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.
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
So view here instead.
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?
Another proposal along the same lines
a r. html
http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/calend
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."
It doesn't break the 7 Day Week. All it really is a 364 Day Year. And every 5-6 Years therre is an extra week. So It will not mess wih their Sabbath.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
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
Lunch hours.
Is it digitally signed?
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...
Swatch recently tried to market something like this. Unfortunately, their site is flash, but go to here and search for ".beat". The idea was based on 1000 "beats" per day, all starting at 0 in Zurich, if I remember correctly (rather than Greenwich). Interesting idea to keep everybody synchronized, but not helpful if you want to know what time lunch is.
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.
What's so complicated about the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox? Otherwise known as Easter Sunday ;-)
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
What's the difference between having the newton week and Leap years on the current calandar? Seems more complicated to me.
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.
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.
That's stupid.
For more information on calendar reform in general check Calendar Reform. I'm partial to the World Calendar.
Software Wars
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.
Changing the clock is such a lame idea. Any mathematician will tell you base 12 is far superior for doing integer calculations than base 10. 10 only has 2 divisors: 2 and 5, which 12 has 4: 2, 3, 4 and 6 which make a 60 minute hours superb. What's 1/2 an hour? 30 minutes. What's 1/3? 20. What's 1/4? 15. 1/5? 1/6? 1/12?
If you had 100 minutes in an hour you'd start doing a lot of rounding or using a lot of decimal places.
Debate the calendar all you want, but leave the clock alone.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
Jesus loves you, I think you suck
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.
As a believer in Christ, knowing that most of our calendar and most of the days of the week originate from names of ancient mythological gods, it makes me a little uneasy too.
Tech, life, family, faith: Give me a visit
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.
My car gets forty rods to the hogshead, and that's the way I like it!
Actually:
Fourth
Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days you shall labor, and do all your work; but the seventh day is a Sabbath to The Lord your God; in it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your manservant, or your maidservant, or your cattle, or the sojourner who is within your gates; for in six days The Lord made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested the seventh day; therefore The Lord blessed the Sabbath day and hallowed it.
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.
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.
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.
Lousy Smarch weather!
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?
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
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.
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?
Yeah, right.
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.
Hindu is likely older- certainly has older than 6000 year scriptures. And it's widely practiced.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
...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
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...
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.
...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
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'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.
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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.
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.
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
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!
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.