New Calendar Proposal

belg4mit writes "An astronomy professor at Johns Hopkins is pushing for the adoption of a new, static, calendar. The press release is written better than his site but a little short on details. Interestingly he claims this should be easy to implement and points at the hoops coders must jump through for the Gregorian calendar." Nobody is taking my 10 hour day plan seriously either.

Sounds like a nut.

[by Anonymous Coward]

"Wouldn't it be convenient if your birthday, Christmas, and the Fourth of July--not to mention most other major holidays--all fell on the same day of the week, year after year?"

No? What if your birthday is on a Monday? Nobody wants that. Everyone wants a Friday or Saturday birthday.

"Newton Week would pop up irregularly: 2009, 2015, 2020 and 2026"

Yes, that's far easier than keeping track of months with different numbers of days... not. I'd rather have 13 28-day months, with the extra day or two rotated through the calendar. I'd also like to see if we could slow down the Earth to create 30 hour days.

Re:Sounds like a nut.

[abburdlen (131870)]

birthday on a Monday? feh.
Worse is if you're born during a Newton week.

Re:Sounds like a nut.

[Toutatis (652446)]

Even worse is if you're born on January 31th. He got rid of your birthday forever.

Re:Sounds like a nut.

[Hatta (162192)]

He is not just a nut but a stupid fool! His head has been filled with educated stupidity that ignores the cubic wisdom of 4-day time! I have absolute proof of cubic time but the educated clueless stupids deny the obvious truth of 4 simultaneous earth-days. This is true evil and will perish.

In case anyone doesn't get the joke...

[cold fjord (826450)]

We've been overdue for the annual Timecube [timecube.com] reference on Slashdot.

Re:Sounds like a nut.

[squidfood (149212)]

I'd also like to see if we could slow down the Earth to create 30 hour days.

It's about time we thought of the programmers! Let's bioengineer ourselves to have 16 fingers, and adopt hex for counting.

Re:Sounds like a nut.

[Ironsides (739422)]

Better idea, we cut off everyones pinkys and use OCTAL!

Slighty OT, but...

[kyle_b_gorman (777157)]

...you know what we could actually do? We could think of each of our 10 fingers as being a 0 or 1 in a 10 digit, base 2 number. Hold the finger up, and you've got a 1, otherwise it's a 0. Thinking of our fingers as a binary number, we'd get 2^10 (that's 1024) digits, which is a good deal better than our measly 10 we get now. Of course, this catching on would require quite a meme. Can anybody reading this do it well?

Practice with an applet here [intuitor.com]

Re:Sounds like a nut.

[Spamlent Green (461276)]

Not to mention he's skewed it so both Xmas and New Years fall on Sundays. I suspect this loon is just some management efficiency expert in disguise, hoping to save corporations big $$ in needless holiday pay.

Riddle me this, Batman...

[grub (11606)]

Timely and semi-related riddle.

Q - Why do computer geeks celebrate Halloween on Christmas?
A - Because OCT 31 equals DEC 25.

Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.

Re:Riddle me this, Batman...

[sporty (27564)]

Thank you, thank you. I'm here all week.

Which week and which calendar so I know to avoid your bad jokes? :)

Re:How is this redundant?

[stupidfoo (836212)]

If you don't like it, don't read it.

But how will I know whether or not I like if I don't read it?

so..

[monkey_jam (557265)]

..you want to reorganise the entire western hemispheres calendering system because the new one is easier to code?

Out with the old....

Re:so..

[Frymaster (171343)]

you want to reorganise the entire western hemispheres calendering system because the new one is easier to code?

well, let's face it: if the current time keeping system were software we'd seriously be considering a rewrite.

my personal favourite for easier time systems is the swatch "internet time" [swatch.com] beats. basically, the day is divided into 1000 "beats" (about 90 seconds each) and the current beat count is global. by being global the annoyance of time zones is eliminated. you just have to remember that you

Re:so..

[Tim C (15259)]

You can do that with the current system, just by eliminating timezones and standardising on GMT.

The problem with that is that while it'd be fine for me (in London), other people would suddenly have to adjust to getting up at say 2am GMT rather than 9am local time. No, it wouldn't make any practical difference, but it would require changing the way you think, and *that* is the biggest problem of all.

Seriously, changing the way that hundreds of millions of people measure time just to make the lives of a few thousand coders a little easier is insane.

No more timezones!!!

[jaaron (551839)]

I just wish we'd get rid of timezones. Why can we all just use UTC and be done with it? And don't even get me started on daylight savings...

Re:so..

[Surt (22457)]

Are you seriously suggesting that ordinary people could add or subtract 3 digit numbers?

Re:so..

[FortKnox (169099)]

Yeah, but you have to remember... its tons easier to work mathematically with the metric system, but we STILL haven't switched over yet....

