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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.
..you want to reorganise the entire western hemispheres calendering system because the new one is easier to code?
Out with the old....
Freakin' hopeless.
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
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Too bad such system will never come about. I am tired when I get home from but after a few hours I feel energized enough to work on some private projects or go out. There is a tendency to go on until like 3am but next day is horrible since I have to get up at 7. I tried shortening sleep but that doesn't work, even with 1 hour less I feel terrible during the day. There was a time I went to sleep whenever I felt the need for and woke up without an alarm clock, this resulted in 26-hour days. The only problem was that sometimes I had to miss a party because it started at the same time I was about to go down.
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?
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.
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 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.
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...
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.
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
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.
I'm not sure where you came up with that theory, but computers (even Windows) generally store time as fractions of seconds since the Epoch. The epoch is usually 0:00UTC January 1, 1970, and has more to do with the hardware than the OS. More information here.
As a side note, 0.041666, with the 6 repeating forever, is not an irrational number. Irrational numbers have no pattern and the sequences to do not repeat. Most importantly, they cannot be written as the fraction of two integers, as 1/24 can. Perhaps you meant "irrational" as in "lacking reason", which I suppose would apply to your post.
--
Promoting critical thinking since 1994.
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
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.