Slashdot Mirror
Christmas Always On Sunday? Researchers Propose New Calendar
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Johns Hopkins University have discovered a way to make time stand still — at least when it comes to the yearly calendar. Using computer programs and mathematical formulas, an astrophysicist and an economist have created a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity."
is not for grinches, you can't have my day off.
My birthday would always be on Monday.
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first. It makes more sense and means more in the long run.
Jan 1 = Sunday, 30 days
Feb 1 = Tuesday, 30 days
Mar 1 = Thursday, 31 days
Apr 1 = Sunday, 30 days ...
May 1 = Tuesday, 30 days
Jun 1 = Thursday, 31 days
Then every 5-6 years, there's a leap *week* at the end of the year after December called Xtr, so Xtr 1, 2015 through Xtr 7, 2015 would exist as valid dates (in whatever order your country uses).
But that trick never works!
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
NERDS!!!!
They deal with the non-integer number of days in a year by occasionally adding an extra week in December. So on some years you may experience the 36th of December.
And the metric system and end daylight savings time? PLEASE!!!
Ocean Marketing.
Or we could just use a lunar calendar instead of a solar one and not have to worry about crap like leap years.
On their hands and not enough important problems in the world to occupy their pointy little heads.
... except equinoxes and solstices...
Their proposed calendar has 4 quarters each of 91 days (30 + 30 +_31).
Problem 4 x 91 = 364, not 365! There is a day missing.
183 years later and Christmas will be 6 months adrift.
That is not a calendar. That is an attempt at a calendar, just like the other calendars his article was rubbishing.
#fail.
Have fun reprogramming everything, developers!
...have created a new calendar in which each new 12-month period is identical to the one which came before, and remains that way from one year to the next in perpetuity.
and then later in the article
This adjustment was necessary in order to deal with the same knotty problem that makes designing an effective and practical new calendar such a challenge: the fact that each Earth year is 365.2422 days long. Hanke and Henry deal with those extra “pieces” of days by dropping leap years entirely in favor of an extra week added at the end of December every five or six years.
So it does not remain consistant from one year to the next.
But then they go on to say:
Sounds like they're just shifting the complexity.
Didn't Isaac Asimov propose something like this thirty or forty years ago? I have a vague memory that there was a "year day" and "century day" that wasn't a day of the week.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Halloween is gone. On the plus side, it appears that they've managed to get a lot of the drinking holidays on the weekend.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
There have been many calendar-reform systems proposed, and "leap-weeks" are a common solution. Wikipedia has an article on leap week calendars and lists five advantages and three disadvantages. It, in turn, points to a web page about leap week calendars that details nine of them.
Henry's own web page doesn't mention the existence of other leap week calendars. It merely says the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar is better than the Gregorian calendar, not why it is better than the nine other leap week calendars. And it doesn't seem to present any particular plan for getting it adopted, beyond saying "It CAN be done, folks, and the decision is YOURS, not mine. Each of you," and the proof that it's feasible is that his mother has adapted to quoting Celsius temperatures. But what's needed is not a better calendar, but a better plan than anyone has heretofore come up with for getting it adopted.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
I've thought that 13 months with 4 weeks each would be so much better. Every year is missing a "day" but it could just be a New Year's Day holiday. The benefit of having a day always being a date would make so many things so much easier. Is humanity past fearing the number 13 so much that we could have a rational calendar?
Can I have it on Monday rather please?
Lousy Smarch weather.
Slow (or speed) the Earth's revolution around the Sun until it takes 360 (or 372) days. Problem solved.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
What about all of the poor schmucks whose birthday always winds up on a Wednesday, every year, for the rest of their lives?
"the new calendar is identical every year... except that, every five or six years, there is a one-week long Mini-Month"
That's not identical every year. That's pretty stupid, actually, and would cause more problems than dealing with moving holidays. There are currently zero computers that currently are set up to deal with an extra "Mini-month" at an irregular interval. e.g. Payroll systems that pay on the 15th and end of the month would need to be changed and have a custom amount for that period. They compare it to the Y2K situation, but it's not analogous; this is not adding two digits to the year, this is a fundamental change in how dates are stored and calculated. They're trying to add an occasional Smarch to the calendar, no one wants it.
Also, it would suck if your birthday was permanently on a Monday.
"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."
No, that would suck for everyone who works. I don't know why they think it would be pleasing for Christians, that doesn't make the least bit of sense.
The entire proposal is just a crackpot dreaming, it fails to be more convenient, his reasoning of the "benefits" is mostly nonsensical.
Error establishing a database connection
Something that's sub-optimal (whether calendars or keyboard layouts) not only has to be shown as lacking, but a better option needs to be found that everyone agrees upon - which would realistically take way more work than is worth it.
... behind global metrification.
I've corrected the Hopkins' calendar so that
- people and companies won't have to remember, and make plans for the upcoming "leap week"
- annual time series data will not require a massive correction factor to account for "leap week" years
- equinoxes and solstices will not drift over each 5-6 year period.
I'm calling it "The Calendar We Already Have Today". The unveiling will be in Nice, France (next May, although there may be some confusion about the exact date).
We don't need months. Just use quarters and call them seasons. Months were traditionally periods of lunar cycles, and aside from certain religious calendars, is really no well aligned with lunar cycles at all. Fundamentally, we just don't need them.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
The site is talking about dropping timezones and adopting Universal Time everywhere. (Claiming only people in the middle of the Pacific would be particularly troubled by this)
Wow.
Eh, not bad at first glance, but I can't be on board with zapping time zones. As someone who deals with international locations across the globe every single day, its a ton easier to find out "oh, they're 8 hours behind us" vs "Hmm, its 0900 Global. We just had lunch... what are they doing in New York at this time? Its 0900 there too - I think its still dark, but I don't know if its close to dawn or if they just woke up."
Sounds good in theory, but god it would suck.
-- My Sig is a P228.
Should we feel sorry for people born on "Friday the 13th" of January, April, July and October?
If we used the Holocene calendar as part of a reform, I'd be pleased even if only because it is religion independent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_calendar
How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first.
Never gonna happen. There are too many politically conservative idiots, like my mom, who believe attempts at converting to metric represent a "socialist" conspiracy, and almost literally scream at any attempt to remove Imperial units in favor of metric.
Socialist? The fucking metric system? Seriously?
The government already tried to phase in metric sometime in the 1970s, if I recall, emphasizing it in schools and installing additional signage on highways with metric speeds and distances. People responded to this with caterwauling and by shooting the road signs into tatters. Dave Barry summed up the final results the best:
Thus the metric system did not really catch on in the States, unless you count the increasing popularity of the nine-millimeter bullet.
The thought of going through every program looking for date logic that needs a total re-write yet AGAIN would be enough to make me change careers and take up tree farming.
There are billions of programs that need fixing, and every single one of them would need fixing by hand. There is no quick fix for date calculations and validations of dates, to say nothing of the mess that would be made of historical records and current contracts. Another monstrous boondoggle for no gain but a lot of pain.
Look, just as no one uses the metric system because of the inertia involved, no one would use this system either. We've solved all the major problems with the current system, there are no serious problems left that can't be solved with a 4 line rhyme, and a $2.95 calendar.
We all know its a goofie calendar and we've all made our peace with it, and there is nothing significant to be gained by messing with it.
How DARE the earth not revolve around the sun in even multiples of is revolution upon its axis!.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Simply adjust the earth's orbit so we have exactly 360 days on a year!
This is just horrible--breaks nearly every convention in order to fix a nearly trivial bit of mathematics, while introducing significant errors in the process? Yay!
Why should months start of different days of the week? Make them all 28 days long, and you have room for a 13th month.
While we're at it, why don't we go back to the Mayan Haab' calendar. It's more accurate than Gregorian; the only problem is that it shifts a tiny bit from year to year. If you don't like your months drifting, you can fix it by extending Wayeb' by a day every time it gets more than half a day ahead.
Who, in the modern world, has George Carlin's ("I have as much authority as the pope; just fewer people believe it.") moxie to force a calendar change? The Muslim, probably conservative Jewish, and other lunar calendar followers aren't going to change (what if THEY all got together and proposed a "universal" calendar?). Americans still aren't rational enough to switch to the metric system of measurement, so they're going to use a more-rational calendar than their current?
Here's a citation: "a "9-to-5" job is defined as a 14:00-to-22:00 (14 o'clock to 22 o'clock) job."
This means those of us in CA, OR, WA will have a work day going from 1700 to 0100. Yes, I can see how having the date change in the middle of business hours makes everything so much simpler.
Such a calendar scheme would have some interesting repercussions for countries such as Germany. Germans do not get Monday off of work if the 25th of December falls on a Saturday. which means that they could also forget about ever getting the first of January or several other holidays off if such a calendar system were to cause current holidays to fall on weekends. Perhaps they would have to adopt the Anglo-Saxon practice of taking a following Monday/Tuesday off which would essentially end up shifting entire holidays by two days in their perspective?
Made the following Monday probably the worst case of "the Mondays" ever...
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
..their birthday to NEVER fall on Saturday (the optimum night for a party), raise your hands.
Anyone? No one? Yeah, that's what I thought...
This is just an attempt head off the Mayan calendar collapse of the Earth.
If we are going to mess with the calendar no less then let's start with the basics. The day has a length that is related to a significant event so we can leave it as it is.
But do we really want 7 day weeks? I think this needs some thought....:-)
Monday Night Football still be on Mondays?
