reduction.
In addition, we'd simply move ALL holiday observances to the four day weekend.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Life would be SO much simpler if we just went to a 28-day month. None of this 28/30/31 day nonesense.
Then we'd have room for another entire month. While I suppose the Religious Right would balk at having a 13-month year, all it's going to take is some egotistical politician to back it, and put his name on it.
This, of course, is how Rome created the months of July and August (for Julius Caesar and Augustus). And, since America is now the new Rome (well, hey, maybe for another 50 years), I can hardly wait until the Senate gets this idea in their tiny minds.
100 seconds in a minute
;-)
100 minutes in an hour
100 hours in a day
but but but 365 still stays the same.... arg... is there something logical about our 24/7? nah that couldn't be... people back in the age werent' that smart
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it!
Because we prefer an octal and hexidecimal system. Much easier to work with and compute. The Jacobin system is so pre-silicon!
10.) Hold on! You've forgotten the farmers! They can't be four days off in spring planting!
They don't need to be four days off in spring planting. They just check the date on their calendar that is painted on the wall (painted, since it remains identical from year to year), and then they check what the Gregorian Date is, to see if it is planting day yet. The Gregorian Calendar does not cease to exist, it just isn't ordinarily used. Except by hicks.
1). What use is a calender than needs to have you refer to a DIFFERENT calender to be useful?
2). Insulting farmers is not going to help your cause.
"...At the end of the day"..."when everyone goes home, you're stuck with yourself." RIP Layne Staley
http://www.phys.uu.nl/~vgent/calendar/isocalendar. htm
The nice thing about the ISO calendar is that it does away with months altogether. The amount of weeks per year varies, but that isn't a problem since you don't have to find a month to fit it into.
Sure, it's a terrible idea being pushed with wild religiously-tinged hubris -- but is it the best we can do? I think not.
This calendar guy has the dullest, most trivial obsession of any net kook I can remember. Now, google for Archimedes Plutonium to hear about some REAL pseudoscience!
Even Archie, though, wasn't as downright terrifying as that guy from the physics groups wayyyy back when whose sig was something like:
"I tell girls that I will not kiss a girl who has the blood of dead animals in her mouth and the bodies of dead animals between her teeth."
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
Such drastic changes are warranted only where there is a very compelling reason. Read about things like time zones, daylight saving time, time scales and, of course, calendars. (sorry for reverse wikispam). Any changes happened only when there was a real reason for that, when a nation (or a region) needed to change, not just because some professor thought it would be a good idea. This is DOA, there is zero possibility that anyone could be persuaded to do the switch. Heck, some countries still cling to their outdated religious calendars and it's less than a century that we have a common calendar on this planet. No chances for this change at all.
And if there is no chances that this is a realistic scheme, what do we have on our hands? Blatant self-promotion, that's what. Blatant-self promotion from a retarded Christian who designs web-pages with yellow background. That should have never been posted here.
Future Wiki -- If you don't think about the future, you cannot have one.
I fail to see how this would make coding easier. Won't software still have to deal with dates in the past? For example, if you took out a mortgage in 1998 and now you go switch calendars, you get to re-amortize on account of the new calendar. Good luck with the compound interest, buddy.
If stupidity got us into this mess, then why can't it get us out? - Will Rogers
As the saying goes, this'll happen right after we're all typing in Esperanto on our Dvorak keyboards talking about the new flat tax. ...in metric. :)
:)
I prefer a lunar calendar, 13 28-day months, with an extra 'New Year's Day' which could be of variable length to workt he kinks out with leap second-type adjusting on that day, every year. No more leap nonsense of adding days to some months in some years, etc. Plus, to be patriotic, we could call this new month 'Liberty.'
Quarters are rather arbitrarily done these days, anyway - fiscal quarters aren't quite what one would expect, plus with months not being equal, the end of a quarter can fall on a different day of the year than the previous year. Any software that needs to calculate quarters and such could still do so without having to know the name of a month - just keep calculating by day of th e year, no biggie. Not having to calculate leap days/years would certainly make things easier in the long run.
Plus a new campaign to change all that software would help create another boom in our industry, much like the Y2K projects did. (I think the economic stimulus of the late 90s was caused as much by upgrades for Y2K & internet-capable hardware as much as anything else. Upgrading for one, might as well upgrade for everything else.)
Okay, that is all.
Did anybody see when the Daily Show covered this story (more or less) a couple years ago? Their approach was to look at all the 31st dates that would be lost... like the days some countries celebrate their independence. Too bad for them, huh?
Aren't the calendar and clock very well defined, such that it's only a matter of looking up a spec for making a correct program?
Sure, there are a number of idiot programmers out there who assume 30 day months or whatever, but, really, the data structures required for a full calendar implementation are not that big. Also, it isn't like there aren't a ton of parsing utilities out there.
90% of the problems can be eliminated by enforcing a very simple and intuitive form for data entry, like very clearly labeled date fields that keep the user from having to guess mmddyy or mmddyyyy or ddmmyyyy etc.
BTW, yyyymmdd is correct and all of you are wrong!
-- "Makes Little Debbie look like a pile of puke!" - Moe Szyslak
Also, a good website about calendar reform in general.
...let's do it with a light, careful hand.
I propose four quarters, each with 3 months of 30/30/31 days.
In the middle of the year, which is to say after the end of the second quarter, insert a built-in holiday of one day. It doesn't belong to any month.
Remember the ST:TOS episode "Return of the Archons?" Maybe we can call it "Festival." (Well, a guy can hope.)
Every four years, this holiday lasts two days.
Simple.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens.
I want some of the crack he's smoking...
The fundamental problem with all calendar reform proposals is that the day, month, and year aren't integer multiples of each other.
However, with big enough rockets, we can fix this! Slow the day down a bit, move the moon out -- 30 days in a month, 360 days in a year. Nice and regular!
(Still seeking funding.)
This calendar is much more in line with the world I want to live in.
The main shortcoming is of course the 10 day week, something that could be overcome by simple division into 5 day weeks.
The best feature is the 5-6 day party at the end. Screw Chrismahanakwanzaka, lets just have a 5 day party.
Isn't this where someone starts the debate about how a base 12 system is superior to a base 10 metric system anyway?
After all, twelve is divisible by 2, 3, and 4. That yields whole numbers for halves, quarters and thirds. Try doing that with base 10.
It makes my life as an architect a heck of a lot easier than making something "ten point repeating three" meters long. So much for accuracy.
Yes, you are right. I missed that in checking my typing. Does sort of change the whole meaning of the sentence, doesn't it?
This new calendar is an amusing intellectual diversion, but far from practical, and in most cases less conveniant than our current calendar.
Not THAT much work is expended modifying calendars from year to year. I myself print out a month-by-month ASCII calendar each year, and the time it takes me to update it for the coming year is two hours at maximum, and that includes looking up what dates holidays like Easter are going to fall on. Most people don't even bother taking 2 hours per year to do this -- we just buy calendars from one of the several companies that do the work for us. The good professor has found a solution to something that's not a problem.
Don't even get me started on Newton Week, which is less predictable or accurate at following seasonal changes than the Leap Year method, or the "same clock time everywhere in the world simultaneously" concept that even Gene Ray has debunked...
Since the press release is slashdotted/farked and the site is somewhat incoherent, here's a clearer explanation of the details by Richard McClendon, who actually invented this calendar. The guy in the posted article is merely promoting it.
I'm afraid they both lost me at the part about keeping the "lord's day" holy. Sure guys. And while you're at it, Death to Infidels!
Recently I was pointed (thanks to http://www.userfriendly.org/) to this site which speaks of New Earth Time (NET) http://newearthtime.net/.
It too is an interesting concept, however I'm not sure any of this would fly. You'd have to get tons of governments on board, and that just isn't going to happen. Hell, try to get them to agree on a single item like warring with other countries...oh wait, that's not too simple.
It would still be hard to get them to do anything that involves change.
Under Henry's plan, each new 12-month period is identical to the one that came before. Each month has either 30 or 31 days. January, for instance, would have 30 days, as would February, April, May, July, August, October, and November. March, June, September, and December would all have 31 days.
What about the gool 'ol...
