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Christmas Always On Sunday? Researchers Propose New Calendar

Posted by Soulskill on from the metric-holidays dept.

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."

8 of 725 comments (clear)

  1. Not a bad idea but... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    How about we work on the adoption of the metric system first. It makes more sense and means more in the long run.

    1. Re:Not a bad idea but... by fnj · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "how many mm is my 5/8" head bolt?" - 15.875.
      "how many meters are between my 16" on center wall studs?" - 0.4064
      "Why would all my roughly 1 mile apart main streets now be stuck at 2.4ish km?" - for the same reason all your streets which are now about 1.25ish miles apart will now be a nice round 2 km apart.
      Any other pointless questions I can help you with?
      Just how do you think every other country in the world, with a handful of exceptions, converted to metric? By JUST DOING IT, that's how. Funny. It didn't hurt any of them, or overtax people's brains there.

      Just think how superior anyone with a halfway working sense of math is going to feel for a few years until everyone gets used to the new way.

    2. Re:Not a bad idea but... by joggle · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It's funny. The military, in some ways, is the most progressive part of the American government. Where was metric first widely adopted? Where was racial integration first introduced? Where did we first phase out the use of pennies?

      Cut the politicians out of the bureaucracy and you can actually make some progress.

    3. Re:Not a bad idea but... by 1u3hr · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Indeed, it's hardly just the military. We have a huge amount of previously existing infrastructure that would have to either be torn down and replaced or cobbled together out of a mishmash of metric and customary measured components.

      Every other country in the world has converted, and they all had a "a huge amount of previously existing infrastructure". In Australia, for instance, which converted in the 1970s, first they did "soft conversion" where instead of a pint of milk you got 560 cc. Eventually most quantities shifted to round metric equivalents. Milk, for instance is now 1/2, 1 and 2 litre cartons. In the building industry, they just went from the arcane mishmash of feet and odd fractions of an inch to millimetres. The few things where the tolerances really did matter, like screw threads, you can still get SAE standard as well as metric. Nothing was "torn down" just because it wasn't metric. Things just were replaced as they wore out. There's no Thought Police forcing everyone to purge old measures from their daily lives.

  2. And you thought Y2K bug was bad by GeneralTurgidson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Have fun reprogramming everything, developers!

  3. 13 Months? by hawks5999 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

  4. Re:Again: Y2K in a bigger way by icebike · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:I was with them until by devilspgd · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unfortunately people are a lot dumber than you'd expect. A surprising high number of otherwise intelligent technical folks don't know what timezone they're located in at all (although they usually can figure out what state they're in or they can tell me the current time and I can figure it out -- Or just assume EST, since most everyone else knows they're not the only timezone in North America)

    Even when working with specific individuals on a regular basis, timezones confuse them. One day they'll schedule a meeting at 2pm their time and email me about it, the next time they'll mean 2pm my time. Then to improve things they'll fire up Outlook and invite me to a meeting, but instead of using Outlook's timezone functionality they'll schedule it at 2pm meaning 2pm my time, which Outlook converts into my timezone automatically giving me a meeting at 12pm.

    Oh and to make it more annoying, my current contract has a habit of adding a time-zone: field on internal notes discussing customer communication, but it's +/- the number of hours from their timezone (which is +0100) rather than basing it on GMT/UTC.

    Now try it with daylight savings time when you have different regions changing on different weeks. Imagine trying to figure out when a conference call will happen when you have participants in California, Phoenix and someone in Germany? Sadly, not a made up example. (For those who don't see the difficulty in this, Phoenix doesn't observe DST, California and Germany do but starting/ending on different weeks of the year, so you can't even rely on adding or subtracting the number of timezones)

    How about when you call a toll-free 1-800 number in the US or Canada and are told their hours are 8:30am-4pm and to call back then, followed by a click. Now what?

    Either way people will need to figure out schedules are different depending on region, but at least if we ditch timezones and all talk about the same clock, we won't have to first guess at the other person's mindset, location AND local legislation to determine what they mean by "2pm"

    --
    Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...