Re:so..

[Dun Malg (230075)]

Yeah, but you have to remember... its tons easier to work mathematically with the metric system

Wouldn't that be kilograms? ;)

The metric system has a unit of measure called the ton [google.com] as well, so no.

Re:so..

[jellomizer (103300)]

Yes and it is easer for HR too. Just yesterday I had to modify a program because it clears out the data for a new year. But because New Years is on a saturday they gave the 31st off for the holiday. So I needed to modify the program to whipe out all data up to but not including the 31st. of December. Our Current System dates are considered to be just as bad as user interaction. Because you are mixing a 365 day year with a 7 day week on a 5/6 day work week, with the same number of vacations durring the work week every year, so you need to fudge the holidays, Every years the numbers fall on different days of the week. Every 4 years there is an extra day in the year. This is a fairly complex coding mechnisim to work out. Having holiday consistancy is a big bonus because.

Some parallels...

[VE3ECM (818278)]

Getting the world to switch calendars will prove to be as hard as getting the USA to switch to metric...

Freakin' hopeless.

Actually ...deps ...

[danalien (545655)]

jepp. here (sweden) it starts on Monday, but you're right, some say it's Sunday. *to quote [webexhibits.org]* (1st hit from googleing [google.com]):

• What Is the First Day of the Week?

  The Bible clearly makes the Sabbath the last day of the week, but does not share how that corresponds to our 7 day week. Yet through extra-biblical sources it is possible to determine that the Sabbath at the time of Christ corresponds to our current 'Saturday.' Therefore it is common Jewish and Christian practice to regard Sunday as the first day of the week (as is also evident from the Portuguese names for the week days). However, the fact that, for example, Russian uses the name "second" for Tuesday, indicates that some nations regard Monday as the first day.

  In international standard ISO-8601 the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has decreed that Monday shall be the first day of the week.

So, actually, it depends rather on you (your beliefs) and how the people from your country choose to go ... BTW, here's a helpfull link to discover who choose what [timeanddate.com] :)

10 hour day

[mackman (19286)]

Nobody is taking my 10 hour day plan seriously either.

Actually, it was the one hour of work that your boss didn't like.

Re:10 hour day

[P-Nuts (592605)]

10 hour day

Pah! Real men have a 28-hour day! [dbeat.com] Actually, I tried this for a while and found it worked, but was too impractical as the rest of the world didn't try it.

change

[Legato895 (788993)]

no matter how good of an idea it is, something thats been used for hundred of years won't change out of convenane, thats just the way it is

but heck, im all for metric time

Re:change

[gewalker (57809)]

AH, the 13-month calendar.

13 months, 4weeks each, plus an extra saturday after week 52 (2 extra Saturdays on leap years).

Now you have calendar reform that I could support.

Not going to happen, ever

[PktLoss (647983)]

I will tell you what, once he manages to drag the American government and populace over to the metric system (kicking and screaming no doubt), then maybe, just maybe the world can have a listen. But realistically I don't see this ever happening, for a few reasons:
1) It being the same time and day everywhere still isn't that useful. Sure it's 3:00pm over in China right now, because it's 3:00pm here, but that doesn't tell me that the people there are in fact awake?
2) Frequent use of the term 'forever more' on his website. I think a lot of the problems we have with systems today are caused by the failure of the original designers to see A) any other possible use or improvement for the system, and B) Not designing the system to allow for other uses or improvements because of A. Perhaps once we are jumping from one planet to another in our space ships some changes will need to be made, who knows? Will this require a change to the calendar? Will it always be the same time on this other planet that has a shorter day, shorter year?

And finally, the big one

3) People don't like change.

I want my birthday to change!

[teiresias (101481)]

What about all those people born on Febuary 29th? What about them I ask!


4.) What happens to my birthday?

If, for example, your birthday is March 7, it will ALWAYS fall on a Wednesday, for evermore.
Christmas Day will always fall on a Sunday, which will be pleasing to Christians,
but, will also be pleasing to companies who currently lose up to two weeks of work to the Christmas/New Year's annual mess.
New Year's Day will always be on a Sunday, too.


Also, I enjoy the relative randomness of my birthday changing days. Since my birthday is in January there is the occasional bonus of a snow day on my birthday (has happened twice in recent memory). I suppose you could prove that having it on one day is just as likely as having it on random days but I like my odds the way it is :)

Site melting:

[Ckwop (707653)]

So view here [google.com] instead.

It Stays Exactly the Same, Year after Year! NOT

[mcg1969 (237263)]

On this page [jhu.edu], he makes the claim about the calendar: "It Stays Exactly the Same, Year after Year!"

Only, it doesn't. About every 5-6 years or so he inserts an extra week [jhu.edu] in the calendar between June and July.