Look, just as no one uses the metric system because of the inertia involved
Look, just as no one exists outside the United States inside your mind...
And that is what it takes. The government loves metric, all government contracts are done in metric (like surveying and so on, something I worked in for a time). However they won't ram it down people's throats which is what you have to do. People will whine and bitch. Hell my grandpa STILL whines and bitches sometimes. He's Canadian and over 80 years old so he remembers when Canada was on the Imperial system. He still uses it often when talking about various things.
I also can understand people's resistance, to an extent, because for normal activities it isn't helpful. Metric really only starts to show you how cool it is when you do things like inter-unit conversions. Things like "How much energy will I need to boil a liter of water?" and so on. For every day use, all you need is to have a sense of how much a unit is. Buying meat is no harder or easier in pounds or kilograms, you just need to have a sense for how much each is so you can ask for an appropriate amount.
Thus it remains a hard sell, and so the government has to force it if they want to make it happen. At a federal level, that is pretty well impossible.
They eliminate leap days in favor of an intercalary "leap week" every five or six years, and have the gall to say that they have a "stable calendar that is absolutely identical from year to year."
Well, except for the intercalary week. That couldn't cause any confusion now, could it ?
And, just to make sure they are really ignored, they call for the whole planet to go on UTC. If they had any guts, they would have said TAI. At least that would get
rid of leap seconds.
this part: "In addition to advocating the adoption of this new calendar, Hanke and Henry encourage the abolition of world time zones and the adoption of “Universal Time” (formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time) in order to synchronize dates and times worldwide, streamlining international business."
weinersmith
As good an explanation as any for this reform.
Universal Time time zones??
Local time is easier for people to work with and easier on people traveling as well.
We just need to accept that unlike some measurements, which we can make fairly arbitrary and thus set to whatever we like, days and years are things dictated by the Earth's movement and thus don't work out nicely. Doesn't matter what we'd like it to be, it is what it is. The fact of the matter is that the Earth doesn't have an integer number of rotations in the amount of time it takes to go around the sun.
Given that, it doesn't make much sense to fuck with the calendar. Yes there's a lot of silliness, like February being so short. However since any changes we make are still going to make things imperfect, let's just not bother. What we have works, even if it isn't perfect. That's life.
Wow, you're right. In binary I can count to 1023 on my fingers and 1,048,575 if I use my toes...
Binary is the way to go; it is the only irreducible base system.
Pfffft....maybe if you're an ignorant plebe. You'd be amazed what I can do with my unary counting system. It beats binary hands down.
Look at that, it's one o'clock again. Time for another beer. You know, just one....
Look, just as no one uses the metric system because of the inertia involved
Look, just as no one exists outside the United States inside your mind...
Also, nobody works in science or engineering fields.
No one uses metric Time or Dates is what I meant to say. see here: http://zapatopi.net/metrictime/
Hell, even the French rejected it and it was a French invention.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
But they're not on the same day every year now, so not a big deal.
Oh, and Easter wouldn't be on the same day every year either, due to the moon.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
If youre going to have Christmas on Sunday, make every day a Saturday. ... ummm ... on second thought, that kind of stinks ...
Nobody gets the "lunch-bag letdown" of disappointment Christmas day.
No big post-Christmas debts for stuff that broke within hours.
No going to work - ever - unless you work on Saturdays.
No having to take the garbage out Sunday night for Monday morning
Conclusion?
Don't you DARE! You already screwed it up enough messing with Daylight Savings Time!
No one here mentioned stardates.
I need your TPS report don't the leap week cover sheet.
Time libraries are bad enough that my eye ticks whenever I have to do developing with them. Now we want to ADD complexity to the equation?
There ain't enough alcohol in the world.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
+5! Excellent system!
to ever be adopted.
We could over come the fear of 13 by having a 14 month year with the extra month
containing only 1 or 2 days - following the leap year pattern. The 14th month would
always be a holiday as you suggest. Giving everyone an extra holiday every
four years would probably be enough motivation to get it adopted.
more cowbell
If retail had those 3 days after, they'd be happy.
They'll be on the same Day, but not on the same date.... think about it.
I propose we also start using decimal hours, minutes and seconds. Lets have 10 hours of 100 minutes of 100 seconds each. That would make the second only a little bit shorter than the current second. It would greatly simplify all calculations involving hours, minutes and seconds.
How about you make 13 months each with 28 days.
28 is a multiple of 7, so every day of the week falls on exactly the same 4 days, every month of the year.
This however only adds up to 364.
Make the 365th day, or 0th day, 'new years day'. It has no 'day of the week' assigned to it, and therefore is a holiday.
For leap years, every four years or so, new years becomes a two day holiday.
If we are going to do this, a 13 month schedule with 4x7 months gets you to 364. By the way, the damned moon does that. "MONths" isn't coincidentally spelled that way. If you are going to do this, do it right. Add a month called "pax" or some other PC thing, and go from there. Like it has been said; adoption adoption adoption. Remember "Internet time" from Swatch in 2000?
my homebrew:
10 months (metric nod), 36 days each. each week is 6 days, so there's always 6 weeks in every month. And you get these 10 months of perfect 6x6 squares. Bingo!
A leap week of 5 (or 6) days at year's end.
A work week is 4 days, with 2 days off. Fuck the Abrahamic Religions and their 7 day weeks. Yes, I know, for saying that I just went from one in a trillion chance of being adopted to one in a quadrillion.
When given a choice between tradition and intelligence, humanity always goes with tradition, no matter how stupid.
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
...since they add a week every "5 or 6 years" I don't really see any particular advantage to this method vs. the one we have now. Sorry, not very compelling to me... Ferretman
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
After Dec. 21st of this year it seem pretty moot...
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
I'd say he was beaten out for most thought-provoking coverage of this phenomenon. But I don't think anyone's ever topped his take on a peculiar kind of coffee.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pon_farr
So this creates a calendaring system to get laid every 5-6 years????
I would so mod this up if i had the points.
Why not base 64 or 16?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The most elegant solution to the calendar I've seen is JRR Tolkien's (yes, him) Shire Calendar:
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
I always liked the New Earth Calendar: 13 identical months that start on the same day of week, Monday, and have the same number of days, and are all 4 weeks long. (With a leap week to keep days and dates synchronized)
The calendar in this article still has months that vary, start on different days, and really isn't significantly better than what we have now.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
The British Medical Journals do a spoofy article around Christmas every year, in which they pick an absurd subject and whomp up serious-looking studies on them. They do it at Christmas I guess because April 1st is just so obvious.
Examples include
This article would fit right in to that tradition.
We can just use the definition of Bede (in 725) which states: "The Sunday following the full Moon which falls on or after the equinox will give the lawful Easter." The current date of easter is fixed to the calendar in the western tradition (so far as I know; wiki has an extensive discussion of it for the curious), but that definition seems simple, succinct, and perfectly amenable to the new calendar (in which all the equinoxes and cross-quarter days, so far as I've seen by testing a couple, drift up to about seven days after their usual Gregorian ones, and then sync back up after a year with an extra week). Since the solar equinoxes drift around anyway, this seems reasonable.
Dude, finger binary rules. All we need is Vi Hart to do one of her super-cute videos about how awesome it is, and the revolution will be underway.
So they are saying that the USA should not only use different units of weight, length, temperature etc from most of the rest of the planet but you should use a different calendar from us all as well.
At least when the revolutionary French tried it, they invented different names for the days and months.
This amazingly stupid idea is unlikely to catch on globally. If the USA decides to use something else different from what normal humans use, please make up 7 new day names and 12 new month ones and keep a conversion table handy for dealing with the 96% of the human race outside your borders.
The use of a standard time happens a little already. I understand that international air travel uses GMT0 (also called UCT) and everyone ought to know their offset. I can't see it catching on in your country though. Some of your compatriots are not aware that there is anywhere else to be offset from...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Ummm... According to the guide, a two-liter bottle holds three liters.
While the JHU site says, "December 27, 2011 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE", the website has been active since at least February 4, 2005:
http://web.archive.org/web/20050204225524/http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendar.html
Of course, back then Xtra was called Newton and appeared in between June and July rather than between December and January.
Are we sure this story wasn't covered sometime in the last 7 years?
Males can go to 2 MB; 8 if you count the other dangling participles (as if).
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
why mess with something that works. Leave well enough alone.
My excel files will turn to shit.... it will be worst that switching to OOXML format.
It all kind of falls apart with the leap week. This will never be adopted. Adoption would require the support of at least one country incapable of grasping the metric system.
Only in theory. In real life you would be slapped if you count to "4" (dec)
There are fewer illiterates than people who can't read.
The entire premise is wrong, they will always end up with a system that has to be corrected because the physical system is not perfectly aligned (so more than 365 days in a year, etc.)
How about abolishing the entire 'natural year' structure altogether then, if they wanted something that wouldn't change?
What year is it? Who cares! Use precise seconds to construct minutes and hours, count the days, use 10 days per week, 10 weeks per months and 10 months per year - done.
No more year based calendar.
No more 'once a revolution around the sun' birthday celebrations.
No more 'leap' anything if the duration of second is defined just as duration of number of periods of the radiation.
Of-course this calendar would be disconnected from physical manifestation of natural phenomena like seasons and nobody would understand or use it, but the calculations would be as easy as pie.
You can't handle the truth.
and Microsoft will have problems with it, randomly resetting computers time and dates. Again
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
So if you're using your right hand, how to you say 2?