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November
...
Imagine having your birthday on a Monday.
Forever.
Oh the suckage! You'll wish you were never born by the time you reach 50.
Another way to fix all this:
1. Make 364 days in a year (just whack another one out of February or something).
2. Make a second = 1.003434 seconds (plus some digits).
3. Done. No Day vs Date shift, no leap years.
You'll only need to rebuild every timekeeping device on the planet to account for the different second but the only people who will really care is the poor bastards that have a Monday birthday! All of us with Saturday birthdays are happy as ducks in a puddle.
I would actually just settle for getting rid of daylight savings time. Talk about stupidity. "Daylight savings????" I promise you that hassling with the retardedness of changing your clock will NOT alter the tilt of the earth for a few months thereby giving you more hours of daylight.
I just wish we'd get rid of timezones. Why can we all just use UTC and be done with it? And don't even get me started on daylight savings...
Who said Freedom was Fair?
Let's do a performance test of the two systems. How many days does september have:
....
30 days hath september
30 days.
Every thrid month has 31:
September is month 9. 9 is a multiple of 3.
31 days.
Hmm.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
didn't the guy who can add like crazy come up with a new calender?
Something like 13 months with 4 weeks in each month?
I actually liked the idea though he admints that it would never take hold.
Under his system, christmas eve, christmas, new years eve, and new years day are all on saturday or sunday. This will happen in 2005 in our current system and us guv'ment types don't get any extra days off. Not that we don't get enough days off anyway (think inauguration day, ex-pres dies, an inch of snow falls, etc) but hey, everyone likes those extra days around christmas.
wish I had mod points...
Not only for the reasons you mentioned. But he claims that the entire world should follow one standard, and then goes on to suggest that that standard should be based on a myth in the Jewish bible. If we are all going to adopt a new standard world calendar, then it would make a lot more sense to base it on Chinese or perhaps Hindu beliefs rather than a minority viewpoint based on a Jewish myth and religions based on hand me downs of Jewish fables. The sheer numbers should make that obvious.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
It's not funny to mindlessly repeat nonsense over and over. At least not to anybody above the mental age of about six or so.
There have been other perpetual calendar proposals, but to me the most logical one is Willard Edwards', that's been around since the late 60's at least, but of course like all the others never caught on.
Slashdot says "Stuff that matters" at the top of its page. Then I see a link to this story? What gives?
If his biggest complaint is that there's a leap year, mine would be the dumbass numbering system.
Make a 13th month, and distribute the months so there's 25 days each, or whatever the math would be. Heck! Make 15 months if you need to.
This is true. In Hawai'i, nobody does business or goes to school or attempts to communicate the date to anybody ever.
/*No comment*/ #No comment
Lousy Smarch weather!
The goal is to make one year exactly 360 days.
The options are:
1. Shorten the duration of the time it takes for the Earth to orbit around the sun.
2. Slow down the Earth's spin around itself.
3. A combination of both.
It might be required to redefine the length of a second, in order to keep the definition of hours and minutes as we have it now.
Let's change the one thing that is standard around the world, time. Yeah now that's a GREAT idea!
Any reason why this was announced in the great Crackpot Science Month that is December? That's right kids, there's no real news so this has a hope of getting coverage.
and will this guy want royalties on the new one?
I was buying this till i saw .. "christmas will always be on sunday.." What the ..!! Even with this current calendar this year i lost 1 day (being christmas on saturday this year) that i could use as vacation ...
I fuse with Mercer every single day...
What if your birthday is August 31st, which is now nonexistant? Would it just switch to August 29th, since that replaces August 31st in his calendar?
but if you are willing to have built-in holidays of one day outside of a month, then take that to its natural conclusion: make each quarter 3 months of 30/30/30 days, with a one day holiday every quarter, 2 days of holiday in one of every 4 quarters (in the middle of the year as you suggest), and 3 days of holiday in the middle of leap years
and make the weeks in tune too: each month is 5 weeks of 6 days each, 4 days for work, 2 days for play
there, our ideas will be enacted... never
lol
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
An ethiopian colleague just told me today about their calendar system, it works like this:
n darandtime.htm
Ethiopia follows the Julian calendar, which consists of twelve months of thirty days each and a thirteenth month of five days, six days in a leap year. (Hence, the popular Ethiopian Tourism Commission slogan of "Thirteen Months of Sunshine!"). The calendar is about eight years behind the Western (Gregorian) calendar. The Ethiopian New Year begins on the first day of the month of Meskerem, which falls on September 11th on the Gregorian calendar.
Taken from: http://www.ethioworld.com/CountryInformation/cale
Day
Night
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
Then again, maybe the government will adopt it on purpose, since it would mean that the economy has 2 extra working days. The people won't accept it without a compromise though.
!
One nautical mile is one second (1/60th degree) of declination at the equator.
Similarly you can tie the 360 degrees in a circle to the length of a year. Remember it was the "holy men" (and women in some cultures) who originally calculated all this. Their main charge was to determine when to plant crops and such.
Now if you want to talk about decimal circles then we have radians.
What we really need is a base PI system of counting! Then we can really blow stuff up!
Phil
Laugh, it's good for you!
Lots of people already operate based on daylight and night anyway. The "Daylight Savings Time" nonsense already throws them back and forth an hour. They don't care about DST/CST/GMT/UTC whatever, they just have to pay attention and reset their clocks at least twice a year. Not having to bother would be a boon. Farmers, construction workers, some pilots, utility company techs, etc. all operate on daylight, not some inane(set by 'crats in DC or wherever) numerical sort of clock.
;-) Afterall, it is just a matter of arithmetic.
Even better would be the ease of operation for anyone that deals with trans- or intercontinental communication every day, or whose work cycles are not aligned with the local day/night. People on the Left Coast that work in the financial industry get up and work whenever they need to whether the markets in Asia are open or in New York. They certainly don't care what "time" it is in California.
Another possibility would be the degeneration of the current 24 time zones into something more reasonable, say 4 zones, separated by 6 hours, or 6 by 4. Wouldn't it be nice if ALL of the Americas were "on the same time"? We are already heading this way with live TV shows. Does it really matter if Monday Night Football is on at 9-8-7 or 6? Everyone knows when to turn on the TV, hell the Tivo knows when to record, what do you care about what "time" it is?
BTW, as far as the local(London) convenience goes, you are assuming that the newGMT clock would be aligned with local(London) day/night cycles. It might not be. 0900 newGMT just might be sunrise time in New York or Tokyo for that matter.
Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.
- W. Wriston, former Citibank CEO
I always wanted to follow Tolkien's calendar -- 12 months of exactly 30 days, with the residue celebrated as Special Days which have no "weekday name".
...
Saturday, Sunday, Overlithe, Monday, Tuesday,
How cool would it be to celebrate Afterfilthe?
Nothing is certain in life but death, taxes, and being slashdotted if you put shiny thing on the internet.
Yes, the calendar is faulty, but that's mostly because our unit of measure, the second, is faulty. As the article mentions, the Earth completes a revolution around the Sun every 365.24 days. If we make a second slightly longer, we can make a day exactly 24 hours. This will solve the leap year problem, or the Newton Week problem.
While we're at it, let's adopt the metric system. What's that, you say? A sizeable portion of the populace doesn't want to adobt a simple, more logical solution?
Two words: metric system.
The "Insert Quote Here" line is almost as predictable as inserting an actual quote.
I think inertia is a large part of it, same as it was for the French Revolutionary Calendar. Although one could honestly argue the same thing for the switch from the Julian to Gregorian calendars. Although there, we at least had a single entity forcing the change upon everyone pretty much at once. (Although there are still a few hold-outs out there who are a few days out of sync with the rest of the world)
Personally, I think I could adapt to a new dating system within a decently short amount of time. It's not like I'm using to having many dates anyhow, posting on /.
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Let the Canadians and the Europeans have their fancy "Newton Week". We follow tradition down here!
I would move to metric in a heartbeat, but the scientist in me likes the percision (closest to real value) of Fahrenheit over Celsius. For every degree Celsius, you get 1.x F. This means you have more granularity for F. It's really not hard to learn the F scale. It's just a matter of 3 numbers. Abs Zero, Freezing (h2o), and boiling (h2o). other than the fact that those numbers are not -272, 0, and 100 it is inferrior.