No, it's not every 5 years, and no, it's not every 6 years. It's sometimes 5, and sometimes 6. You'll just have to ask him.

So will someone tell me why this is any less difficult than what we currently use?

Another static calendar proposal

[swm (171547)]

Another proposal along the same lines

http://world.std.com/~swmcd/steven/rants/calenda r. html

Thank you for your submission, but...

[waynegoode (758645)]

Dir Sir/Madam:

Thank you for submitting your idea for calendar reform. However, we must reject it for the following reasons:

• ( ) It changes the seven day week or adds days outside the week.
• ( ) It has a day or days that are not in a month causing problems for writing dates, etc.
• (X) It has an unusual number of months in all or some years making it hard to divide a year into quarters.
• (X) One or more months have significantly more or fewer days than the others causing problems for monthly fees, etc.
• (X) The number of days in a year varies greatly from some years to others.
• (X) Some months are only in certain years and therefore the number of months in a year varies from year to year.
• (X) The number of days between a date in one year and the next varies form year to year.
• (X) It makes people keep clock time that does match the daytime, i.e. sunrise at midnight or noon.

Congratulations on getting 5 out of 7!

Yes, but the question is,

[Omicron32 (646469)]

Is it digitally signed?

Problems with changing...

[Rahga (13479)]

1) Aggies (Texas A&M) would need to switch from the "12 pairs of underwear" system.
2) The once-a-year event of celebrating the arrival of the same paycheck for working 14/15th the time will disappear. The French wouldn't notice this.
3) Doesn't fix the problem of daylight savings time... As Paul Harvey once described it, it's a bit like cutting off the top of your blanket and using it to cover your feet.

Nutcase

[photon317 (208409)]

This guy hasn't a prayer of getting his calendar implemented. He's a nutcase, and his calendar is riddled with practical problems (which he even notes on his site amongst the "FAQs", and then brushes aside with illogical retorts). As further proof of his unfitness as an architect of serious systems for human use, in another part of his calendar site, he gives code examples in Fortran. Anyone who, when given the chance to write a code example in order to explain a simple calendar concept, immediately goes for Fortran as his language of choice, is not someone I want designing anything that might affect my life.

13 Month Calendar

[SuperQ (431)]

This whole 30 day calendary is silly.. if you're going to re-shuffle everything, make it a simple 13 month, 28 day calendar.

the month is exactly 4 weeks

There is only 1 spare da a year (a real new-years-day)

You still probably need to do leap-years.. but that's less of a big deal, just make new-years 2 days.

You also get the bonus of being more in-sync with lunar changes. (which is easier to keep track of my gf's moods ;)

Re:13 Month Calendar

[soulsteal (104635)]

You also get the bonus of being more in-sync with lunar changes. (which is easier to keep track of my gf's moods ;)

Wow, you're dating a werewolf?

no shortage of bad ideas

[supernova87a (532540)]

for you all who're having trouble getting to the actual info page, here it is. [jhu.edu]

To give you some inside information, the guy behind this idea is kind of a crackpot -- he's a guy who has lots of weird thoughts, but hasn't exactly done much serious research in a while.

And that's why although this may make a good press release, any professional astronomer (or even amateur) knows why we have the calendar we do -- so that each year, the calendar days you are familiar with correspond to approximately where the stars lie in the sky, and the weather season, etc. Ie. every September, the vernal equinox coincides with the rising parallel, the length of the day, etc. etc. Leap days are the way to distribute the extra 1/4 of a day per year into a reasonable interval (once every 4 years).

This scheme of having one calendar with a leap "week" is just another way of shifting around the leap days, and is exactly what an astronomer would NOT want! And his rationale for not having to print different calendars is obviated by having to remember that leap "weeks" occur in years 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, etc...

The current calendar gives some consistency and familiarity -- you can predict how long the day is, what stars are in the sky (within a day or so b/c leap days), and approximately if you're going to need a heavy jacket to go outside in the cold. Under this crackpot new calendar, you have to recompute all these things based on what year it is. Crackpot.

Newton Week?

[mshiltonj (220311)]

That's stupid.

For more information on calendar reform in general check Calendar Reform [ecu.edu]. I'm partial to the World Calendar [ecu.edu].

Shortcomings and psychological annoyances

[vorpal^ (114901)]

Two thoughts come to mind:

1. How would this affect people whose birthdays, anniversaries, etc. fall on the 31st of a month that no longer has a 31st? How about Halloween?

2. Personally, having my birthday occur on a Wednesday for the rest of time is tremendously unappealing to me. I enjoy having the occasional weekend birthday so that I can laze around all day, go out and get drunk, and just generally get spoiled by friends and family. The thought of having to work on my birthday for the rest of my life up until retirement isn't exactly heartwarming.