This idea is similar to the old Roman Calendar from 700 B.C., so why is it a step forward? Intercalary days? Arbitrary decision about how often we adjust the calendar by a week? Days that aren't part of any month? This is madness (THIS IS SPARTA-era esque.) Seriously, this is very similar to the Numa Calendar from Ancient Rome. What would we do with the birthdays of people born during the intercalary days? Would that be a holiday period? And all this to deal with the fact that calculations of interest are complicated for some people? And that they apparently do not like the Calendar printing industry and feel no one should buy kitten calendars....
Um, you might want to check that. Equinoxes (and solstices) mostly are. The only variability is because the terrestrial orbit is about 1/4 day longer than an integral number of days, but the effects of that are kept to a minimum due to leap years. We have an approximately astronomical calendar.
That the 7-day social cycle doesn't fit into the 365 day calendar is the source of most of the perceived and actual variation in dates (eg, American Thanksgiving is always a Thursday, President's Day is always a Monday, etc., which means those dates will never be the same from one year to the next), in addition to events which are determined by lunar cycle (like Easter, Passover, or Ramadan) which also doesn't neatly fit the terrestrial orbital period.
But as for equinoxes and solstices, they're mostly stable, varying by date only between two neighboring days. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox .
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
change the calendar for economic interests, change the time for economic interests? OFFS! are we ants? we (usually) spend more time away from work than working, so why show work interests stuff up the rest of our lives?
There was an unknown error in the submission.
http://shire-reckoning.com/calendar.html
This is straight from the appendices of the Lord of the Rings - In other words, 99.99% of slashdotters already have a copy of the Shire calendar on hand.
Note that the leap year holiday Overlithe lands on the middle of the summer solstice, not in February.
At best men get 2MB. Women can do 4MB if it's cold out.
;-)
Besides it was a man who said "640K ought to be enough for anybody". Compensation anyone?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
I would think a "fixed" calendar would have thought of that..and leap year. there is no need for it.
crazy world.
I still think thirteen 28 day months and leave in February 29th every four years makes more sense. Plus, we already have a name for the new month, Smarch!
Was thinking the same thing. I never bought 3L bottles anyway, they went flat before I could finish them.
Now that I think about it, we already use metric for lots of stuff like colas and water (most are now metric, litres, half litres, 2 litres) Many can foods are done in metric (they have to have both by law anyway). Even car speedos are required to have metric. I love cruising the highway at 120kph. (and so does my lawyer). All medicine is metric. All science is supposed to be in metric (oops NASA!).
If you want to get us Americans to use metric, all you have to do is require the most important thing we deal with to become metric: gasoline purchases. Everything else will follow. Gas is the most important thing to us, it is what we spend half our income on, and what we bitch about the price of most. As to temperatures, I really don't see C being that much better than F (the degrees are too fat in C) but that isn't that hard to get used to. Rate cars only by litres per 100k, and change the laws so it has to be sold by the litre, and within 10 years, problem solved. Besides, the old die hards that insist on using Imperial...well, they don't die that hard, and they are getting older.
Speaking of metric, I have noticed that different European countries use metric differently as well. Some will list a 6+ ft item as 2m, some will call it 2000mm. Yes, it is the same thing, but each country seems to have a preference for the default.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
it's easier to work out local times like when local places are open or at least get a easy general idea.
I vote we remove the calender all together.
Screw it.
I only buy calenders to have a sexy girl cover the empty space on the wall.
While we are at it, we can turn our 12 and 24 hour rotary dials into a partitioned dial with a light portion and a dark portion.
The light part would say, 'I'm awake,' and the dark would say, 'I'm sleeping,' and both portions would be adjustable to suit one's lifestyle.
This could easily be adapted into a watch that simply changes color via an LCD display, or some sort of over-complicated shutter system.
I also vote the government issue us free 18 inch ( or larger ) digital picture frames to fill the new free space on the wall with cycling pictures of beautiful women.
----
On a different note, why not be creative?
A *year* would consist of five months and have nothing to do with orbit. The length of the month would scale in such a fashion that the length of the previous month, multiplied by two, subtract half the original length would give the length in days of the month to follow. This would essentially solve the problem of aging past 30.
X*2-(0.5*X)
The first year would be 403 days if you started with a 31 day month. Reasonable. The following year would have 3043 days, and the year after that you'd be over half way through your life.
This system would also make it much easier to draw time-lines for those idiotic school projects.
Huh? Each Solstice is on its own day, half a year apart on either side. They're not on the "same" day.
Unless you're saying that the events are on the days that they are on. For instance, today is on the same day as today, regardless of what date you assign it. ("A rose by any other name...")
(tongue firmly in-cheek)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
No one uses Time Cube is what I meant to say. see here: http://www.timecube.com/
Hell, even the Americans rejected it and it was a American invention.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
What people here neglect to mention is that for a lot of things, like bolts or screws and a million other things, there really aren't good conversions available at all.
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
Even in Europe, ostensibly metric, they haven't really made this transition at all.
At least with the present calendar I can remember when February has a leap day. With the new calendar I'd be hard pressed to know when an xtr week was needed.
Who wants to have dates fall on the same day of the week each year? Variety is the spice of life.
Christ, you can't get Americans to use a globally standard single-unit measuring system in the same number base they learned to count in (and identical to the counting system they use already for currency and anything digital), but you expect them to learn a new metric system and a new base system?
Good luck, Mr. Coward, good luck.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
you simple minded twat - it's inertia. There are lots of things that are already expressed in metric units. Things with relatively quick turnover, i.e. food and whatnot. Things with a bit longer lifespan have been slower to convert. Like cars. Albeit most cars on the road today will have all metric fasteners and so forth. Take a look at your lugs? Then there are things with a very long lifetime. Like your house. Imagine you had to replace a floor and the only dimensioned subflooring you could get was metric, while your floor joists were set otherwise? You would either have seams falling between joists, or you would have to rip and waste some portion of the subflooring.
46 & 2
just not decimal.
No worse than converting lunar calendar holidays like Easter each year. And unlike Easter, most people won't care about the solstice. They mention that farmers will want a yearly "agrarian" calendar to show season-starts each year. Astronomers, fishermen, and the like would use the same calendar.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I see some foreign beers in 11.2oz bottles, and that number only makes sense as the customary equivalent of a third of a liter, with the label reworded for the US market.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Let's continue to simplify everything to reach that ultimate BORING existence.
SIN
Hopefully not every year, this stupid idea of believing in imaginary space jews should die real soon. Then we can go back to calling it the summer/winter solstice (depending on hemisphere) instead of "christmas"
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
235 lunar months happens to be very close to 19 solar years (a pattern known as the Metonic cycle)
19 * 12 = 228, 7 months are added to reach 235, in years 3,6,8,11,14,17 and 19 to be particular.
Each month is 29 or 30 days, including the leap month.
Info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_calendar
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metonic_cycle
The Gregorian calendar has a leap day, the Hebrew calendar has a leap month, the calendar in TFA is somewhere inbetween with a leap week.
Perhaps various existing calendar systems can provide lessons on how to implement the system proposed in TFA.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
What about boredom? Seriously the same calendar every year, forever think about it! You save on buying new calendar but you be bored to death in five years.
Not sure about the calendar, but the time of day adjustment definitely doesn't make sense to me.
Timezone conversion is a problem, but night/day not matching local time is another problem.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Wow, you're right. In binary I can count to 1023 on my fingers and 1,048,575 if I use my toes...
Don't you mean that in binary you can count to 1111111111 on your fingers, and 11111111111111111111 if you include your toes?
This is an ex-parrot!
Yeah, but it is prone to misunderstandings. Last time I ordered four beers for me and my buddies, we were thrown out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oops, about 1.2 US gallons.
Then keep the imperial gauges for bolts and screws. Europe did so, too, so why not? You can still buy "inched" screws and bolts here, even though nobody remembers a time when we measured things "imperially". Plumbing is almost entirely on the inch standard.
Nobody really bothers "changing" that. What for? The plans and blueprints are computer made, so who cares what unit they draw in, and the people actually building it don't measure, they use it. Besides, the conversion isn't that hard. 2.5cm/inch is plenty close to reality for most real world applications where measuring error almost invariably trumps an error margin of 0.04cm/inch.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My birthday is May 31 which is eliminated from this calendar. I could just shift it to June 1 or I could count the days from the first day of the year and use that. Oh, and I would feel bad for all of those kids born on Xtr 1-7. What a joke.
It's a classic four-quarters calendar, but with a leap week every six years or so, rather than a leap day every 4 years.
The new thing is that weeks stay in sync, which matters to some religious types.
The researchers are essentially replacing the leap year with a leap week. This is essentially the same concept the Mayans used with their calendar, so it's not exactly revolutionary. On the gripping hand, I propose we make use of a completely new calender designed purposely to usher in a new era of madness, but to also serve as an effective barrier of understanding and reason between generations and species. Here is my proposal:
.2495756, we'll say that each earth year is approximately 365.25 days per year. How do we get rid of the leap year, you ask? Quite easy, we'll just get rid of that pesky fraction by multiplying by 4. Now we have 1461 days. In order to make sure that each month has the same number of days, we'll simply multiply the number of days by 4, and divide by 12. This ensures that each month consists of 487 days. Some would say that this is too long and/or complex to be feasible, but we'll merely dismiss their complaints, wailing, and gnashing of teeth with the wave of the hand. This first version of a calendar is "The Short Year".
