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."
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...
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
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.
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....
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 ##
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...
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
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.