Think about it.
Tuesday's child is full of grace,
Wednesday's child is full of woe,
Thursday's child has far to go.
Friday's child is loving and giving,
Saturday's child works hard for a living,
But the child born on the Sabbath Day,
Is fair and wise and good and gay.*
(* but not in the modern sense of the word)
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
- one second == one second
- one minute == 64 seconds
- one hour == 64 minutes
- one day == 32 hours
- one month == 32 days
- one year == 16 months
easy to compute------- In the end there are no begining
It would be great if people with the time and energy to solve these problems would focus on more important problems. I'm referring, of course, to the standardization of beverage sizes.
I got new for you: Jewish holidays will still fall on different days, because they are linked to a radically different calendar system. So much for 'universal'. I declare this guy to a be a 'false teacher'. He tries to change the law and the times. Yep, false teacher.
Mathematics is not a crime.
I didn't even look but I'm sure I'm the 100th caller to point out that "It Stays Exactly the Same, Year after Year!" is a Damn Lie, when right there is shows the 7-day month of Newton jammed into every 6th year.
Yikes! :o)
It's not spelt 'einstine'...
... but then I visited the site and now I think this guy is simply nuts :P
/. :) Give credit where it's due :) Great job, man :)
:))))
But hey, he managed to get into
I think we should make every month 7 days long, each day should be 48 hours long, 1 hour should be 600 seconds long, and seconds should be the time a half-legged Santa can bounce around the Christmas tree. Yeah, and make those 7 days all Sundays, 'cause some people would just spend their lives fishing instead of reading stupid stuff all day long.
I hope this guy won't be too much surprised when he realizes that that hypnotizing show he went to last week actually worked !!
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
Maybe the scientist in you can handle decimal fractions of celcius. Eg 10.3C Not very hard. People can handle that in prices -- why not temps.
I'm not having my birthday on a Wednesday every frickin year. And having April fools day on a Sunday is useless - how are you supposed to pull pranks on co-workers if you never go into work that day?
Also notice he put Christmas on a Sunday? I'm sure the Christians would be quite happy about that, but would other countries would be happy to adopt a calender that puts one of our biggest religious holidays on a Sunday, but (likely) doesn't take into account their holidays?
Plus, how is coding for an extra Month/Week every X years supposed to be easier? The whole concept of changing the calender to help coders is bizarre to begin. How many of us are excited about having to rewrite all of our date handling code? Sounds like a computing nightmare to me. Does this guy remember a little thing called Y2K?
For a year or so when I was at University I was awake most during darkness hours. I would get up at about 8pm, go out to the bar or take part in some other "late night" social activity, then from 2am until 9am I had time to persue personal projects, study or whatever before lectures and classes began. In this particular year all of my classes took place before 12pm, which worked out nicely since I could then go to bed and get eight hours sleep before doing it all again.
During the winter months I wasn't seeing much daylight, but I spent the worst of this period at home on Christmas break anyway so my sleep pattern was less constrained. On one day of the week I had a lecture between 11am and 12pm, so I had to eat my main meal of the day at some point between 12am and 2am and then have a snack for supper during said lecture. Fortunately, this particular lecturer didn't mind my eating in his class.
It worked quite well for that year, but over the summer I got a job and had to rotate back to normal, and when I went back to university my schedule was no longer morning-heavy so I had to conform to a more normal schedule. I particularly enjoyed the fact that I could go out to clubs and such and stay out late without feeling like shit for the morning lectures.
Some important verses from the Torah and New Testament that confirm the Saturday is last and Sunday is first argument:
Exo 20:8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.
Exo 20:9 Six days shalt thou labor, and do all thy work;
Exo 20:10 but the seventh day is a sabbath unto Jehovah thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy man-servant, nor thy maid-servant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates:
Exo 20:11 for in six days Jehovah made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore Jehovah blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
It is clear from this passage that the Jewish rest day was the last day of the week, whatever definition you use. If Monday is internatioally declared to be the first day, expect Jews to keep Sunday as the sabbath.
And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James, and Salome, bought spices, that they might come and anoint him.
Mar 16:2 And very early on the first day of the week, they come to the tomb when the sun was risen.
Mar 16:3 And they were saying among themselves, Who shall roll us away the stone from the door of the tomb?
Mar 16:4 and looking up, they see that the stone is rolled back: for it was exceeding great.
Mar 16:5 And entering into the tomb, they saw a young man sitting on the right side, arrayed in a white robe; and they were amazed.
Mar 16:6 And he saith unto them, Be not amazed: ye seek Jesus, the Nazarene, who hath been crucified: he is risen; he is not here: behold, the place where they laid him!
Since Sunday was the day of the ressurection of the Christ, christians honor that day as more significant than the sabbath, since the Messiah declared that he was the "Lord of the Sabbath", putting himself above the sabbath in importance.
Act 20:7 And upon the first day of the week, when we were gathered together to break bread, Paul discoursed with them, intending to depart on the morrow; and prolonged his speech until midnight.
Act 20:8 And there were many lights in the upper chamber where we were gathered together.
Further evidence that the early christians were worshiping and taking eucharist/communion on the first day of the week.
Expect christians to start setting aside Monday as the day to worship if internationally Monday is declared to be the first day of the week.
Hope that helps.
-WHL
NB: As an aside, it might be better to speed up the rotation, to even out daily temperature variations. Though the stronger coriolis force-driven storms might be bad...
Swatch's Internet Time proposal.
And we all saw how well THAT caught on...
GET FREE APPLE STUFF!
Though the "improved" Gregorian calendar with less frequent leap years was invented in 1582, it wasnt adopted by America (England) until 1752 and by Russia until the revolution. Thats why you see footnotes on US founding fathers birthdays, with some birthdays under the older Julian calendar.
This contributed to the protestant-catholic wars of the era.
Wow. john Hopkins just got slasdotted
I've come to believe that proposals to make time more like the metric system of linear measurement to be misconstrued. It should be circular, not linear. Notice how 30, 12, 24, 360 are related. It ain't perfect, but it matches how space and gravity works. Now that we know a bit more about gravity affecting time, might as well keep circular measurements and time together!
just 2c from a very uninformed layman.
I'm another person who's tried that, when I was working varied shifts at a 24-hour sandwich shop for a few years. I thought it was great-- for once, it seemed that there were enough hours in the day. The only down side was that I still worked 8x5 rather than 4x10, so my "weekend" was only one day. Of course, I'm rather nocturnal in disposition to begin with, so I wouldn't recommend it to most.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
This is absolutely moronic. Change the calendar to make it easier for coders to compute the date? There are two problems with this idea:
1. If anyone is writing code to compute the date, they are fools wasting their time. There are countless tools already out there that you can download and use for free. No need to reinvent the wheel.
2. Our computers waste so much time doing useless things like drawing rounded corners on windows that there is no reason not to waste a few cycles on computing the date.
We've been overdue for the annual Timecube reference on Slashdot.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
This idea was DOA right out the door.
Worst idea evar!
Things would be a lot more boring and uninteresting if we went to simple standards. And why bother fixing something that's not broken?
I think we should dump months altogether and just have years and days. Today would be 2004-354. Think of the savings in head-scratching! (Quick, how many days between January 20, 2005 and April 8, 2005? What about 2005-20 and 2005-98? Is 11/8/2004 a date in November, or August?)
We can even make day of the week easy to work out. Assuming we keep the seven day week, if we reserve 365 as a special day (and 366 on leap years) every numerical date has the same weekday every year (take the number mod 7) since 364 = 52 * 7.
It would also make my job easier. I work in fixed income finance, and we get screwed by the calendar all the time. Suppose you have a $100 bond that pays 6% interest, monthly. How much should you receive for January? $0.50? $(31/365)*6? $(31/360)*6? Believe it or not, all three answers are used in the industry, depending on what kind of bond you're buying. Suppose you buy a bond, settled on November 30, to pay off three months after settlement. When do you get paid?
You can imagine how much fun it is to write software to handle that.
Actually, modern Fortran isn't too bad a language. Much better than C for anything involving calculations IMO.
