New Calendar Proposal 796
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. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
so.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Out with the old....
Some parallels... (Score:5, Insightful)
Freakin' hopeless.
change (Score:5, Insightful)
but heck, im all for metric time
Not going to happen, ever (Score:5, Insightful)
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! (Score:5, Insightful)
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
How is this redundant? (Score:1, Insightful)
With all respect, I submit that the moderator is smoking crack.
Problems with changing... (Score:3, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:so.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:so.. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Shortcomings and psychological annoyances (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
I have to agree. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:change (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:so.. (Score:3, Insightful)
- Thomas;
Re:so.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:10 hour day (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:so.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Besides, it's always entertaining to smugly point out somebody else's software got the date-coding wrong. As if I would ever code a bug?
Happy 5th of Newton!
No more timezones!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
No extra holiday time for Guv'ment workers (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a nut. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How is this redundant? (Score:4, Insightful)
But how will I know whether or not I like if I don't read it?
Re:Not going to happen, ever _ minus Centagrade (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Sounds like a nut. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:so.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Now on Daylight Saving Time. [webexhibits.org] It is a nice concept that was invented for economic reasons that daylight is used more efficiently. While I support it, it is a PAIN! I live in a daylight saving time zone, but am sometimes working in a NON-daylight saving time zone. End result is I am usually slightly early when I am at that site(it is west of me) and then have a habit of showing up before the doors are unlocked! I'm glad I am not at that site very often!
On the other hand, I can enjoy the evening during the summer. Go out sailing in the evening winds and still have time to get back before dark.
Daylight savings is a good thing for most people. It is a difficult thing for IT professionals who are never seeing the light of day in the first place.
Then again never seeing daylight is a bad thing too.
Phil
Re:Sounds like a nut. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nah, too hard, just slow down cesium 133.
Re:Sounds like a nut - more like a hoax (Score:1, Insightful)
I added the emphasis. Most of our time measurements are based on systems that existed before Christianity and even Judiasm. This has got to be a hoax or this person has serious case of head up the arse.
C&T Calendar? Why not Shire Reckoning? (Score:3, Insightful)
But seriously, you need a sweeping new regime to get acceptance for a new calendar. If you look at the introduction of any calendar anywhere, it's always been either (a) highly localized in a particular spatio-, chrono-, ethno- or credo-sphere (or combination thereof), or (b) gradual, viral, and not entirely successful.
Examples of the former are:
- Chinese
- Hebrew
- Iranian
- Islamic
- Japanese
The most notable example of the latter is the transition to worldwide dominance of the Gregorian Calendar which actually took a very long time. The Julian Calendar still hangs on in the Orthodox religious calendar, and legal documents in various areas are still written using other local calendars (e.g. Japanese drivers' licenses).Yet another calendar? Don't need it. There are enough disjoint relationships between the different numbers describing the earth's motions (and hence the seasons) that ultimately, the irregular way "Newton" shows up in the year is just as confusing as what we have now.
€ 0,02 worth...ank
Re:Sounds like a nut - more like a hoax (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Not going to happen, ever _ minus Centagrade (Score:2, Insightful)
People make a lot of noise about how "superior" the metric system and I simply sit back and laugh. I see the whines about not understanding ounces and pounds and then these same people go on to talk about using hexidecimal numbers as routine. (In case you didn't realize, there are 16 ounces in a pound, 16 fluid ounces in a pint, and "a pint's a pound the world 'round").
The metric system hasn't won out precisely because it isn't inherently "superior" in any way. I suspect that the whining over the English system is just a meme that dates back to some mathematically illiterate folks who thought that the only way to handle anything was to make it base ten.
Re:Sounds like a nut - more like a hoax (Score:3, Insightful)
But no matter; the Julian/Gregorian calendar has always been a jumbled mess of historical revisions. (Unlike most other calendars.
I've long liked the Mayan system. Number the years from some prehistoric date. Within a year, number the days starting from 0. Yes, they had a symbol for zero, and it looked a lot like ours. After 365 or 366 days, reset the day counter to zero and bump the year counter.
Actually, the astronomical "Julian day" is essentially this system, except it just counts days (with fractional days instead of hours and minutes), but no true year number. You can do a divide to get the year, of course.
Then, of course, there's the unix (and VMS) timestamp, which just counts seconds. This is one of the most practical approaches if you're trying to write software to keep track of time. Once you've got all your software using the second count as its internal representation, life becomes a lot simpler. You can write library routines to translate to whatever display format your users like, while keeping time arithmetic simple for the software.
Of course, we're going to have to make sure all our software is compiled for a 64-bit second counter some time within the next two decades. But that's starting to happen now, well ahead of schedule. Actually, it should be a signed 64-bit integer, so we can use it to unambiguously represent the pre-1970 portion of human history.
Re:decimal hours (Score:3, Insightful)
As a side note, 0.041666, with the 6 repeating forever, is not an irrational number. Irrational numbers have no pattern and the sequences to do not repeat. Most importantly, they cannot be written as the fraction of two integers, as 1/24 can. Perhaps you meant "irrational" as in "lacking reason", which I suppose would apply to your post.
Re:Sounds like a nut. (Score:3, Insightful)
What would suck [funlol.com]is a Monday [funlol.com] Birthday! Just like the parent said!
Re:Not going to happen, ever _ minus Centagrade (Score:2, Insightful)
Half the scale not used!? 0 is freezing, 100 is boiling (at std. atmospheric pressure). That entire range is extremely useful and relevant in everyday life.
Where I live, the temperature is usually below freezing this time of year. What logic is there in saying that the first degree below freezing is THIRTY ONE?
Freezing is a very relevant temperature point, and having sub- freezing temperatures lie below zero makes a lot of sense to me. Right now it's -14C here. It's negative. That means its COLD, see?
The ZERO point in Farenheit is pretty damned meaningless (but it'll be well below 0F tonight, woot). Of course, later this year it may reach -40F, which is the only temperature in Farenheit that makes sense--because then it'll also be -40C.
Re:Not going to happen, ever _ minus Centagrade (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd agree with you if the English system was always base 16, but it's not. There are 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and 1760 yards in a mile. That's just confusing.