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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."
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).
... 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.
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?
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!
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?
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?
..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...
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.
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....
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!
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?
I would so mod this up if i had the points.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
Ooops, you'll hit a problem when you get to 4 (00100).
"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.
why does no one ever think of a calendar with 13, 28 day months? Everyone tries to cram it all into 12 months for some reason. My calendar gives you 364 days in a year, which would still need to be corrected by a single non-month day (or have the day tacked onto one of the months.) That makes 4, 7 day weeks to a month.
If you keep that extra day apart from other months, it could be a permanent holiday, we'll call it splorchday or something equally silly.
Not just meetings, even just phoning your insurance company at 3pm and being told to call back between 9am and 4pm would be a lot more convenient.
Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day, but teach a man to phish...