That's not to say that I'd use Fortran, only that it's hardly the worst choice out there. Ada? ASM? C (though despite its evils, more people do know C)? Pascal?
Hi, > This whole 30 day calendary is silly.. No. It only qualifies as silly if some major software vendor has patented it. Ciao, Dscho
Last year, I visited Montecello, Thomas Jefferson's home, in Virginia. His birthdae on his tombstone is annotated O.S. for Old Style.
The tour guide stated that he was born under the Julian Calendar (old style) in 1743 and died under the Gregorian Calendar in 1826.
According to this Montecello web page England and her colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1752.
So...What do you want on your tombstone?
What about the poor bastards born on January, April, July, or October 13th? Their birthdays will always be on Friday the 13th.
I would have changed immediately and joined the cause, but he exceeded my maximum exclamation points for a convincing argument limit.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
THanks, I remember reading about this calendar.
:)
It made WAY more sense than this lunatic's. "And we'll have arbitrary "party weeks" for an arbitrary amount of time to keep with the seasons. Balogney.
I actually think it is a shame that Ben Franklin's calendar wasn't adopted in 1776 with the founding of America. That would have been ripe with 13 colonies. They could have won approval by denoting the months after the colonies in order of the signing of the Constitution
So May would be the Month of Connecticut...
There's no October 31 on his calendar, so Halloween would have to be October 30. LAME
He also wiped out my wedding anniversary, which is on a 31st. Do you think this would mean I wouldn't have to buy gifts?
Like Digital Freedoms? Then donate to EFF before they're gone.
The problem I see, is that people don't like to change even if something is better.
I allude this to the AS/400 sales, they still sell one every 8 minutes I believe. Old platform, but it's robust, people have code written for it, and it's rock solid.
Why would people change when what we have works just great, and there will be other new problems that we would have to deal with...
GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
I've just come up with a better idea. How about, instead of an arbitrary number, we invent a system where the hours are related to a physical phenomena? Kind of like how the meter is defined as the distance light travels in 1/299792458th of a second. We should pick something simple and easily reproducable. I propose we look at shadows cast by the nearest star. When the derivative of the length of shadows with respect to time is zero (i.e. at the local minimum or dl/dt = 0) we could all agree to call this time "noon". Any takers?
To computers time is the counting of ticks, to humans it's the orbit of the earth around the sun and the rotation of the earth.
Gregorian calendar works fine for the physical realities of this planet, while computers and there seconds since Midnight Jan 1st 1970 works fine for them too.
Conversion between the two is trivial for computers and the functions to do it written many times in every language you can imagine.
There's no worry, and it matters not a jot. Well at least until were living on other planets, they might not be happy about the fractional number of seconds in a day.
Yeah, right.
Imagine spring every day! And maybe changing the orbit of the Earth to adjust for global warming and cooling.
easier solution- just move to southern california. there still is some variation in seasons, though; you have spring, rainy spring, and windy spring (alternatively, forest fire spring on particularly dry years).
anyway, some of us actually like having seasons.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
guess why we have our gregorian calendar:
some romans used the extra days that have been added to the julian calendar every now and then to e.g. extend their tax-report periods, their time in place as the rulers or priests of rome etc.
which brought us to the idiotic naming of some months beeing two months off their name:
(use dies for nix systems to find out)
if anything, i ld rather have the mayan calendar,
which is correct for a few hundred thousand years, and involves well-implementable and easy to remember count cycles
(mdate for nix-ish systems)
otherwise, i ld rather have the diskworld date,
if anything nutty at all...
Please... do I look like I care ?
This idea made me immediately think of the Clock of the Long Now project. I wonder what they're up to these days... and if the clock will ever get built!
The Shire Calendar also has every day be the same day of the week each day, but in it every month is 30 days long, not just some of them, and the extra days are feast days on the solstices. Partying is built right in to the calendar!
Say what you want about Hobbits, but they knew the value of making drinking and eating a regular part of one's daily activities. And since they had so many kids, one might conclude that their after hours party activities included a few less bucolic things as well.
Something to think about, before you reject it out of hand...
Have you read my blog lately?
This guy shows a little bit of insensitivity (to put it mildly). How does one calculate "the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox" under his scheme?
Have you read my blog lately?
I added the emphasis. Most of our time measurements are based on systems that existed before Christianity and even Judiasm. This has got to be a hoax or this person has serious case of head up the arse.
The names of the days of the week in old Rome were Solis dies, Lunae dies, Martis dies, Mercurii dies, Iouis (Jovis) dies, Veneris dies, and Saturnis dies. When the Empire converted to Christianity they only changed the name of the first day to Dominicus dies, the day of the Lord.
Germanic tribes which suffered Roman influence and adopted the seven-day week substituted the names of their own gods for the Latin ones, like Tyr, Thor, Odin, and Freya.
Portugal way over in the West of Europe, having a large population of Jews in the Middle Ages, adapted the Jewish system for numbering days, such that in Portuguese weekdays are called segunda-feira, terça-feira, etc. where feira is an old word for "day" and segunda, terça, etc. are ordinal numbers (in this case, for two and three, respectively).
Finally, to answer your question, the Christian Monotheistic God did not name the days of the weeks. Humans did. And they are under no compunctions to name them one way or another -- hell, they could have named them Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo and Violet! It would have been the same.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar
"Not only are the trains running on time, but now they're running on metric time!"
Am I the only one the thinks that having an extra week on a "Newton" year is more stupid than our current system?
What a 'tard...
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
OMG, I totally had this idea years ago. A 10 hour day, 100 minutes / hour, 100 seconds / minute. No time zones (why bother)? Instead of saying some show starts at 8:00 EST,7:00 CST. You could just say it is on at 8:00. Each location would treat "8:00" different. So if you lived in Europe, your day might start at 1:00, which in the US your day might start at 4:00. There would be no "What time is it in London", it would be the same time at every point on earth, each region would just alter when they decide to start their day. If you lived in Chicago, and a business in LA says that it closes at 8:00, the person in Chicago would just have to call before 8:00 Chicago time, because LA would be on the same time zone schedule. No time zone conversions needed. We can't even switch to metric units here in the US. People are too stupid here.
If they approve his wacky calendar, he is going the have the entire astrology league mob in front of his house right the next day.
1. Money spent designing new crackhead calendar. $1.99
2. Cost of implementing it: $10 billion
3. The face on pissed off astrologers: priceless!
Adopting a calendar "forever more" has the following two noticable flaws. 1) Humanity is too close to an expansion into the solar system. Within 100 years optimistically, but we're still fairly close. Once we make that transition, calendars will become a thing of the past, since we won't have the spin of the earth to depend on anymore. 2) The gravity of the moon is slowing the rotational speed of the Earth. Of course, it'd be millions of years before a single day lasts 720 hours, but even within a few millenia, for the subspecies that remains on the Earth after the superspecies leaves for the cosmos, the earth will have slowed enough that the length of a day would be off enough to warrant inserting another day on key leap years. As is stands, the Gregorian calendar is arranged just to align the year to the two Solstices and has plenty of space for the insertion of days.
Change the length of a second and propagate up. 1 second 1 minutes = 10 seconds 1 hour = 10 minutes 1 day = 10 hours 1 week = 10 days 1 month = 10 weeks 1 year = 10 months We can keep decades, centuries and milleniums. Just make sure that the length of a second corresponds to 1000000 seconds per year. For more precise timekeeping, we can use 1/10 seconds = decisecond 1/100 seconds = centiseconds And so on and so forth. Voila, nice and easy to use. The only problem is that it would be expensive to convert to and I'm sure religious zealots would have a fit. Don't mind me, I'm retarded.
...you know what we could actually do? We could think of each of our 10 fingers as being a 0 or 1 in a 10 digit, base 2 number. Hold the finger up, and you've got a 1, otherwise it's a 0. Thinking of our fingers as a binary number, we'd get 2^10 (that's 1024) digits, which is a good deal better than our measly 10 we get now. Of course, this catching on would require quite a meme. Can anybody reading this do it well?
Practice with an applet here
Many years ago I worked out something I called the Neometric Calendar. Generic stupid name but I think the idea still works well.
