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.

Comments

Sounds like a nut.

[Anonymous Coward]

"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.

Re:Sounds like a nut.

[ak3ldama]

Yea, with lines like The Gregorian Calendar does not cease to exist, it just isn't ordinarily used. Except by hicks., you really have to wonder if this guy wants to be taken seriously. The pitfalls to his calendar are enough to keep it from being implemented universally, but once his personality steps in, it is a done deal.

so..

[monkey_jam]

..you want to reorganise the entire western hemispheres calendering system because the new one is easier to code?

Out with the old....

Re:so..

[FortKnox]

Yeah, but you have to remember... its tons easier to work mathematically with the metric system, but we STILL haven't switched over yet....

Re:so..

[Tim C]

You can do that with the current system, just by eliminating timezones and standardising on GMT.

The problem with that is that while it'd be fine for me (in London), other people would suddenly have to adjust to getting up at say 2am GMT rather than 9am local time. No, it wouldn't make any practical difference, but it would require changing the way you think, and *that* is the biggest problem of all.

Seriously, changing the way that hundreds of millions of people measure time just to make the lives of a few thousand coders a little easier is insane.

Re:so..

[jellomizer]

Yes and it is easer for HR too. Just yesterday I had to modify a program because it clears out the data for a new year. But because New Years is on a saturday they gave the 31st off for the holiday. So I needed to modify the program to whipe out all data up to but not including the 31st. of December. Our Current System dates are considered to be just as bad as user interaction. Because you are mixing a 365 day year with a 7 day week on a 5/6 day work week, with the same number of vacations durring the work week every year, so you need to fudge the holidays, Every years the numbers fall on different days of the week. Every 4 years there is an extra day in the year. This is a fairly complex coding mechnisim to work out. Having holiday consistancy is a big bonus because.

Some parallels...

[VE3ECM]

Getting the world to switch calendars will prove to be as hard as getting the USA to switch to metric...

Freakin' hopeless.

change

[Legato895]

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

Re:change

[gewalker]

AH, the 13-month calendar.

13 months, 4weeks each, plus an extra saturday after week 52 (2 extra Saturdays on leap years).

Now you have calendar reform that I could support.

Not going to happen, ever

[PktLoss]

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.

I want my birthday to change!

[teiresias]

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 :)

Nutcase

[photon317]

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.

I have to agree.

[gandell]

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.

No more timezones!!!

[jaaron]

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...

Re:How is this redundant?

[stupidfoo]

If you don't like it, don't read it.

But how will I know whether or not I like if I don't read it?