Oh, and of course, his model doesn't appear to be TimeCube compliant [timecube.com], and thus will be met with a lot of protest.

Not thinking big enough

[JonathanLennox (31068)]

The fundamental problem with all calendar reform proposals is that the day, month, and year aren't integer multiples of each other.

However, with big enough rockets, we can fix this! Slow the day down a bit, move the moon out -- 30 days in a month, 360 days in a year. Nice and regular!

(Still seeking funding.)

Screws up Halloween!

[BrianWCarver (569070)]

There's no October 31 on his calendar, so Halloween would have to be October 30. LAME

He also wiped out my wedding anniversary, which is on a 31st. Do you think this would mean I wouldn't have to buy gifts?

Sorry, no.

[Safety Cap (253500)]

Your post advocates a

(x) technical ( ) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to solving the "drifting calendar" problem. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work.
(One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which
used to vary from country to country before the Gregorian Calendar was adopted.)

(x) Jebuslanders would not remember what date Jebus was killed
( ) Banks would go out of business without those little calendars to distribute
(x) No one will be able to figure out when daylight savings time occured.
(x) People born on Feb 29th would revolt
( ) It will stop confution for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of date-sensitive programs will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from developers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Hallmark cannot afford to lose business or alienate "unimportant" religions
( ) The average Joe doesn't care that Oct 13 will be on a different day of the week next year.

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for calendars
( ) Other, weird calendars in foreign countries
( ) Trivial tase of determining last day/first day of the month using a single line of code.
(x) Asshats
( ) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new ideas
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new calnedars
( ) Huge existing software investment in Gregorian Calendar
(x) The Stock Market
(x) Willingness of users to install OS patches
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all approaches
( ) Extreme profitability of selling candy on a Tuesday.
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(x) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who think world-wide solutions are "easy" to implement
( ) Dishonesty on the part of bootleg calendar makers
(x) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
(x) INT 1A, 4 should not be the subject of legislation
(x) Change sucks
( ) Eliminating tradition sucks
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Y2K didn't go far enough
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(x) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) I don't want the government telling me to go to work on Sunday
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

( ) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
(x) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.

If you're going to make a drastic change...

[Rick Genter (315800)]

...do it right - go all the way.

I propose that we get rid of years, months, weeks, and just jump straight to ... stardates!

We can make stardate 1 be the date on which the first ST:TOS episode aired (September 8, 1966 [startrek.com], old Earth calendar ;-). Of course, fractional dates correspond to time (.1 stardate = 2.4 old Earth hours).

I believe that that makes today (December 21, 2004) stardate 13985.

And nobody takes my "fall back" plan seriously...

[The_REAL_DZA (731082)]

I've maintained for YEARS that, as long as we're going to go screwing around with the clock twice a year anyway, why not set the clock back one hour, twice every month ? Let's say we set the clocks back one hour on the 1st of the month, and again on the 15th of the month, every month. In one year we'd be right back where we started (12 months X two hours each = 24 hours!), but we'd have gained a whole extra hour of sleep every two weeks (or so)...now who wouldn't like THAT? (and just to clarify: there'd be no restriction that you had to use the extra hour for sleep...) Sure, part of the year "first thing in the morning" would be just before sundown, and at a completely different part of the year (the opposite side of the year, in fact) you'd be sleeping all "day", but who cares? I mean, we all live by our clocks anyway, right? And you'd be getting that "fall back" boost twice every month !

Well, I'D vote for it...at least it's no crazier than thinking we're "gaining" or "losing" an hour by fiddling with the clocks.

Re:This won't please YHWH/Allah/insert deity here

[jellomizer (103300)]

It doesn't break the 7 Day Week. All it really is a 364 Day Year. And every 5-6 Years therre is an extra week. So It will not mess wih their Sabbath.

Re:This won't please YHWH/Allah/insert deity here

[harvardian (140312)]

If you RTFW, he has large font that explains:

the C&T Calendar Fully Respects the Fourth Commandment of the Bible

There are five 100-minute hours in my week

[Lucas Membrane (524640)]

Lunch hours.

Re:decimal hours

[brunson (91995)]

Changing the clock is such a lame idea. Any mathematician will tell you base 12 is far superior for doing integer calculations than base 10. 10 only has 2 divisors: 2 and 5, which 12 has 4: 2, 3, 4 and 6 which make a 60 minute hours superb. What's 1/2 an hour? 30 minutes. What's 1/3? 20. What's 1/4? 15. 1/5? 1/6? 1/12?

If you had 100 minutes in an hour you'd start doing a lot of rounding or using a lot of decimal places.

Debate the calendar all you want, but leave the clock alone.

Re:Hrm...

[Zog The Undeniable (632031)]

What's so complicated about the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox? Otherwise known as Easter Sunday ;-)