Rounding up from
To facilitate ease of use with astronomical calculations, we can create a "Long Year" in which each month consists of 1461 days, or 4 Gregorian Years. The total number of days in a "Long Year" will consist of 17532 days, or 48 Gregorian Years. Both of these newly proposed calendards of mine present several advantages over the inefficent, short-sighted calendars crafted by heathen and barbarian cultures of aeons past. We'll start with The Short Year first.
The first, and foremost of these is that there would be no leap hour, day, week, or year. Everything is consolidated into a single calendar of grotesque efficiency. The Short Year calendar pretty much guarantees that you'll have two birthdays per month. Since each month consists of a prime number of days (487), this also reduces the need to split up a month by the concept of "weeks". Two inefficient concepts are now eliminated.
Moving along to The Long Year, the major advantage of having a calendar of this length is that the average life expectancy of a human in developed nations is approximately 75 years. This ensures that most people will never have the misfortune or inconvenience of buying a second calendar. Also, given that The Long Year consists of 17532, there should be plenty of days for future holidays, that way, nobody gets offended because of overlapping festivities.
You obviously haven't worked with many date/time libraries. Almost all of them today support conversions to different calendars for internationalization purposes. All that would be needed would be to add the new universal calendar to those libraries and then have society slowly adopt it over time.
Have you even read TFA? This proposes changing to a 364 day calendar with a leap week.
0.04cm/inch ? That error margin would make screws and bolts completely unusable. They just wouldn't fit with 1/10th of that error.
I've both written and published such libraries. I know full well the scope of the problem. And it's far bigger than you imagine.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The solution we actually use in Europe for this enigmatic problem is almost magic, so you may want to read it twice to catch the finesse: We use the metric system for both the screw and the bolt!
in europe we use 1, 2, 5, 10, 20, 50 etc mm/cm/whatever.
0.635 cm is for catering to imperialists.
Again, the bolts and screws are available in both standards. What I meant is that when you're measuring a length of cable or plumbing pipe, an error margin of a few fractions of a millimeter don't matter.
As Mr. Anonymous above said, use the same standard for screws and bolts. Why not have both for the transition? Oh the horror of having to actually read what's on the label...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Using computer programs and mathematical formulas
How informative, and here I thought they would use sheet music and baking recipes.
sic transit gloria mundi
I think maybe you haven't thought through that example enough.
Exactly what inch-long object do you suppose they use when making a 1/4" object? Last time I checked, screws and bolts (for example) were not manufactured by carefully halving and re-halving other, larger, screws and bolts.
You could even call it 0.00347222222 fathoms - and manufacturing one would still be exactly the same process, with exactly the same amount of material required, and exactly the same cost.
Are you seriously suggesting that the bolts yanks use are created to a 1/1000th of a cm perfection?
Screws, plugs and nails are messured in cm (actually mm); only bolts (and then only some) are meassured in inches and I suspect it might be because manufactors are shipping to the entire world and most places can live with the conversion from Inches to cm, but not the other way...
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
I'm brought up the metric way and I wouldn't ditch that system. It makes more scientific sense. My impression though is that the imperial system makes more applied sense.
A few years ago I built my own British car. For historical reasons -I take- a mix of metric and imperial system is used in my car and I had to buy a set of imperial system keys. Surprisingly I ended up using almost all keys of the imperial system set.
I have a long experience in wondering why people even bother to make 9, 11, 12, 14, 16 and 18 mm keys. One almost never uses these but invariable they all come in the most basic key sets.
So metrics is fine but imperial system shouldn't be discarded too quickly. I expect it to remain among us for time to come.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
If you're going to do something as audacious as change the calendar that most of the world has adopted, and claim your system does away with all the hassle and uncertainty of the current system, you should come up with something that doesn't require the following small print "The following extra week will be added at the end of December, every 5 or 6 years". Seriously, if you're going to become hyper-rational about the year, just redefine everything - days, months, years, hours, minutes, seconds, etc. Do the math to make everything fit into nice and neat blocks of 10. Otherwise, stfu and keep the broken system which is broken due to backwards compatibility.
without the interesting history tidbit: knuckles mnemonic
I am an American... and strange one... I can perform ASE/Imperial/Metric conversions subconsciously without a problem and have never really had an issue using one or the other. I find myself playing video games at times and hearing my wife ask me how many milliliters 1.5 cups is when she's baking from one of my recipes. We don't own any cup measures.
The problem is... while metric is obviously mathematically easier since you can easily think "100cm is a meter and 1000 meters is a kilometer and therefore 100,000 cm is a kilometer" instead of "There are 3 feet in a yard and there are 5280 feet in a mile and therefore there is 1760 yards in a mile." people still need a calculator to handle the math because multiplying 5 by 100,000 is too complex for the average person. Yes... really.
Americans are actually better in arithmetic because of the screwed up ASE system of measurement.
P.S. - We do not use Imperial measure in the U.S., we use ASE. There is a discrepancy between the two systems with regards to measurement of liquid volume. This is because, when you transport a gallon of wine from England to Boston using a barrel on a wooden sailing ship, some of the wine evaporates and the English would not accept less money for delivering less wine. Therefore, 1 U.S. gallon is approximately 0.832 imperial gallons.
care to explain?
I don't understand your point - the metric system doesn't stop you from making something 1/4 the length of something else...
Of course when you're comparing measurements I find metric much easier. I've always wondered how Americans can remember whether 37/93rds of an inch is larger or smaller than 14/57ths of an inch, but for me comparing 623 millimetres to 1.01cm (1010 millimetres) not only makes the comparison easy, but I get an intuitive feel that one is a little over a third larger than the other.
But then I guess the difference here isn't metric vs imperial, it's more that imperial seems to prefer fractions, whereas metric favours a decimal number. You never write 1/2cm, always 0.5cm or 500mm.
The guide doesn't specifically say that a 2 liter bottle holds 3 liters. Ron Paul doesn't hold 75 liters, He has a volume of 75 liters. A 2 liter bottle have a volume of close to 3 liters.
The fact that paper records are utter crap to begin with and all survey information should be computerized anyway, it doesn't matter what system the measurement was made in the first place, a user should be able to click and choose which unit of measurement they would prefer to see... even if it's the Ramses II cubit (the cubit changed over time).
Of course, in Europe, we still use inches quite bit... the difference is, we don't purchase a 2x4 anymore, we purchase as 38x89 instead. The discrepancy in the conversion is that the metric conversion measures the wood after it's been dried and planed where the U.S. version measure before hand.
I have seen carpenters measuring using the width of their thumbs which is actually where inches come from in the first place.
For most other things, the imperial system is pretty much dead. On my recent trips to England... I have seen that with the exception of the ever-important pint, they have also made the change over to metric.
But as I said, you have good and bad points. There's absolutely no reason that in a world such as ours, we'd have to depend on a given measurement unit. Hell, I don't see any reason programs like AutoCad for example couldn't be changed to allow you to specify new measurement schemes as well. For example, if you were to design a solar sail, you might design it using metric since a full sized sail would be many meters wide and high. Though a proper solar sail would likely be produced by "knitting" a sheet of carbon atoms. Therefore, when passing the design to manufacturing, it might make sense to supply the measurements relative to the width of a carbon atom. Like 9.8123 billion carbon atoms in length and 82.995 billion carbon atoms in width and 1 carbon atom in depth. Just make a screen in the software which allows you to define your own measurement system and how to display it.
What exactly is TimeCube about? Every time I try to even begin to read that site I go temporarily blind - is there a wikipedia article that explains what that fruit loop is trying to say is so great about it?
I clicked through TFA to the website about the calendar. Apparently the most important feature (at least, the only one mentioned on the homepage) is the fact that the calendar meets biblical requirements.
If that's the way they feel, their credibility is zero. No need to look any further...
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Converting to metric would of course include facing out imperial bolts.
Have nine months with 40-day weeks and the tenth month is always 5 or 6 days depending on whether it is a leap year.
January - 40 days (4 weeks)
February - ditto
March - ditto
April - ditto
May - ditto
June - ditto
July - ditto
August - ditto
September - ditto
December - 5 or 6 days (mini week - holiday break)
Each week would have a weekend and a mid-week break:
Sunday - weekend
Moonday - weekend
Mercuday - 1st working day
Venusday - 2nd working day
Earthday - 3rd working day
Marsday - 4th working day
Jupitday - mid-week break
Saturday - 5th working day
Uranday - 6th working day
Neptuday - 7th working day
One drawback would be the division of the seasons. They would no longer be on 3-month boundaries.
Yeah. It's this little thing we like to call "a joke". You might notice a couple more in there if you look veeeeery carefully.
You obviously haven't worked with many date/time libraries.
And neither do most of the existing programs out there.
Let's say Christmas will always be on a sunday. Thats a normal day off.
But if Christmas days vary each year (like on a wednesday) you'd have more off: the holiday day + the weekends.
I worked this out some time ago. And my approach is MUCH better. Seriously. Take a look. Benefits: Benefits include every month starts with Monday; Pay periods are normalized; billing periods are normalized; the ridiculous and confusing spattering of celebrations all over the calender are eliminated; bills would always be due the same date and day; the 11th would always be Thursday (as every date would always be the same day of the week think of the implications no more figuring that nonsense out!); Your birthday would always be the same day; no more celebrations that wander around the calender; a vastly improved sense of what day and/or date it is, because (for example) there are only four Mondays in the month, and if you know it’s Monday, you probably know what date it is; and if you know the date, it’s always the same day anyway, so you would know the day right off.
