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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."
It's an old battle between anatomy (having 10 fingers) and pure mathematics (factorization).
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?
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 ##
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.
I don't know if it's true, but I heard once that in the 70s, the gas stations (here in the USA) tried to switch to metric, but at the same time they jacked up the prices hoping no one would notice because of the unit change to liters. People found out and got really pissed off, and the metrification movement got the blame for this and it became politically unpopular.
Not to mention, who is actually making progress eliminating dependence on fossil fuels?
If we won't do it for the environment, at least we'll do it for national security...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I think it could be done if it was done unit-by-unit. Start with volume - we already buy 2 liter sodas, replacing the lingering pint, quart and gallon items shouldn't be hard.
Then, distance. Most people use it in terms of speed - miles per hour - to stay within (or mostly within) speed limits. Simply change all the limits to metric, the other uses of the mile will follow.
Temperature will be the hardest, since there's few personal reasons to switch. Save it for last, so you can make the argument that "this is the last one holding us back".
Remember, the US has been teaching kids metric for decades. Most of my generation would be fine with metrication. It would take some getting used to, but we know the theory at least, even if I don't know how to estimate in it well. It's just the older generations that are more reluctant, that are holding us back. Once the baby boomers start dying off, I bet we'll see quite a bit of progress being made on this front.
Then let those standards stay. I'm working on a standard spacing of 2.54 millimeters when doing MC work, take a wild guess where that comes from.
The only drawback is that after a while some standards won't make sense anymore. Take the water pipes. Water pipes marked with a "1" were actually once 2.54cm wide (i.e. 1 inch) on the inside. Leading to an outside diameter of about 33 mms, dictated by the properties of the metal used for the pipe, and the requirement to withstand the water pressure reliably. After a century of metallurgy, we now have pipes with thinner walls at equal strength. Since all the screws and other plumbing equipment relies on the outside diameter (since, well, where do you attach the connectors?), this leads to a bigger inside diameter that has nothing to do with an inch anymore.
But that wouldn't be different if we still measured pipe diameters in inches, of course.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The military (in any country) are driven by matters of life and death which trump merely economic matters. If the US military goes metric it's a hint that metric is superior to imperial units. I remember I read that Napoleon forced the metric system into his army because it let his artillery perform ballistic calculations faster than the enemy (*).
It should be easy to see why using only base 10 for both counting and measuring is better than mixing base 10, base 4, base 8, base 12 and maybe a few others I miss because of ignorance (I've been living all my life in a metric country).
(*) After a little googling I found the web page where I read that. It's about the physics of motorsport http://www.getfaster.com/Techtips/Physics6.html so it's not an authoritative source for historical matters but it's a clear example of why metric is better.
I quote
Plenty of examples are provided there.