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."

Comments

The Shire Calendar

[wfmcwalter]

The most elegant solution to the calendar I've seen is JRR Tolkien's (yes, him) Shire Calendar:

• It's fully conformant with the astronomical realities (no magical even-divisions or date fudging necessary)
• There are still 12 months (so no weird decimal months, no 34th of Thermidor bollocks). You can stick with the familiar month names (rather than Tolkien's Hobbity ones)
• Each month is 30 days long (simplifying accounting, pay calculations, holiday accrual etc.). No pointless variation, no mnemonics.
• Year on year, a given month always begins with the same day of the week. Even for leap years. So if you were born on a Tuesday, your birthday will always be Tuesday.
• The clever part (which allows all the other stuff to happen) is there is a winter festival holiday (2 days) and a summer festival holiday (3 days normally, 4 in leap years). These aren't week days and aren't in a month - they're special. So e.g. Christmas doesn't change between sometimes being in the weekend, or adjacent to the weekend, or midweek - Christmas is always in the same place. I know I always get disoriented around Christmas - Christmas already seems like a special day which doesn't resemble a Thursday or a Sunday or whatever - the Shire Calendar is just a realistic expression that it's not a weekday, and that it shouldn't be regarded as one. And the first day back at work after Christmas is always a Monday.
• The winter and summer festivals are pretty consonant with common practice in many countries anyway. Move Christmas into the yule holiday (Jesus wasn't born in December anyway, so it's no less Biblically correct than current practice). Many countries have a midsummer festival or summer bank holiday and US independence day can be celebrated then.
• You only need one printed calendar (not the 14 different types we currently need) - you just score off the leap year or not.
• Its easy to fix the locations of other festivals, like Thanksgiving, and then you get a perfectly consistent gap between e.g. Thanksgiving and Christmas
• From a software perspective it's a wash - 2 more mini-months need to be handled, but less bother with differently lengthed months and much easier day-of-the-week calculations.

Re:Not a bad idea but...

[Opportunist]

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.