I'm not the first to take a swing at this, either -- and almost every attempt I've looked at is better than what these academics made. IMHO, of course. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
FTFY
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Perhaps, but its just as easy to make a 6mm something.
Yes you end up with two standards that way for a period but who cares? People can already differentiate between a 1/4" wrench with a 5/16" wrench.. adding a 6mm wrench in there is only one extra step.. and you usually know ahead of time whether you're working in metric or imperial so its rare that you screw up (and even then, it only really matters in excessively precise work -- that 0.35mm isn't terribly noticeable in most areas).
Oh and I'm Canadian. I deal with this all the time. You get used to having an extra system in the same way you get used to having two alphabets (upper- and lower-case), the already multituninous units of measure (inches, feet, miles, football fields, librariest of congress, whatever).
That said, its a slow transistion. We've been legally a metric country since I think early 80s (too lazy to look it up;) A long time anyway).
Anything that goes against peoples' long-held biases like that tend to take 3-4 generations to completely sink in as those who are too old to change their bias get replaced with younger generations that can be taught the new system without running against pre-existing bias.
Forget all the real issues of changing the calendar for a sec.
First of all make the month match it's namesake... the moon, have 13 months all with 28 days.
This gives 364 days, that leaves approximately 1.25 days per year. That day can be outside the normal calendar and be a world wide holiday. Every 4 years you get 2 days at the end of the year, except every 100th year where you just get 1 day off. Sound familiar?
Pros:
Every month has exactly 4 weeks and every week starts on the same day.
You could use the moon to tell which week it is.
Cons:
There are 13 months so the year can't be broken into quarters by month just by weeks (13 weeks)
As an observation from 'Down Under' I wish to thank the USA for being one the last bastions of the British Imperial System. Australia may still have the Queen of England as our head of state, but we don't have the continual daily reminder of our subservience to England by using the Imperial System.
except when it isn't. Let me guess, an economics expert was involved in this brainwave. Am I right or am I right?
It's so much easier to imagine or calculate a size if you don't have to remember all the unique multiplicators all the time. 12 inches in a foot, 3 inches in a yard, make up your mind and use multiplicator, like the decimal system does.
If you think that all it takes is a few multiplicators, think again when it comes to cubic inches, cubic feet, cubic yards and all that. Most Americans don't have the brains to do that and have to resort to the decimal equivalent of the contents of an Olympic size swimming pool. Hows that for a compromise?
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
How the hell did garbage as this get moderated up? Yes, it is pure garbage.
1/4 x is better than 0.13489zz12389. Wut? I bet you can as easily change the sizes of screws to 1/4 (1/2) of 1 cm. Your Inch is not a god-given basic item of the universe, it is totally arbitrary, you just defined that arbitrary value to 1 and, no surprise, it then is easy to put a nametag on 1/2 or 1/8.
Even further (and here comes the true stupidity of parent's post): It is as easy to drill a hole (screw) with the width of 1/4 inch with a tool that is made for that as the width of 1/4 inch. If I have a drill that is 0.82342 cm I can easily drill a hole that is that wide (or make screws or whatever).
And IF you want to make something 1/4 of the size of a standard length, why not make a standard length that has the most advantages (for example metric) over another standard length (whatever crap you use now)?
The parent does not contain anything worth modding up so I politely ask everyone who did mod that garbage above up to refrain from modding in the future.
More likely Europe simply tolerates imperial because its useful for some things or its just plain down to interoperability. In Australia I have no trouble communicating in both. It just comes down to context. eg a discussion about someone's height in cm or feet as well as cm or metres. Building measurements in metres or millimetres.
Anything important is done in metric. I've never heard anyone actually talk in furlongs or chains etc. If you're seriously into imperial you wouldn't talk of distances in hundreds of miles for example
As for bolts - its only because you're so caught up in fractions of inches that there is even an issue. My lathe certainly can't tell the difference...
YMMV :)
tihs isg mead fmro rcecydle tpyos
You can make something a 1/4 length of something else regardless of the units used to measure the item - I don't really understand your argument..
Look, just as no one uses the metric system because of the inertia involved, no one would use this system either.
Except, you know, the vast, vast majority of the worlds population save three or four hold-outs including Burma and the United States...
versus the definition one 1 inch
makes you understand why some people prefer to use a system where "it's the lenght on a man's thumb!" (sure, may not be true but whatever)
Also, in Brazil and I believe most of Europe, who cares about pumbling? They're still using inches, heck, I don't even have a unit of measure for them - I just ask for a size x bolt/pipe or whatever. I believe this holds true everywhere else. You just know the size you want but do not care about the lenght and the UOM.
Disclaimer: everything off of wikipedia. take it with a grain of salt
http://stoploudness.org/
Proposed Time Rhyme:
... now, what's my percentage of calendar sales?
March, June, December,
Please to remember:
31 Days are their alot.
Of all else
30 are got.
Beware your days,
Run, be merry without rest.
The Reaper will ignore the list,
Man's crude toy,
With a counting none resist.
Even in Europe, ostensibly metric, they haven't really made this transition at all.
Well, Europe also likes to export to and import from countries using the imperial system. One country in particular, to be precise. A country where most people are very peculiar about using the metric system or doing the conversion themselves. So it has to be done for them or after you got stuff from them -- and for some goods it's even easier to just produce/use things in round numbers from their system to begin with.
Reminds one of the old adage about the prophet and mountain. :)
We have 12 months a year, 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, 60 minutes an hour, 60 seconds a minute. All of them trouble somebody.
A week is roughly a quarter of a moon cycle, which we won't follow anymore, with exceptions. But why should we keep 7 days a week then? For religious reasons? Oh, that makes sense, fiddling with the year to disjoin moon from date for economical reasons and fixing the week for religious reasons.
Which makes 12 months per year nonsense, as that follows the moon as well - which the FAQ of HH calendary points out by telling the need for farmers to keep the old calendary next to the new one.
So there are the number of months at stake, the days of a week. Why would we need to keep 24 hours, 60 minutes, 60 seconds then? 10 hours a day, 100 minutes per hour, 100 seconds per minute have roughly the same time span as today. We don't need to adjust the duration of the second as we are used to differing positions of the sun per day during a year.
So why not make a deep cut?
cb
Actually, in Europe we use metric bolts and screws, so no conversion is necessary.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_metric_screw_thread
Only a few times I have come across an imperial screw. I just replaced them with metric ones to make the whole system coherent. The only place in Europe where I have seen a mix of imperial and metric screws everywhere is UK. I am from Eastern Europe, which uses only metric bolts, since the Soviet Union standards were all metric.
Was thinking the same thing. I never bought 3L bottles anyway, they went flat before I could finish them.
I assume it's a joke. Are 3L bottles more easily available, marked "50% extra free!" for example?
If you want to get us Americans to use metric, all you have to do is require the most important thing we deal with to become metric: gasoline purchases. Everything else will follow.
That hasn't quite worked in the UK. Road signs and beer/cider sale are still in miles, miles per hour, yards and pints (and half pints).
Petrol has been sold in litres for a long time (20 years?), but my dad fills a 60L tank with 55L of petrol, costing £1.29/L, total £70.95, then converts that to gallons (approximately), then divides how far the odometer reads (in miles) by that, to get miles per gallon. I think you'd need to convert the odometer too, and probably the road signs.
(The UK has a very vocal minority of anti-metric people, who are frenzied by the right-wing anti-Europe press. Some industries benefit from this, since any proposed laws to force fairer consumer labelling of products are shot down. Since some point in the 1970s education has been entirely metric, it really is just the old people claiming inches and pounds are somehow "British" and worth preserving for tradition's sake.)
Ooops, you'll hit a problem when you get to 4 (00100).
All medicine is metric
Except blood pressure, which is still measured in mmHg (millimetres of mercury) instead of hPa (hectopascals).
require the most important thing we deal with to become metric: gasoline purchases. Everything else will follow.
Ask the English how that worked out for them. They buy petrol by the litre, but measure speed and distances in miles, and fuel economy in miles per (Imperial) gallon.
By reading this signature, you hereby agree with the content of the above comment.
It just doesn't work better. That's the problem. You let me talk to a scientist or engineer and I can easily explain why they'd care about metric, and they'll be convinced in minutes it is better for them (not that they don't use it anyhow, just as an example). However a regular person? Not so much. It doesn't improve their ability to do the things they need to do. All the nifty inter-unit conversion shit is lost on them.
"What people here neglect to mention is that for a lot of things, like bolts or screws and a million other things, there really aren't good conversions available at all."
What most Americans arguing against metric neglect to mention is that there is already a metric system for bolts, screws, and a million other things, working perfectly, you don't need to convert things that are working, just start new with metric equivalent as you start to build new gear.
A Gearbox is built with SAE Bolts ?, keep building it. When you come to build the next generation of gearbox with a fresh design and fresh castings , 'Upgrade' to metric measurements and bolts etc....Its not rocket surgery.
This means you have a transition period of 10m to 15 years and before you know it you are all converted.
It should not be that hard, America has outsourced most of its manufacturing to asia (who are already metric to cope with the outsourced manufacturing from europe and Australia), so there really isn't that much to convert within the country.
