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/
... except equinoxes and solstices...
Or we could just use a lunar calendar instead of a solar one and not have to worry about crap like leap years.
Except August will eventually be winter in the Northern Hemisphere. People like things happening in the same seasons.
I don't know, but it works for me.
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.
I can hear it now, "is this year ever going to eeeennnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd?!"
Not only the non-integer days in a year, they're mostly making up for their round number months not quite matching, otherwise they would only need an extra week every ~ 30 years
There's a leap week built in for that.
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?
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?
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!
Nice? Shurely "Nicaea?"
"... and more and more now there are all kinds of electronic goodies available" -- Pink Floyd 1972
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?
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.
Which of course implies a greater degree of imprecision for the other 4 years. If you chop days out of years 1 thru 4 so as to have 7 days to tack onto every 5th, it sort of seems counter productive as far as keeping things in sync with the solar system.
Its sort of a sign of the arrogance of mankind that they are willing to say screw the facts, lets make it easier to count on our fingers.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
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...
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....:-)
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....
Do we mod parent insightful?
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.
We add a leap day about every 4 years in the current one, so it's not perfectly working by that metric to start with.
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!
I need your TPS report don't the leap week cover sheet.
Its sort of a sign of the arrogance of mankind that they are willing to say screw the facts, lets make it easier to count on our fingers.
Indeed, using complicated calendars is the only way to show appropriate deference to the universe. Seriously, what?
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!
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
Yes, I can see how having the date change in the middle of business hours makes everything so much simpler.
As someone who works at a job where we often close after midnight; so what?
The only problem the date change ever causes for us is that some software vendors (I'm looking at you Intuit) don't take the possibility into account. If this change happened, they'd have to have their software take date changing workdays into account and it'd become a complete non-issue.
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.
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.
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.
So the point is : why keep a perfectly working calendar thats accurate to 1 day in 3000 years for one in which we have to introduce a leap week every couple of years.
Yea, why not.
Though why stop there when you can just label the days 1-365, add a leap day every 4 years as usual and then just split the days up in chunks of 25 days and give them new names, then organize new weeks with 10 days in them of which 3 are weekend days, two in the end and one in the fourth day, .
And yea the weekdays need new names as well, we are keeping fridays cause i like fridays, but it's now on day 8, also thursday, cause it's named after thor and who can argue with the god of thunder.
Sundays, mondays and thuresdays are definitely gone, humpday need to be given a suggestive name and finally one of the days need to be named after the currently hottest girl at the time of it's adoption, i vote for Bianca Beauchamp.
The whole thing gets reset every day 1, so all the weekdays end up at the same place every time.
however 365 isn't evenly divisible by 25, so this means that the 15:th month is tiny (only 15-16 days), but it's the holiday month after all in where you place Christmas (or at least a version of it) on day 9 which is coincidentally right on the start of a weekend (you could even make it a 3 day weekend) it's Christmas after all.
- "There is nothing quite like an ineffective solution to an nonexistant problem"
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.
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.
It isn't about keeping things in sync with the solar system, as we now have better ways of measuring that. Now the calendar just needs to be a way to make sure we know when to pay our bills.
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.
Because I don't want to wait another 2500 years for February 30th. Duh.
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.
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 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.
I'm not for changing the calendar but I think in serious consideration would start with having 13 moonths.
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
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.
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.
> +1! Excellent System!
Fixed that for you.
Nouvelles de jeux et technologies en français. TC
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.
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!
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 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.
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.
You obviously haven't worked with many date/time libraries.
And neither do most of the existing programs out there.
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.
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?
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
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. :)
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/
Or we could, you know, leave it the fsck alone.
Carol vs. Ghost
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.
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?
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.
Actually, do thirteen months of 28 days each, balancing it back out again.
Then the full moon will be on the same day, making it simpler to barricade against Lycans.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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
Ah, sorry, the new commenting system still confuses me after years, I didn't see the parent to your comment, only the grandparent.
"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.
The main problem with having thirteen months is that it is not evenly divisible into halves, quarters, thirds, etc. That results in scheduling difficulties for a lot of things.
That is probably a livable deficiency, given the other advantages though. It is much cleaner than having intercalary weeks every so many years. The proposal referred to in the original post is a scheduling, accounting, budgeting, and billing disaster.
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?
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!"
What day will April 1 fall on? 'Cause I'm pretty sure it's not today.
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.
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Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
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.
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!
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.
I didn't claim it could. And I didn't claim the current one isn't good enough.
I just disputed the claim that the current one is "perfectly working" and "accurate to 1 day in 3000 years" given we have to add a day about every 4 years to it too.
And you don't have to shift the Earth's orbit, you could just as well change the Earth's rotation. Not that I claimed we should care about doing either.
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!
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?
Through what magical feat of physics do you suggest they "deal" with the space rock? Momentum, momentum. Once again, conservation of momentum. Whether you collide with the debris or deflect it while it's far away, the momentum still transfers and the planet moves back into a higher orbit again.
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.