Six day weeks.
Five weeks per month.
Twelve months per year.
Every three months add an extra day (I'd do it in the middle of each season, before or after Feb, May, Aug, and Nov).
Add another day per year (I'd do the Winter Solstice).
On leap years (every 4 except every 100 except every 400), add another day (I'd do Summer Solstice).
A Six-day week is halvable and thirdable. Nobody cares how many weeks are in a month and it's not standard now anyway. A twelve month year is halvable, thirdable, quarterable and sixthable. The programming logic of it is simple:
Six days per week, five weeks per month, every three months add a day, every twelve months add a day, that's one year, every four (except every 100 (except every 400)) years add a day.
-Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
"I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
- 10! deci-minutes per year
- 9! minutes per year
- 8! newtons per year (that's 8 newtons per hour)
- 7! hours per year
- 6! days per year
- 5! weeks per year
- 4! months per year
- 3! semesters per year
And it is also much easier to figure out the other relations. There are...On the other hand, it's hard to take seriously a a guy who thinks there's even a chance for the "universal adoptation" of his calendar by 2006. To his credit, he's not a fanatic about it, noting that he "can't devote a lot of time to calendar reform." That's a good thing. Like many other posters, I don't see having the calendar the same each year as a plus. I prefer life to be richer and filled with change, however minor.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
And you can live a boring life like everyone else there too!
Hebrew calendar. every year, the same old joke: "the hollidays! They came early this year!" "Nu! they came late last year!" "Oy! they never come on time."
Luni-solar! 28 day months no matter what and you know its the beginning of the month if the moon is dark and middle of the month if the moon is full. period.
You just throw in a 13th month now and then in a pattern that repeats every 19 years. what could be simpler?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
But seriously, you need a sweeping new regime to get acceptance for a new calendar. If you look at the introduction of any calendar anywhere, it's always been either (a) highly localized in a particular spatio-, chrono-, ethno- or credo-sphere (or combination thereof), or (b) gradual, viral, and not entirely successful.
Examples of the former are:
- Chinese
- Hebrew
- Iranian
- Islamic
- Japanese
The most notable example of the latter is the transition to worldwide dominance of the Gregorian Calendar which actually took a very long time. The Julian Calendar still hangs on in the Orthodox religious calendar, and legal documents in various areas are still written using other local calendars (e.g. Japanese drivers' licenses).Yet another calendar? Don't need it. There are enough disjoint relationships between the different numbers describing the earth's motions (and hence the seasons) that ultimately, the irregular way "Newton" shows up in the year is just as confusing as what we have now.
€ 0,02 worth...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
I unfortunately had him for a class titled Intro to Frontier Physics (it wasn't nearly as cool as it sounds. He spent most of the time going over the history of Galileo, Newton etc.), and he's pretty much as crazy as he sounds.
0,02 worth...ank
Hey, that's worth 20 minutes on a callabike....unless it's a hackabike in which case you've overpaid.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Can you imagine actually trying to implement this? For God's sake, if you are trying to help out coders, don't do this. The transition period would probably bring down western civilization. Just think about it for a minute, and you realize, we are stuck with what we have, deal with it.
Authority questions you. Return the favor.
Seriously, it needs to go. It's an absolute waste, even for a person like myself who has actually had jobs that required me to be working outside all day long. It's a royal pain in the ass for everyone. It's not even used everywhere in the US. Daylight savings time and it's variants are used in a seemingly random manner across the globe. This page has some good info on it. I don't care if an ancestor of mine was the first to suggest it's use. IMHO the cost and energy savings today are not worth the sheer hassle of it all. DST should go.
The other silly thing about the statement that "Calendar reform has always failed before" is obvious in the name of the current month. This is December, as in deca, as in "the tenth month". Except, of course, it's not the tenth month - it's the twelvth. just like sept-ember is the 9th and not the 7th, and oct-ober is the 10th and not the 8th. That's pretty clear evidence that the months have been shoved around a bit and calander reform has in fact worked. (August is named after who, again?)
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Two hands
Eight bits - fingers
Two parity bits - thumbs
The calendar industry, which has a vested interest in having each year start on different days of the week, so consumers have to buy different calendars every year. I mean, nobody is going to buy 12 pictures of kittens or landscapes or 10-year-old Far Side comics or swimsuit models for $12.95 to hang on their wall if they can just buy one calendar that will last them forever! I bet if a calendar-reform measure were to come up in Congress, Hallmark and American Greetings lobbyists would start buying up senators right and left... ;)
...do it right - go all the way.
... stardates!
;-). Of course, fractional dates correspond to time (.1 stardate = 2.4 old Earth hours).
I propose that we get rid of years, months, weeks, and just jump straight to
We can make stardate 1 be the date on which the first ST:TOS episode aired (September 8, 1966, old Earth calendar
I believe that that makes today (December 21, 2004) stardate 13985.
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
One thing I find when I am on vacation or when at college and had long breaks, is that I slept better when I knew I could get up at any time and often found myself getting less sleep than I was before but feeling much more refreshed. I'd stay up til 3am, sleep until 10am and feel great after 7 hours, but going to bed at 10:30pm to get up for work at 7am, even with 8 hours uninterrupted sleep I still felt drowsy and lathargic for the first half of the day.
sounds like it's founded on teh same basis, and you'll get just as many Americans to convert
This is never going to happen because there's no practical reason to change. It would be insanely confusing to adopt this new calendar. Plus things like calendars and time zones are so trivial that no one would care. It would, in the end, be too much of a hastle. Furthermore, the US would shun this new change (even if, internationally, it was accepted) like it did with metric. This would lead to the US being more "independant" and disconnected from the rest of the world.
Sounds like a COBOL programmer who hasn't had a job since Y2k fixes were complete.
A thirteenth month should be called "Bob", just because.
Get off my virtual lawn, you damned virtual kids!
Now just do away with time zones, go by a 24 hour universal time (like GMT, but not Anglo-centric, base it at, oh, Easter Island or something) and make it the same time on the same day everywhere... no more day/date conversion bullshit for anyone!
[what?]
Remember that skit... that said something like... "Sure it'll be hard to get used to, but the massive amounts of amphetamines will help!"
But hey, if we did work on a 10 hour metric day... I'd have to tell any jackass that wanted me to work an 8 hour day to take a hike... But I guess I'd never want to work for Electronic Arts anyway.
[Farmers] just check the date on their calendar that is painted on the wall (painted, since it remains identical from year to year), and then they check what the Gregorian Date is, to see if it is planting day yet. The Gregorian Calendar does not cease to exist, it just isn't ordinarily used. Except by hicks.
In other words: introduce a new calendar and try to calculate the old date to know what time it is. I also fail to understand why people would appreciate to go to work on other hours, depending on where they live (because the time is the same everywhere on the planet). With all due respect: a joke gotten out of hand, of which the creator should have realised it is ridiculous. Alternative is NOT always better. The only ones this idea is good for (as parent pointed out) is for computers, who ironically are also best at recalculating dates...
Z
Why don't we all get together and synchronise our watches?
Before he gets to changing the calendar, I think he needs to push for a new, static web page.
This post expresses my opinion, not that of my employer. And yes, IAAL.
I would be hard pressed to come up with a way to get the rural population to dismiss the idea with prejudice, short of ending it with "Except by Jesus-loving rednecks watching NASCAR." Someone needs to brush up on their Dale Carnegie coursework.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Rightttt...
That's because 10 is a stupid number to base measurement systems on. It doesn't divide by three or four, and division by two leaves a useless five, which no one can visualize. 12 is a far superior base for measures, since it relates better to one's senses, and 16 or 8 would be far better than 10.
Time is one of the few places where the "metric system" (i.e. SI) hasn't managed to completely screw things up. SI puts simplicity of manual computation ahead of natural perception, not to mention accuracy of automated computation--the result is a system that actually introduces roundoff error practically every time a measure is used in a calculation. (Read up on IEEE floating-point format if you don't know what I'm talking about.)
For simple proof of how broken SI is for the real world, just go to the grocery store and have a look around--750ml, 250g, etc.
Won't this break Conway's doomsday algorithm?
