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
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?
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!Lunch hours.
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
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.
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.
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.)
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?
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
...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
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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