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.
..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