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.
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.
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