Every Japanese/korean/european car coming into your country is built using the (standard for the rest of the world) metric bolts, nuts etc.
yes you can use a 1/2 inch spanner on that bolt, the rest of the worlds uses a 13mm spanner. 9/16 ? 14 mm
In Australia I use metric tools as standard choice for most thing only reaching for one of the 2 or 3 different Imperial sets for older equipment (or some things built in or specifically for the USA)
And while I think about it, can someone explain to me why an american mile is different to a mile anywhere else in the world ?
da da da dum indeed.
Instead of metric, why not adapt a new binary or hexadecimal system, that would be most computer friendly, and divide a day into 65536 equal parts, and group them into 64 'seconds', then 64 'minutes' and 16 'hours' in a day. Or make it 32 'hours' if we want finer instead of coarser 'seconds'. Only problem - there is no getting around the 365 days, since that's the time required for the earth's revolution around the sun. Unless of course, we stop defining a year as per that amount, and arbitarily make it 256 days, w/ 8 months of 32 days each.
That's just for time, which is the most difficult to align, but aside from that, length and mass can be redefined to new binary based standards.
"have society slowly adopt it over time" is the part of your plan that's impossible. You can't have some people using a calendar in which September has 30 days and others using one in which it has 31 days. That would be a train wreck. Probably literally. The Julian and Gregorian calendars coexisted, but that was in a world without instantaneous global communication and commerce.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
It's too bad Wikipedia isn't searchable, so you could answer this question yourself.
Do you go blind every time learning something requires a little bit of effort?
We just don't use 1/4" bolts at all. It's M6 all the way, they conveniently fit into a 6mm hole, which is really convenient, because we also have metric drills.
Simply start every January 1st on a Sunday ('New Sunday') - the year then always ends on a Sunday as well ('Old Sunday') - so you'll have a 3-day weekend at the end/beginning of a year 'Saturday-Old Sunday-New Sunday' - enough for some good new year celebrations. For leap years: every 28th of February is on a Tuesday - in leap years there will be an extra Tuesday on the 29th: 'Leap Tuesday' - so once every 4 years (roughly) you'll have an extra long working week. Simple and no need for an 'Xtr' week...
all you have to do is require the most important thing we deal with to become metric: gasoline purchases.
I read that this happened in the US when gasoline hit $1/gallon, but they eventually went back to imperial again. An urban legend?
Good example: Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should.
A plan like this would leave billions of people stuck with Sunday-Thursday birthdays, never knowing the joy of a birthday landing on a Friday or Saturday.
You spend half your income on gasoline? that really sucks man... I spend a much bigger portion on housing than gas... like 4x as much...
Leap weeks?
Almost sounds like this guy is just from another culture and simply dressed up an old idea in a lot of astrophysics and called it "invention".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I thought that even American cars used mainly metric bolts. Back in the 90s, when I actually worked on cars, we found that 3/4 of the bolts were indeed metric, excepting some dash screws, leftover common parts from over the years, and minor stuff. Fortunately, many were 14mm, and a 9/16" is just a hair sloppy on that, close enough for all but torqued bolts. Maybe they switched back to Imperial, I don't know, but then it was more metric than standard.
And as for Eurpean useage, we get stuff from Europe all the time (import equipment) and it is all in metric. It is just a matter of making new stuff metric, and making Imperial stuff to maintain the old stuff. screws, bolts, spacing, all in even metric. And these are primarily Belgian designs built in Moldova, so it spans the continent.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Even in Europe, ostensibly metric, they haven't really made this transition at all.
You never were in Europe I guess. I have never seen a non metric screw/bolt in my engineering practise (in your case any german would use a M6 screw). And even in private I only once buyed two imperial nuts for an old couch and to get them I had to go in a specialised hardware shop and pay the same price as for a full box of metric nuts. The only case were imperial threads (non UTS btw) are used is for pipes, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_standard_pipe_thread .
And your example is bogus anyway, yeah if you use a base unit that is definde to be exactly 25.4 mm you get in all kinds of trouble. In metric units we simply use the mm as basic unit for anything on this scale (the mm is also the default unit in mechanical engineering for this reason). And a 1/4 m = 250 mm, or 1/4 mm = 250 micrometer. So where is your problem?
belongs in 1960s science fiction. (oh, wait.. it is already there)
not. gonna. happen.
better chance of the whole world agreeing on one single common language than implementing this complete nonsense on a global scale.
Yet they are willing to force something as pointless and cumbersome as "daylight savings" time, and come back years later to dick with it again, changing the arbitrary pivot point to a brand new arbitrary pivot point.
And yes, it is force whenever and wherever government is present. Put it this way: would the scheme ever have been "adopted" if government wasn't involved? Of course not. The people who wanted to get up and hour early to go to work would have, and the people who didn't wouldn't have.
This is XKCD we're talking about though, so you may have to use a broader definition of "joke" than is generally understood.
Ah, yes. Forgot about the "naughty bits".
"Imaginary space Jew"? What's next, a GNAA troll? Why do you athiest zealots insist on bringing religion into every damned topic no matter how unwarranted? And what's worse, you injected anti semitism into it.
Nice. What annoys me about this is you're making my athiest and agnostic friends look bad with your hateful diatribes against Jews and the religious (whether Jew, Muslim, or Bhuddist).
Free Martian Whores!
for the date to get it right. Even then it won't work right until Windows v10.
FTFY
FTFY^2
I believe GP was referring to the worship of Jesus, a specific jew who in the christian mythos lives in "heaven above" aka outer space. Nothing about this implies anything negative about Jews or the Jewish faith, can you point out the antisemitism? I guess maybe the value judgement that belief in Jesus as a divine being is "stupid", but that's a pretty common belief amongst the non-religious and hardly restricted to Semitic faiths
Sig withheld to protect the innocent.
> Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier
> (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of
> something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
This is ridiculous. It's not cheaper or easier, it's just that that was what was there before.
There are inch-screws and millimetric screws. In millimetric screws you have, for example, a 6mm one. You wouldn't have a 6.35 mm one, that's stupid.
The same goes with everything else. The fact that certain things are measured as 1 inch, 1/2 inch, 1/4 inch is just a convenience, there's nothing magical in these numbers. They could perfectly be rounded to 2cm, 1cm, 1/2 cm or whatever is handy for each use.
Margarita Manterola.
Yes, but the fellow I was replying to asserted that equinoxes and solstices are variable on the current calendar, which they really aren't.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
This destroys an important feature of a somewhat humorous observation relating two dates celebrating more or less opposite things, at least for Christians. You'd no longer be able to declare that Halloween and Christmas were the same thing, 031 == 25, after all. {^_^}
Not every program should be fixed by hand.
People who rely on libraries shouldn't need to touch anything, except update their libraries.
This would quickly identify good programmers from bad programmers.
In any case, this ain't going to happen. Not a chance. Who would want their birthday always on the same day? Is there any benefit from such a stupid (and old) suggestion?
Margarita Manterola.
"In addition to advocating the adoption of this new calendar, Hanke and Henry encourage the abolition of world time zones and the adoption of “Universal Time” (formerly known as Greenwich Mean Time) in order to synchronize dates and times worldwide, streamlining international business."
This site has already discussed ad nausea many reasons why universal time is a terrible idea, so I am surprised that after scanning the comments I had not seen anyone mention this.
You must be absolutely batshit crazy to advocate New York City's work day starting at 2pm and ending at 10pm, and people eating dinner at "midnight" although it's not really the middle of the night.
Finally, seeing as how their "research" has led them to "discover" a "new" calendar, which is nearly identical to the world calendar proposed in 1930 (thanks GreatBunzinni for pointing this out), I hope they are chastised for this. They are labeled as "researchers" and then proposed a "new" idea without first doing research to see it has been proposed before, and cap it off by advocating a universal time zone. If I were Johns Hopkins University, I would immediately distance myself as far as possible from these schmucks.
I don't want Christmas or my birthday or any other day to fall on the same day of the week forever!
All the benefits these guys claim are about productivity or efficiency or financial savings. Those are not the most important things in life. I wonder, do these guys eat the same thing on the same day of the week, and take their vacations in the same place every year?
These guys aren't being realistic. Y2K was bad enough--imagine reprogramming all the software in the world to use a completely new calendar! There'd be a whole new industry for temporary date-conversion software, because people would have to convert between them until the whole world was adjusted. Not to mention, how do you get the entire world to agree on ANYTHING nowadays? There is no authority with the power and influence the pope once had, and with globalization, a change in one place can't just trickle down eventually, or spread with colonization.
And they want everyone to use UTC too. Thanks, but I don't want to advance to the next day at effectively 8 pm.
These guys are out of touch with the real people in the real world. Life isn't all about numbers.
"Those who consume the bulk of goods are those who make them. We must never forget this secret of our prosperity."
... except equinoxes and solstices...
I think that's a serious weakness of the Hanke-Henry proposal
I am working on a piece of fiction set in an alternate reality that uses a calendar based on the Earth's orbit: Jan 1 is always on Perihelion Day (varies from Jan 2 to Jan 4 in current calendar); Mar 15 is always on First Equinox Day; etc. The advantage is that each calendar day is always tied to a specific spot in the Earth's orbit (within 1 degree). This makes it much easier to estimate delivery times of interplanetary trade ships, etc. On a local level, it makes it easier for farmers, including solar power farms, to predict future activities.