I've gotten used to using this algortihm to calculate, in my head, the day of the week for any year/month/day.
from his own webpage "farmers are hicks" and Pacific Islanders "don't care what day it is"
nice.
I've maintained for YEARS that, as long as we're going to go screwing around with the clock twice a year anyway, why not set the clock back one hour, twice every month ? Let's say we set the clocks back one hour on the 1st of the month, and again on the 15th of the month, every month. In one year we'd be right back where we started (12 months X two hours each = 24 hours!), but we'd have gained a whole extra hour of sleep every two weeks (or so)...now who wouldn't like THAT? (and just to clarify: there'd be no restriction that you had to use the extra hour for sleep...) Sure, part of the year "first thing in the morning" would be just before sundown, and at a completely different part of the year (the opposite side of the year, in fact) you'd be sleeping all "day", but who cares? I mean, we all live by our clocks anyway, right? And you'd be getting that "fall back" boost twice every month !
Well, I'D vote for it...at least it's no crazier than thinking we're "gaining" or "losing" an hour by fiddling with the clocks.
This space intentionally left (almost) blank.
Monday = Moon day
Tuesday = Tyr's day
Wednesday = Odin's day
Thursday = Thor's day
Friday = Frey's (Freya's) day
Saturday = ?
Sunday = sunday.
The days of the week were humbly exported into then-England and Anglosaxon languages by the Nordic viking culture. Latin languages, au contraire, use Roman gods for weekdays.
...and I'd like to recieve your newsletter.
I wish we could get a sizable chunk of society to go along with this. I'd be advocating it twenty-four seven -- er, twenty-eight six.
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
Just imagine trying to achieve First Post typing with 12 fingers.
Farenheit is a more convienient method precisely because the commonly used temperatures for everyday usage are between 0 and 100. In the centigrade scale, at least half the scale is not typically used.
People make a lot of noise about how "superior" the metric system and I simply sit back and laugh. I see the whines about not understanding ounces and pounds and then these same people go on to talk about using hexidecimal numbers as routine. (In case you didn't realize, there are 16 ounces in a pound, 16 fluid ounces in a pint, and "a pint's a pound the world 'round").
The metric system hasn't won out precisely because it isn't inherently "superior" in any way. I suspect that the whining over the English system is just a meme that dates back to some mathematically illiterate folks who thought that the only way to handle anything was to make it base ten.
"I may disagree with what you say, but I will defend unto the death your right to say it." -- Voltaire
Hmm, The Aztec Solar calender is much more accurate then our current one, so why not just use it?
After all aliens taught them how to do it. Nah, why bother. The world will end December 2013.
"The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men." ~Plato (427-347 BC)
Nice layout. I think he used FrontPage while on acid. Actually, that would give acid a bad name.
Well, I've read a number of explanations that the Roman-era ("Julian") calendar was viewed as a cycle, with no truly standardized starting point. But 2000 years ago, the spring equinox was widely treated as the start of a new year. Due to the Earth's precession, that was early in March around then (and the 26,000-year precession cycle would have brought it back to March first in another 24,000 years ;-). So to most people, september was the 7th month. Then, some time later, other people decided to treat January as the first month, for no clear reason.
;-) And the system in this article really isn't a whole lot better.
But no matter; the Julian/Gregorian calendar has always been a jumbled mess of historical revisions. (Unlike most other calendars.
I've long liked the Mayan system. Number the years from some prehistoric date. Within a year, number the days starting from 0. Yes, they had a symbol for zero, and it looked a lot like ours. After 365 or 366 days, reset the day counter to zero and bump the year counter.
Actually, the astronomical "Julian day" is essentially this system, except it just counts days (with fractional days instead of hours and minutes), but no true year number. You can do a divide to get the year, of course.
Then, of course, there's the unix (and VMS) timestamp, which just counts seconds. This is one of the most practical approaches if you're trying to write software to keep track of time. Once you've got all your software using the second count as its internal representation, life becomes a lot simpler. You can write library routines to translate to whatever display format your users like, while keeping time arithmetic simple for the software.
Of course, we're going to have to make sure all our software is compiled for a 64-bit second counter some time within the next two decades. But that's starting to happen now, well ahead of schedule. Actually, it should be a signed 64-bit integer, so we can use it to unambiguously represent the pre-1970 portion of human history.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
That would be a bad idea, if you are going to change it, make it metric. I think we should have 10 hour days of 100 minutes, or something like that (whatever fits). I actually wrote out a way that would make everything line up the way it does today.
Finally, a real IT problem to solve - I've been adrift since Y2K.
Not to self promote, but I think that a new calendar should ditch uneven months, weeks, etc., not just slap a patch on. The chinese first invented it, and I'm working to improve it... the 10 month calendar, aka The Triangular Earth Calendar.
Very simple and learnable. Each week has 6 days. Each month has 6 weeks. Each year has 10 months. Every year has a final week (thinking about a "week of light" for world peace celebration or such). The final week is 5 days, 6 on a leap year, leap years remain as they are now.
By basing months on a value of 6, instead of 7, you can have more normal weeks. You can divide them in half, thirds, and even fourths (with half days) much easier than a 7 day week. The same holds true for months. Such a calendar is as easy to work with as the metric system. This 12 month proposal is utterly devoid of any improvement on the current system.
When I finish my proposal, I'll be happy to put it up (in my spare time, working on how the new calendar integrates with business and culture models currently) and dispell such foolish notions that don't go to the root of the problem.
It's not about the days in the month. To rephrase the popular quote: "It's the days of the week, and weeks of the month, stupid."
Not only is the Trangular calendar uniform, but it is also very beautiful. The days of the week form a triangle (0 at top, 3 4 5 at bottom), but these triangles form a larger triangle that is a month (same structure), and the months form a triangle that is the year (0 at the top, 6 7 8 9 at the bottom). In standard format, this calendar can be printed on with 1 single month, and you just check off the current month in the header, and reuse the days (useful for marker board calendars) because every month is the same. Also, unlike the chinese, this one recognizes true time. It recognizes time that has elapsed correctly. IE - After one hour has passed after the new year, it is 0 month, 0 day, 1 hour. It is also millenial, recognizing 2001 (the true millenium) as 0 year. Like the metric unit, this system recognizes the day as a unit of 1, thus all time is based on a decimal of day.
Want to know the current date/time of this post for me?
3.9.31:62901
Cleaning the net one sed at a time! s/sex/sermons/; s/hot/holy/; s/goats/thebible/; www.holysermonswiththebible.com
So obviously nothing is going to change until our alien overlords arrive, but our current system could use some change. However, if you were going to change it, wouldn't it make sense to go a little further and make each month be a round number of weeks? This would make it much easier to remember the date--It's tuesday, so it has to be 2,9,16... You could do this with 10 35-day months and an extra one-week month. Newton week would probably be added to that. But I guess it's not really practical as so many things are monthly, so you pay the same for less in February. Unfortunately the floating week is an absolute killer.
It's much more practical. Ends up this "15-days for payment and 14-days for two week periods" discrepancy.
Considering some cultures had 12 30-day months + 5 days, i follow the same approach.
Make 13 months of 28 days each. 28*13= 364.
The LAST (13th) month will be 29 days, and 30 on leap years. (These extra 2 days will be declared "end of year" vacation).
This has the advantage that your monthly salary can ALWAYS be calculated as 4x a weekly salary.
I been using the following system for about eight years:
1) Palms up (rt index lsb, left index msb)
2) Use your thumbs as a "ground".
3) Open circuit is 0, closed (touching thumb) is 1
what use are months?
do away with those things
a year should have 36 10day weeks
those 5 or 6 days that are left could be used as something to replace x-mas and new year
10hour day ect ect ect.
septobruary 16 2004 realy doesnt make sense
carpenter people can use 12 so they can devide it in 3 or 4 though i realy dont see the point
I'm thinking the licensing fees alone could have Bill Gates cleaning the toilets in Cupertino.
Hmmm...
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Wish granted.
Gonna have to wait a while, but it's being worked on...
WTF? How is I vividly remember phoning my elderly mother, in my native Canada, some years before she died: and with astonishment hearing her quite casually say, "it was very hot today, 30 degrees." an answer to the question (statement) Well, I still say you are going to fail.
