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.

It Stays Exactly the Same, Year after Year! NOT

[mcg1969]

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?

Re:10 hour day

[P-Nuts]

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.

Re:so..

[Frymaster]

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 go to work 350 in switerzerland and 600 in michigan and that hocky night in canada is on at 120, 145 in newfoundland.

simple.

Newton Week

[Satertek]

What's the difference between having the newton week and Leap years on the current calandar? Seems more complicated to me.

13 Month Calendar

[SuperQ]

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 ;)

13 Month

[fk319]

Many Resturants use a 4 week, 13 month calender to watch there sales from year to year. Every few years, Month 13 had 5 weeks instead of 4 weeks.

Re:decimal hours

[brunson]

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:Sounds like a nut.

[Alan Cox]

Well we do have to do something, although fortunately we have 795 years before we need to worry. In 2800 however the calenders diverge and we'll have different countries on different days unless they can agree on a revised leap year rule set.

How is this different than NET?

[4vidar]

Recently I was pointed (thanks to http://www.userfriendly.org/ [userfriendly.org]) to this site which speaks of New Earth Time (NET) http://newearthtime.net/ [newearthtime.net].

It too is an interesting concept, however I'm not sure any of this would fly. You'd have to get tons of governments on board, and that just isn't going to happen. Hell, try to get them to agree on a single item like warring with other countries...oh wait, that's not too simple.

It would still be hard to get them to do anything that involves change.

Re:so..

[jdavidb]

And the silly thing is that the date and time coding problem is trivial to solve: solve it once, stick it in a module or library, and then use that forever. And hey, look! It's already been solved for most languages!

In Perl I've been using Matt Sergeant's excellent Time::Piece module for years now, but am planning a switch to the new DateTime module which looks slated to become a Perl standard. Unfortunately it's always the bad coders who try to do everything themselves and reinvent the wheel. They will write their own date handling code and saddle me with the responsibility of fixing it years from now (what, you mean 2008 is a leap year?). I'm still mad at some highly paid consultants who didn't bother to read the docs to see what kind of year value they got out of some code I had to fix on Dec. 31, 1999. All they had to do was read the docs! And it's not like they didn't have any knowledge that year-handling was ever a problem...

Meanwhile most of the languages I've been learning lately seem to have built-in date literals. (Nothing new; I had that in dBase IV an eon ago.)

Simple solution: use one library everywhere and fix the library if it ever has problems. Instead we get inexperienced coders who reinvent the wheel and then tell us all we need to change our calendar to make it easier for them to continue manufacturing redundant wheels.

Re:Some parallels...

[Daengbo]

The imperial system offers great approximation and visualization advantages. It's based on twos and threes.

A cup is about what you drink your coffee in

Two cups is a pint

Two pints are a quart

A foot is about that long

divide a foot in half, and you've got six inches

Most people can fairly accurately divide into three parts. That comes to about two inches.

An inch is half that.

A yard is three feet, which you can visualize, or you can rough from your shoulder to your hand. The imperial system came from a time when close enough was good enough, and it still works well in those situations. Unfortunately, like analogs clocks and rounding to the nearest quarter hour, those days are all gone now.

Slighty OT, but...

[kyle_b_gorman]

...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]

No more daylight savings time!!!

[macdaddy]

Seriously, it needs to go. It's an absolute waste, even for a person like myself who has actually had jobs that required me to be working outside all day long. It's a royal pain in the ass for everyone. It's not even used everywhere in the US. Daylight savings time and it's variants are used in a seemingly random manner across the globe. This page [ca.gov] has some good info on it. I don't care if an ancestor of mine was the first to suggest it's use. IMHO the cost and energy savings today are not worth the sheer hassle of it all. DST should go.

Re:C&T Calendar? Why not Shire Reckoning?

[Hognoxious]

The most notable example of the latter is the transition to worldwide dominance of the Gregorian Calendar which actually took a very long time.

A very very long time. At a unix command prompt, type cal 9 1752. Note the missing days? That's because unix is American, in 1752 America was still British, and Britain was protestant and that's when they made the change. Most other European countries had made a smaller adjustment nearly 200 years earlier.

Re:so..

[juan2074]

It turned out bad when they put up new speed limit signs. That really confused the drivers.

But renumbering all the exits and replacing mile markers with the appropriate markers every kilometre was very expensive, even for the richest state.