Additionally, this fictional calendar uses the year that the first light from the Crab Nebula supernova was seen as year one (1054 CE). It is thought that this will make it easier to handle certain communication issues during first contact situations, but it also completely secularizes the common calendar, reducing one source of friction in a world plagued with religious intolerance and terrorism.
For anyone interested, The Prologue of the story, Artie Wood and his Electric Flying Machine, has a bit more about this. Scroll down to the "About Time" section.
Will
Wait, why is it easier to measure 1/4 of a unit than 63.5 units?
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
I assure you that milling machines don't care if you do your math in base-pi as long as you program them in their native units.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yes, just add mentos. That will generate the 3L.
They're usually on the same DATE not DAY. This new calendar would change what date they're on. Why were you modded up?
Don't complain about syntax, grammar, or spelling. There is no.hell like input on android.
Now that would make things a lot easier. How about a decimal day? The whole 24 hour thing is a PITA and even more so when you're dealing with morons who can't count past 12 and need to figure out which half they're in by adding AM and PM in the time :P
This will be buried at the end of 600 comments, but hey, I might as well throw in my two cents.
Make the calendar:
Five days per week.
Six weeks per month.
Three months per quarter.
Four quarters per year, plus one five-day week at the end of the year.
Add a leap day to the end of every fourth year, except years divisible by 128. In other words, 128 years would be exactly 46751 days, and each year would average out to 365.2421875 days.
Then start the year at the autumnal equinox (in the northern hemisphere). The seasons would roughly align with the quarters. Of course, the phases of the moon would fall out of synch, but 30 days is pretty close to a lunar cycle. You can have the quarters of Fall, Winter, Spring, and Summer, with each quarter divided into Early, Mid, and Late.
For example, the months would be:
Early Fall, Mid Fall, Late Fall
Early Winter, Mid Winter, Late Winter
Early Spring Mid Spring, Late Spring
Early Summer, Mid Summer, Late Summer.
And no one will ever read this, but here is a little ditty:
The First of Autumn, to make it clear
Is the first day of the year.
Every week has just five days
Six weeks per month, plus one that stays.
Thirty days hath Mid Winter
And all the months that you remember.
Fall and Winter, Spring and Summer
The seasons are just four in number.
At years end, across the nation
Add a week of celebration.
Every four years, you may note
Add another day to vote.
Except for the years 1-2-8
Don't leap ahead, and you'll stay straight.
This tagline is copyrighted material. Please send $10 for an affordable replacement.
who gives a shit ?
but for me comparing 623 millimetres to 1.01m (1010 millimetres) not only makes the comparison easy, but I get an intuitive feel that one is a little over a third larger than the other.
FTFY.
But then I guess the difference here isn't metric vs imperial, it's more that imperial seems to prefer fractions, whereas metric favours a decimal number. You never write 1/2cm, always 0.5cm or 5mm.
FTFY too...
alias sudo="echo make it yourself #" ; # https://pipedot.org/~stderr & http://soylentnews.org/~stderr
But as for equinoxes and solstices, they're mostly stable, varying by date only between two neighboring days. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equinox.
And the proposed revision to the calendar would change that. From TFA:
Hanke and Henry deal with those extra “pieces” of days by dropping leap years entirely in favor of an extra week added at the end of December every five or six years.
So the date on which a solstice or equinox occurs would move over a range of up to six calendar dates over the course of one calendar cycle of 6 years. Most calendar years would be exactly 364 days long, with one that's 371 days long every 5 or 6 years (on average, every 5.635 years).
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
You missed the point. Under the Gregorian calendar, solstices and equinoxes vary only by a day because the leap day every four years stabilizes them. If you instead do leap weeks (which will obviously be less frequent than leap days), solstices and equinoxes will drift more and then suddenly get yanked back into place by the leap week.
Even if they don't change the calendar, please make xmas on the last Sunday of the month. It makes scheduling easier. Since it isn't that actually birthdate, and only a celebration, then changing the day should not matter. Sorry, I didn't mean to mix logic with a belief system.
Also, make Halloween the last Saturday of October.
Both cases would make everyone's life easier.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
From the article: Note: the “Extra-Week Years” are every year in which the Gregorian calendar begins or ends on a Thursday.
If the new calendar still needs the old calendar...then why do we need the new calendar?
Ah, sorry, the new commenting system still confuses me after years, I didn't see the parent to your comment, only the grandparent.
Equinoxes and solstices WOULD shift in the new calendar. This calendar simply starts January 1 earlier each year until enough days are missing to add an extra week.
December 21 old style will shift over time to December 22, 23, 24, etc. until the calendar gets enough out of sync to add the extra week. The solstice would still occur at the same date (old style), so it would shift in the new style calendar.
People would play games with the money for the leap week. You'd get an extra 7 days on your monthly rent payment on leap week years. You'd have to stretch your paycheck one week longer during the holidays those years. Just think of all the financial shenanigans that can be played with the leap weeks.
"With computer programs and mathematical formulas" I found an idea of thirteen months, each four weeks = 28 days. Thus every MONTH would be like the previous, would begin with monday etc. One thing more: we add one day to celebrate year change (or what ever) and that day is part of no week or month. 13*28+1 = 365. Since we cannot change world rotation, we must yet add one day on leap years.
I made a calendar almost exactly like this in the fifth grade.
I think this one has about as much chance of getting adopted as mine did.
Proverbs 21:19
Sorry man, Saturnalia both predates Festivus by millennia, and it had orgies. Clearly Saturnalia is the one to shoot for. :)
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Actually, there are three countries that still use the Imperial system. If one is the US, I'll let you guess what the other two are. Go ahead...
If you want to get us Americans to use metric, all you have to do is require the most important thing we deal with to become metric: gasoline purchases. Everything else will follow. Gas is the most important thing to us, it is what we spend half our income on, and what we bitch about the price of most.
That's actually a neat idea. I think grocery stores could push it more than they do as well.
However, where do you get that we spend half our income on gas? Even when I made $30K and less my gas bill wasn't remotely close to that with 10K miles per year.
Anyone else here spend that much on gas? Sorry to derail the thread, but A) this is slashdot and B) that kinda made me curious. :)
The American mile is different? The American mile is 5280 feet, and that was a unit created by English Parliment in 1593. What are you thinking of? Examples?
Agree. We can skip Months, Weeks and named Days. And simply call it Day 1-356.
Workdays can be adjusted to fit the needs of the work, and the needs of the workers.
(If we want to be nifty, we count backwards from 356, like many sports. ...1.. 'Happy new year' countdowns makes some sense)
And those silly 10.. 9...
Why does this whole thing remind me of some wild eyed cold war idea gone wrong... or may an old Negativland song. "Do you know how many time zones there are in the Soviet Union?" "ELEVEN!"
The 2m or 2000mm thing is more of a precision thing. Extension cords are usually marked 2 meter, while for example timber for construction is marked 200cm. The cord might be 1,95 meter and no one will bitch about it, but if you have a 195cm piece of roofing timber while you specifically needed 200cm is annoying.
In response to this modification of a crappy calendar, I propose my own creation:
Faithful Calendar - Part 1
This simple "lunisolar" calendar is devised to:
-Align several existing solar and lunar calendars
-Align seasons with calendars
-Affix the day of each month to a given week day
-Affix moving holidays, such as Easter and Thanksgiving
-Resolve inconsistant billing and pay cycles
Given:
-Solar year = 365.242199 days .242199 days
-Leap year every four years (with exceptions) to compensate for the
-Lunar month = 29.53059 days
-Week = 7 days
The Faithful Calendar consists of 13 months, each containing 28 days. Since 13*28=364, we reserve 1 day as New Year's Day. New Year's day would not be a weekday, nor a weekend, but simply a universal holiday. New Year's day would fall on the Gregorian December 21st - The (approximate) Winter solastice. This would mean that New Year's day would mark the start of Winter.
Since 28 is divisible by 7, the day of the week would be fixed. Therefore the first day of each month would be the equivalent of Sunday and the last day of each month would be the equivalent of Saturday. This system honors those that respect the Sabbath on either day as New Year's day will fall between them. For those that observe Christmas, Festivus, Holiday (FSM) or other similar holidays, New Year's day would also be those days too. You may incredulously ask, "Move Christmas?" but keep in mind that the feast date of the Annuciation of the Incarnation (Mary's virginal conception of Jesus) is normally celebrated on March 25th, but is sometimes moved on the Gregorian Calendar to avoid a conflict with Easter Week.
Consider the Hebrew Calendar which is Lunisolar. For those that observe Hanukkah, which is celebrated across eight days starting on the 25th day of Kislev of the Hebrew Calendar, New Year's day provides the eigth day for the feast.
Consider the Hijri (Islamic) Calendar, which is Lunar. It is typically 354 or 355 days long, is not sychronized with the seasons, and drifts from the solar Gregorian Calendar by 11 or 12 days yearly. The seasonal relation repeats approximately every 33 Islamic years. Typically, the Hijri Calendar lasts for 12 lunar months. However, in order to keep the Hajj (Pilgramage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia) within a Solar season, the calandar contains provisions for a 13th leap (intercalary) month. This situation is very similar to the Chinese calendar and the solution will apply to both.
To keep the Faithful Calendar aligned with the Lunar cycle, (28*13+1+Leap=365.242199) (29.53059*12=354.36708), the alignment of the two systems will be denoted by naming each year of the 33 solar year cycle. There will be a lunar alignment celebration every 391 solar years (365.242199*391 = 142809.699809 vs. 354.36708*403 = 142809.93324).