This man is obviously daft! He's just typing randomly!!!
My birthday is on a Thursday, I never could get the hang of Thursdays.
It's April Fools, all you have to do is completely change the calendar so something inane and make it be the same day every day! Just think every day could be your birthday or Christmas! Even better is that every person could choose their own calendar and live life the way they want to! Forget having to work, EVER! I'm sure it won't effect anything important.
Wrong, everyone knows California has 4 distinctly marked seasons:
Fire
Earthquaque
Flooding
Riot
So you go to when-the-heck-will-the-sun-be-up-at-this-point-in- the-world.com as you must do with every phone call you make, because there is no way of telling when sunrise or sunset is at any point of the world with this new time system, but you are lucky enough that 1800 World Time where you live just so happens to be right at nightfall. Not too early and not too late to make a phone call.
You find out from this website that your friend will not be awake at this time. It is 1800 World Time there as well, but they are asleep as it is 3 AM in their local time.
Even worse, let's say you forget to convert the time, call, and wake your friend up at 3 AM, thinking that they would be awake.
Now compare it with this scenario...
It's 6 PM your local time. You want to call your friend in Japan. You convert your time to the time in Osaka, Japan by going to a site that actually exists and has a shorter URL to see what time it is where your hypothetical friend lives. You find out that it is 3 AM there. You decide not to call after all.
Which is simpler? Sure, from a business perspective, it is somewhat easier to arrange meetings, as you can agree to meet at 1800 WT and you would both be on the same schedule. However, scheduling meetings requires the same amount of work, as you still have to consult some form of chart or converter to figure out when business hours are. Our current form actually FORCES you to consult a chart, which is a Good Thing, as it forces you to know when sunrise is. From this, you can guess what a person is currently doing and where they are.
Oh, and let's not forget that in most places, the date would actually change in the middle of the day. That is to say, at noon you might have to write a different date for papers then what you wrote at around 9 o'clock. With our current time system, the date changes when we are asleep (or fixing that last bug), and therefore goes by unnoticed either way.
Oh, and let's say that some countries actually adopt a world time while other countries continue to use local time. That would not only defeat the entire purpose of using world time in the first place; it would divide the world even further apart!
If your friend still needs proof, set all his clocks to Greenwich Mean Time.
Oh; don't tell him about it.
In fact, if anyone thinks that having World Time is a brilliant idea, then feel free to experiment by changing your clocks around to match GMT. Have fun setting your alarm clocks to wake you up at 3 AM to go to work.
After a few days, you may start to feel a bit strange. You may even feel that you should set your clocks back to local time. This feeling is your sanity returning. I recommend embracing it, lest it flees from you again and you get the brilliant idea to replace the Gregorian calendar with something even less functional....
Ain't happening. Nothing worth reading here. Move along.
Heard any good sigs lately?
I miss the old Saturday Night Live...
Don't underestimate the power of The Source
This was thought of years ago, only without the "newton week" crap.
Skinner: Remember this time people, 80 past 2 on December 21st.
Our day would change at 4pm according to his plan. Having a date change in the middle of the working day would require a major change to most date-related software.
It's too complicated to set up nested parsing of dates, so instead we should change all calendars around the planet.
Uh-huh.
I don't think this is brilliant.
The fact that consecutive years would vary in length by a full week... seems that would cause problems with the measurement of time. Consider calculating interest, a single extra day every four years isn't too bad. Adding a week every few years would make things pretty hairy.
The point of all this is to... make sure that saturday this year is a saturday of the same date next year?
This seems like a great way to make the planet more uniform and boring, we could know what hours are shifts are for every year for the rest of our lives. ;)
Plus, the vacation week ends up being only every few years?
Is this whole sceme a joke?
Why are we so obsessed with Earth-centered calendaring? Once we've settled half a dozen planets in the next couple of centuries, the UNIX time definition (well, actually TAI to take care of leap seconds properly) is the only one that makes sense independent of local planetary conditions. Yeah, sure, we'll have local calendars too, but the universal standard will be seconds since 1970 or 1955...
Energy: time to change the picture.
Especially considering that even the world that adopted most of the metric system still hasn't adopted Metric Time.
Why don't we measure time using the epoch?
Get the precise date and time in one concise number!
________________________________________________
suwain_2
And all this is supposed to make our lives easier????
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
This might work if DST didn't exist. But it does, and it makes calculating offsets in your head hard.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayan_calendar
Half the scale not used!? 0 is freezing, 100 is boiling (at std. atmospheric pressure). That entire range is extremely useful and relevant in everyday life.
Where I live, the temperature is usually below freezing this time of year. What logic is there in saying that the first degree below freezing is THIRTY ONE?
Freezing is a very relevant temperature point, and having sub- freezing temperatures lie below zero makes a lot of sense to me. Right now it's -14C here. It's negative. That means its COLD, see?
The ZERO point in Farenheit is pretty damned meaningless (but it'll be well below 0F tonight, woot). Of course, later this year it may reach -40F, which is the only temperature in Farenheit that makes sense--because then it'll also be -40C.
I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
Interestingly, the astronomy used in creating the Jewish calendar makes it drift overall (it has a few months that change lengths to account for the fractional lunar month length, and has a leap month every few years, which operate according to a 19 year cycle of the different types of months. (19 years of lunar months divide equally into the solar year, the ancient astronomers knew) much less than the Julian calendar does, and practically speaking not noticably different than the Gregorian.
Of course, non-Jews mostly don't consider the lunar nature of the months important for their religion (though the name month derives from "moonth") and since Jews are a lot less pushy about forcing their calendar upon others than the Catholic church and the Roman empire, the Jewish calendar, as ingenius as it is in matching biblical demands, is only in use by Jews today; and of course is a bit difficult to program for unless you're good at astronomy or use Emacs. (Emacs has a Hebrew calendar function, and l'havidil a Mayan one as well.)
Err, more like 20 seconds.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
You're right- I had my hours and minutes confused.....
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I propose a year with 13 months of exactly 4 weeks plus the odd intercalary day. The year would start on the spring equinox, southern hemisphere (its our turn).
The advantage of my plan is that the thirteenth month would have no rent, interest or taxes payable.
Vote for Dave, world dictator!
Replying to myself, but to simplify the discussion entirely.
Let's say you have X number of Boxes, and Y number of widgets. You need to store all the widgets in the boxes (because your boss has nothing better to do than have you store widgets in boxes). The boxes are all the same size (capable of holding so many widgets eacy), and the widgets are all the same.
What do you do?
You can either put the widgets in the boxes haphazardly, using too many boxes (costing your boss money), or you can put the same number of widgets in each box, and any remainder in the final box. If your boss knows you used method 1, he will have to count the totals of each and every box up to get his inventory. If your boss knows you used method 2, he simply needs to know how many you used in a full box, how many boxes there are, and how many are in the remainder box.
If you realize that method 2 is the better method (which you can check by simply asking anyone in a shipping/invetory department), the question then is simply a matter of A) using the fewest boxes and B) minimizing your remainder. With 365/6 widgets and 1-366 boxes (either all in 1 box, or a box for eacy), you have to look for a good ratio. In my ratio, you have 10 boxes. Each box has six layers, and 6 widgets on a layer. The last box has 1 layer of either 5 or 6.
I think this most easily explains the main benefits of the TEC over Gregorian (or any other system).
Cleaning the net one sed at a time! s/sex/sermons/; s/hot/holy/; s/goats/thebible/; www.holysermonswiththebible.com
Think about it....time in itself is a man made item that corrects itself by adding an extra day per 4 years based on planetary rotation. It's ironic too because most theorems are time based and it's a semi-arbitrary idea. The most basic scientific definition is: "The time needed for a cesium-133 atom to perform 9,192,631,770 complete oscillations"; however this is also incomplete in its scientific definition (reference: http://my.erinet.com/~kenseto/doppler.htm). If you read the article it references "background time" as it relates to clock time, which also is a reference to the behavior of Cesium-133. Now, why was that particular element charged with determining time and how it's clocked? I looked that up too but all the websites I searched still reference time as it relates to something that man has already defined. In other words....an arbitrary number. The definition of a "second" is nothing without referring to some other man-made definition of how an element reacts; or doesn't. So I leave you with this: try defining time without referring to a man-made, pre-determined definition. Shit, now I'm going to lose sleep over this; kinda' like: "Did Adam and Eve have navels?" OK, I stole that one but it still makes me wonder. I think I'll post AC just so I don't get my butt kicked with article references in my email. Just respond on /. and I'll read your response and your reference.