What day will April 1 fall on? 'Cause I'm pretty sure it's not today.
Since the Faithful Calendar consists of 13 months, Sideral Zodiac Symbols may be used in the naming of the months. They are as follows:
Capricorn (Gregorian Dec 21st), Aquarius, Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpius, Ophiuchus, Sagittarius
The days of the week will be named after the planets of the Solar system as follows:
Sunday -> Mercury (1st ,8th ,15th ,22nd) ,23rd)
Monday -> Venus (2nd, 9th, 16th
Tuesday -> Mars (3rd, 10th, 17th, 24th)
Wednesday -> Jupiter (4th, 11th, 18th, 25th)
Thursday -> Saturn (5th, 12th, 19th, 26th)
Friday -> Uranis (6th, 13th, 20th, 27th)
Saturday -> Neptune (7th, 14th, 21st, 28th)
This is in order from the planet closest to the Sun (Sol) to the farthest. Earth is missing from this arrangement, and will be assigned to the Faithful Calendar New Year's day. Likewise, Leap day will be known as Pluto and will be observed on the day following Earth day. The reason for renaming the days and months is to teach children about astronomy. This throws out conventions naming months after Ceasars (Julius and Augustus) and updates the nomenclature of astronomical bodies (Sun-day, Moon-day,... Saturn-day).
Advantages to the Faithful Calendar are as follows:
-Women's menstrual cycles will be more predictable by men, possibly saving lives.
-Accounting and billing will be easier and more accurate since each month would consist of the same number of days.
-People who are paid twice per month and those who are paid every other week would align.
-Yearly reciepts would inflate by 8.3% without changing rates. Corporations and landlords will love this one.
-Holidays that jump around various calendars will become fixed. This would make Thanksgiving predictable (Saturn, Ophiuchus 19th) and Easter more predictable.
-Programmers will appreciate the simplicity of the Faithful Calendar when implementing software.
-People may actually learn some Astronomy (not to be confused with Astrology).
-There would be alignment and reconciliation of several calendars.
-We could collectively forget how many days has September, April, June, and November.
While we are at it, since we are measuring time with a calendar, we also need to consider other measurements of time. A Faithful clock would:
-Note the time in 24 hours (No AM or PM).
-Support circadian rhythm time adjustments in lieu of "daylight savings" time.
-Local time will be derived from the International Dateline, not GMT.
I think that Centigrade is better than Fahrenheit for weather:
0 degrees: Wear a jacket.
10 degrees: Wear a sweater.
20 degrees: Wear shirtsleeves.
30 degrees: Wear nothing.
Blah blah blah orgies. Blah blah blah. :)
Good point! You win. :-)
The Gregorian Calendar is only one calendar in use. It is also joined by the lunar calendars and the Orthodox (Russian / Greek) calendars and the myriads of manufacturing calendars. A manufacturing calendar is calculated taking into account legal holidays.
The Muslim, calendar, as I understand it, is lunar based, and has no leap year. Over time the months drift from season to season. It is a sensable way to manage dates. I could live with any Calendar that was not necessarily Lunar based. That means, eliminating the Gregorian Calendar too, as Easter, Monday is lunar based.
.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
To be fair, NASA didn't screw the pooch, some programmer at Lockheed Martin did (and NASA then didn't catch it).
What you are really saying is that a civilization capable of removing 1.5% of their planet's mass to speed up it's velocity is incapable of dealing with a bunch of extra space rocks?
No, that is the international mile. The US mile is 5280 feet and 1/8 of an inch. Because it was defined before the invention of accuracy. Each mile is thus 8 furlongs, each furlong being 40 poles (or ten chains), each pole being 16 feet 6 inches, each foot being 12 inches, each inch being 3 barleycorns (presumably not genetically modified). Simples!
Ha wow, well I blame trying to think in inches for that one ;-)
Another culture you say? You got that right. Antichrist is what Antichrist does and altering calendars is one of them.
23 “Thus he said: ‘As for the fourth beast,
there shall be a fourth kingdom on earth,
which shall be different from all the kingdoms,
and it shall devour the whole earth,
and trample it down, and break it to pieces.
24 As for the ten horns,
out of this kingdom ten kings shall arise,
and another shall arise after them;
he shall be different from the former ones,
and shall put down three kings.
25 He shall speak words against the Most High,
and shall wear out the saints of the Most High, [you know, like Westboro Baptist Church, to the delight of the "enlightened and educated" everywhere.]
and shall think to change the times and the law;
and they shall be given into his hand
for a time, times, and half a time.
All the "enlightened and educated" people here have NO CHOICE but to worship this one.
==//==
No you don't. Walk into a hardware store once. You use the imperial system. Seriously. Go and check.
For pipes too, and cables (steel cables for construction). You're a bit less likely to see this in a hardware store, but a sufficiently large one should still have these kinds of things.
Dude, I believe my GP means that equinoxes and solstices will not be on the same days in the new calendar!
Ooops, you'll hit a problem when you get to 4 (00100).
Only if you're one of those freaks that starts counting with their thumb. The problem comes at 2 for the rest of the civilized world.
You don't hold your thumb up when you are miming to someone that you want one of something you use your index finger, so why do you start counting with your thumb? It makes no sense consistency wise.
Hmm... See subject, see proposal, see Irony
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
“any definition of irony... must include this, that the surface meaning and the underlying meaning of what is said are not the same."
See also.
It may be inconsistent but I'm prepared to go to war with your country over thumb-first counting. Burn inifidels!
What kind of scientists are those guys ?? Amongst other things: :-D)...What a mess for everyone it was supposed to simplify life of !!
- They process leap years by adding an "extra" mini month every (more or less) 6 years (Actually they give a fortran routine to determine which years contain this "Xtr" month. A fortran routine man!! Those guys are up-to-date
- They wnat to implement a universal time, and do not even care of the fact date changes for some people when the sun is overhead (Who cares about someone living in Pacific ?).
- They validate they stuff by invoking some not broken rules of the Bible (as convinced atheist this is the final argument...).
A simple reading of their FAQ (http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendar.html) will show how stupid this proposal is. As a french guy, it is reassuring to see we are not the only country paying taxes for some stupid guys "thinking" about useless stupid stuff.
To keep dates on the same weekdays, they'd like to abandon the idea of years of consistent length (and that are, as close as they can get, a genuine astronomical year long). And the benefit of that is...?
Call me an old fogy, but given a choice, I'd rather have a year that's actually a year. I can see value in that.
Plus, as I can actually walk and chew gum at the same time, I find no difficulty in coping with trivia such as Christmas falling on different days of the week.
In the PDF you'll see that the leap week they propose is based on the current Gregorian calendar
"Note: the “Extra-Week Years” are every year in which the Gregorian calendar begins or ends on a Thursday:
2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088,
2093, 2099, 2105, 2111, 2116, 2122, 2128, 2133, 2139, 2144, 2150, 2156, 2161, 2167 "
I.e. in order to use this calendar you would still have to maintain the current calendar in parallel, so you gain the "benefit" of having to work with two different calendar systems. :-(
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
to name a few.
why do you right-wing fascists have such a strong tendency to want to screw with how time is kept?
go back to the romans - julius and augustus ceasar each screwed up the calendar by adding months for themselves; eventually making the seventh month (september) into the ninth month, so on down the line to the tenth month (december) becoming the twelfth.
more recently was josef stalin doing pretty much exactly what you are proposing, and changing the structure of the weeks. he did it to keep the factories running around the clock, what is your profit motive?
even more recently was the turkmenistan dictator saparmurat niyazov, who garnered attention for naming months and days after his family members. will your lord and savior change dates to be named after himself?
It may be inconsistent but I'm prepared to go to war with your country over thumb-first counting. Burn inifidels!
I have just one thing to say: 2 you and the swine humping oxen you rode in on!
Oh here, let me translate: 4 off heathen!
He shall speak words against the Most High
Oh noes, the Antichrist is going to speak against the vice chairman of the EU Commission! Our bureaucracy responsible for common foreign and security policy is under threat at the end of the world!
I've heard this before, the whole "when I convert without any other changes, it isn't a round number." But how do you represent a 5mm screw in Imperial? 0.196850394 inches? Well, that's proof (based on your statements) that inches are inferior.
Learn to love Alaska
This doesn't work, someone does this already and have been doing it for over 5772 years. Most people with this mind set never consider this...the Moon doesn't actually have 28 days to its cycle. If you doubt that, look at a calendar that shows the moon phases. If the Moon had a 28 day cycle with four distinct phases, the new Moon would be on the same week day (28/4=7) every time. It's rare if it hits the same day consecutively.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Where do you get that the US mile is 5280 plus 1/8 inch?
I looked this up at the standard bureau and it just was 5280.
No, we have the Queen of Australia as our head of state. It just happens that that person is also the Queen of England.
The positions (among others) were split up aways back, and in theory they could be held by separate people at some point (presuming that the republicists don't somehow manage to get their way beforehand).
Why not just make New Years day a standalone day out side of any sinlge week or month (make it 2 days on leap years) Then you would have a 364 +1(or 2) day calendar year which would be exactly 52 weeks.
So Sunday Dec 31, then new years day then Monday Jan 1
Where did this idea come from that a week starts on a Sunday? Not in my world, and not, I suspect, in a lot of other people's world. Sunday is part of the weekEND. I'm surprised they came up with this too, seeing as they're so keen to keep bible people happy.