Why not just number the days 1-365? Seems a lot simpler, and no weirdness.
after 2000 years we finally have reasonably universal agreement on a civil calendar system, and jerks like this insist on needlessly stirring up the pot of discord.
The Y2K experience was actually a good thing - most programmers now understand the Gregorian calendar algorithm.
Skip the concept of 7-day weeks and months and timezones and DST and all that other foolishness.
... adn while we're at it, why not switch to a 20 hour clock in stead of 24? 10 hours of daylight and 10 hours of night (at the equator on the Equinoxes) ... and 50 minutes to an hour... and 50 seconds to a minute.
Everybody runs on Zulu/UTC/GMT. We all know when the sun's at Zenith.
Use Julian dates instead of day/month/year notation. Days ending in 0, 1 or 5 are like current "weekends". You get 3 days off our of every 10 for a normal "white collar" work schedule. Only a few more days off than current weekends, but New Year's Day, Christmas and New Year's Eve are freebees.
The divide by 30 calculation (except for December and the unpredictable "Newton") is pointless. The divide by 7 calculation is a pain. Pitch them all. Wasn't the "Metric System" supposed to make all our lives easier? Here you go. Switch to a 10 day week. You get 36 (and change) of them.
Golly-gosh... imagine the ease of calendrical computation! Why you wouldn't even need a PC or PDA anymore! It would all be so easy that...
hey... HEY!!! WHO THE HELL ARE YOU?... MFF! FUFFMURRFUNNUNUH! MMMMM!
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yes. the calendar proposed by mister henry is ideal. i love it. it is fantastic. it is even better than "cats".
With policies like that, I'm a shoo in for government.
And it's mathematically much more perfect:
13 months of 28 days (364) plus a single "New Year's Day" every year. Add in your 2 days of new year celebration every 4 years.
I'm baffled because I figured this out when I was something like 12.
I here ask all citizens of the earth to make the basis to the world-democratic calendar
/. said i was using to many junk characters)
;)
4 quarters, 1..4, forget summer, winter... climate is going crazy anyway
each quarter 90 days, 10 weeks of 9 days each, 2 weekend days, (only 6 or 7 working hours per day)
the remaining 5/6 days a year, for celebration, why not from the last 2/3 days of each year to the first 2?
workforce total =
current model
52weeks * 5 workdays * 8 hours = 2080 hours year
new model
4 quarters * 10 weeks * 7 workdays *7 hours = 1960 hours a year
As for vacations, why not 4 weeks a year:
4*7 = 28days a year.
that is exactly what you get on best countries.
(non european countries will probably think that is not enough work a year, but let me tell you its about the same we get now)
a year would be something like:
free week during new year celebration -5/6 days
workyear - 360 days, 4 quarters, 40 weeks
(I did a nice ascii art for it, but
Yet another calendar? sure, make it a well designed one, that way we will suffer none of the current ones problems.
I also would like a "change in regime" to something better worldwise. but we can leave that for later
I'm trying to get modded "Interesting Flamebait Informative and Insightful Redundant Troll" *-* Please Help *-*
January was named for Janus, who symbolized doorways and transitions. Prayers to Janus traditionally occurred even before prayers to Zeus. He had two faces, one for looking forward, and one for looking back, and was a natural choice for the beginning of the year.
Of course, you seem to be aware that September-December were initially the 7th-10th months, when July and August were inserted to honor Julius and Augustus...
Fnord.
Page 34 of the Principia Discordia.
Not a sentence!
Not bad. I'll take an extra week off. In the meantime, I have designed a calendar with one day per year. Every holiday and birthday is on the same day so all gifts cancel out and you don't have to buy any presents all the time
( Getting the world to switch calendars ...)
... refers to The World Calendar (described here) with substantially the same properties, and says "The World Calendar has won the support of many different groups.". And following a few links from the original article leads here, where it says "... the notion of a leap-week calendar was first introduced in 1926 by M. P. Delaporte.".
So this particular notion:
I think we should impose a metric-like system on time measurements. After all 24 hours in a day is a horribly unround number. We should divide a day into 100 metric hours. Then we could mystify people by saying cool things like "I'll be back in 2 deca-hours" or "Hang on, I'll be there in a centi-hour!". It may sound absurd but you better believe if someone did invent such a system you would have people out there touting it as easier, more efficient and (*groan*) more "scientific".
...00100
Or for the two fisted: 00100 00100
Hex works for me tho...
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
..Reading it to form an opinion is totally alien to what goes on here.
Truth isn't Truth - Guliani
ya know... with how messed up our current system is.... this would be really nice...
I don't get why all calendar reform proposals bother with months & years, nor why they're cyclical. Thus, I propose the following:
...89 d will suffice.
..., Monday=6. Alternatively, you might prefer to replace the week by a ten-day period, creating the days Earthenday, Weresday (wurzday, meaning Man's day) and Wisday (wizday, meaning Woman's day, all three formed from the Old English genitive+day, then contracted). Then, obviously, you say the week goes Tuesday=0, ..., Saturday=4, Earthenday=5, Weresday=6, Wisday=7, Sunday=8, Monday=9.
Today (Dec 22) shall henceforth be day 1 aka 1 d. Tomorrow will be 2 d (not 2d., which is tuppence!). A week hence will be 8 d. In seven hundred and sixty four thousand, three hundred and eighty-nine days, it will be 764 389 d, though in colloquial use I'm sure
It might be useful to retain a week for a working purposes, and so a week would obvious start on a Wednesday and continue until Tuesday; you can work out the day by dividing the daycount by seven and mapping the remainder according to the algorithm Tuesday=0, Wednesday=1, Thursday=2,
When people are 6500 d old, they can drink, drive and are required to vote (though not all at the same time!) in Victoria. Companies can use 100 d periods for their financials, longer than a current quarter, but shorter than a third.
Things like seasons aren't really all that important that they need to be in a calendar. I know that last decade (10 d, not 10 years!) was a bit colder than this one, and that next decade will be warmer. People that really care about this stuff can still use the archaic calendar if they want, though.
The only difficulty is that we lose birthdays and other anniversaries, because we've lost the year. Well, nevermind; if we steamroll headlong into this new system, we'll work it out eventually.
Yay! for the yearless calendar!
PS: I'm not sure if I'm serious. I didn't mean to be, but it's such a good idea! Incidentally, with the three new days, feminists can revel in the fact that man's day sounds like 'worse day' and woman's 'wise day'.
Look out!
Young people gather on 24dec and 31dec at the "Mercado del Puerto", next to the docks, by noon, eating roasted meat and drinking (and "sharing" in the F1 style) fizzling wine (medio y medio). By 2pm everybody is drunk, in the summer sun (even more drunk). Here, we wouldn't have a problem getting drunk a little earlier.
It would even help recovering for the night dinner. We have the holidays in the summer, but have the european tradition of eating pork and lamb, and hipercaloric foods.
This means I'll actually be getting up at the beginning of a calendar day.
I saw this back in the 80's in Discover magazine. I even did a school report on it. 13 months each with 28 days. Leap years would get a 'sol' day in the middle of the summer where everyone would get the day off! Hopefully you weren't supersticious because every month had a friday the 13th. Side effect was that it would put all calendar makers out of business...
A good friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body.
The metric system hasn't won out precisely because it isn't inherently "superior" in any way. I suspect that the whining over the English system is just a meme that dates back to some mathematically illiterate folks who thought that the only way to handle anything was to make it base ten.
I'd agree with you if the English system was always base 16, but it's not. There are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and 1760 yards in a mile. That's just confusing.
Hell of a way to start the year.
Was that out loud?
And I've known forever why 12 is a good number of eggs: because it's so divisible...
YOU, sir, are a genius!