From another point of view, a given date gradually occurring on every day of the week is a feature, not a bug. I see that the proposed calendar puts my birthday on a weekend, every year year after year, but I kind of like my birthday (and my wedding anniversary, and other important dates) occurring on a new day of the week each year, for variety.
I note too that the calendar would not "make it easy to plan annual activities" for any of the dates in the "extra week" proposed for the calendar, if by annual activities we mean activities that occur in every calendar year. The extra week occurs "at the end of December every five or six years," and the new memory load everyone would have to bear is remembering which years--2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105, "et cetera" are the extra week years.
that "new memory load" is functionally zero, since no one would have to remember that. By the time the Extra week actually arrived, people would have been looking forward to it for an entire year, and it would not catch anyone by surprise. No memory required. Even subterranean cave trolls would be aware it is coming.
I think it's a nice idea especially if we could have a big weeklong worldwide party once every 5 or 6 years
I like this idea. Unfortunately, it can't coexist with the Gregorian calendar in its current form; if a small fraction of the world switched to it, they'd always have to wonder which calendar someone writing "Jan 1" was referring to.
When a date is written down, it needs to be immediately obvious which calendar it's referring to. It needs a special notation that doesn't overlap with any of the currently-used notations for dates, so that it will be unambiguous (and so that the old calendar will remain unambiguous). I propose doing this by giving each month a letter, A-L, and writing dates like this:
2012-A01 = New calendar, first day of first month of 2012
2012-L30 = New calendar, thirtieth day of twelfth month of 2012
2012-01-01 = Gregorian calendar, first day of first month of 2012
C30 = New calendar, thirtieth day of third month of whatever year this is
With the notations neatly separated, you could then print calendars with the two schemes side by side, and let people convert back and forth for awhile while the new system is adopted. We could give the months fanciful names, too, as long as they start with the right letters. But the important thing is, the two schemes must be unambiguous and distinct.
I just pointed this out to a friend and she gladly brought up the Shire calendar from Tolkien's works, which according to her has 12 months, 30 days a month, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with the date of each month staying the same weekday due to the separation of the five other days as holidays that are separate from the months (including leap-day, which doesn't belong to any day of the week).
Which actually solves the exact same problem in a much cleaner fashion than this proposal.
I was going to mention this alternative (have read it long long time ago in some amateur astronomy book), but I had no idea about its origin. Thank you for providing it :)
There are already lots of calendars if one cares to look. Why bother with a 7 day week other than the biblical mandate? Why not use a lunar calendar? It would certainly simplify 'calculating' Easter. Having a leap day is a lot less intrusive than a leap week and does anyone actually bother to memorize the Metonic cycle? Is it because lunisolar calendars are uncommon or because they're a pain or both?
I think having timezones benefits us in the sense that we can say "It is lunch in city A when it is dinner in city B". Knowing when people are likely to be sleeping/working/playing in different places helps more than having One Timezone. Pilots use UTC because they're between timezones too much for them to follow a 'standard' schedule according to our approximations of the Sun's movements.
Compliance with biblical mandates is a popularity hack. You need popularity if you want a new calendar to be adopted (or you need massive power on the level of an emperor^Wdictator.
Had this proposal been suggested a century ago. I would have a good feeling it would have been made a reality since it doesn't interfere with a 7 day work weak.
Today with computers, it isn't really necessary. Anyone is able to check when July 1st will be in 2500 without calculating. So it is not likely to gain to much interest except in by theorists.
This proposal introduces an artificial calendar that is neither solar or lunar but realigns every few years. It is quiet a novel idea.
The Jews did similar engineering in their calendar system. The rabbis did not want some holidays to fall out on certain days of the week because of varied reasons. So they engineered rules for the leap years and new months to happen in a pattern to prevent this.
The Jewish calendar is lunar but realigns itself with the solar calendar. It need to be certain Jewish holidays always accure in the same season.
if you read the linked article, you see the explanation: the fourth commandment specifies resting on the seventh day. any proposed calendar that doesn't have a seven day week will never be adopted as long as religion still exists.
and even if it weren't for religion, everything is structured around a seven day week. changing that would mean a drastic lifestyle change for most people.
That depends on what you mean by adopted. The federal government/education establishment/etc. all use SI units. It's the general populace which couldn't care less.
Which means this proposal has the same probability of adoption as me winning the lottery. And I don't buy lottery tickets.
Here's a revolutionary thought - the calendar is already fixed. Sporting events (etc.) don't have to happen on the same weekday, they can just always happen on the same date. Voila, predictable time planning that doesn't have to be redone every year.
And I love the idea of eliminating timezones, especially the example that pilots already use UTC. Ever considered this might be because the concept of "day" doesn't really apply when you change 10 timezones in 10 hours?
Personally I think eliminating timezones would make relating to people internationally very difficult. It's already weird enough that Australians think of December as a summer month. Consider half the world thinking of 20:00 (8PM) as the morning. How does "everywhere is the same hour" even remotely fix the fact people sleep at night and work at day anyway?
And what do you do with an extra week "every five or six years"?
What's the difference between needing to know what timezone some place is in, vs. needing to know about where their day falls?
What particularly annoys me about timezones is that times are already useless. When does the day start? (And I mean the normal cultural day, not your personal day.) Be it 7am, 8am, 9am, or whatever your answer may be, it sure isn't anything sensible like 0 or 1. If those are anything, that's when the day ends. If the sun rises at 03:00 in one place, 10:00 in another, and 22:00 in another (presumably we'd stop using "am" and "pm" as the a & p would become useless), who really cares? It's not like we're taking away the 00:00 sunrise that you can set your watch by from anybody.
Removing time zones would break any kind of cultural joke and reference to time. "omg, i woke up at 4am today!"... Especially in todays internet connected world.
Swatch tried to intruduce timezone-free time many many years ago called "swatch internet time", Ericsson even had it as default on some of their cell phones to promote it. Needless to say it didn't work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
> Here's a revolutionary thought - the calendar is already fixed. Sporting events (etc.) don't have to happen on the same weekday, they can just always happen on the same date. Voila, predictable time planning that doesn't have to be redone every year.
Except you want work days off to be near a weekend. I'd rather have a 3 day weekend than Wednesday alone off...
In all seriousness, it would be easier to adopt this proposed calendar than it would be to:
- Not have football on Sundays
- Tell students that they have to go to school Thursday
through Monday this year (But church is still on Sundays!).
- a bunch of other weekday/weekend-aligned activities.
In the UK there have been discussions about stopping DST. The main problem is that in places Scotland it would be darker for longer in the morning which could lead to more traffic accidents.
The affects on crime and traffic accidents would be huge. And it would never be possible to get half of the planet to agree that they will forever work while it's dark and sleep while it is light.
I've been using an independent calendar for my own records for over a decade now - it's the day-of-year, written base 7. It fits in with weeks; if we reset weeks every year (why not? we do worse things already with leap days and seconds) then dates become equivalent with weekdays. One number expresses the day-of-year, day-of-week, week-of-year, and month-of-year, using a 49-day month.
I don't really expect many other people to use this, despite being a better designed system. I think hardcore math/cs people would like it, though. I've written some small pieces of code that work with this system, if anyone's interested.
Wow, after reading the comments it's amazing how difficult it is for most people to understand that eliminating time zones doesn't mean that anyone will change when they work. You will just have a different number for the time you do things than in than other parts of the world. In England you might start at 09:00, but on the other side of the world they would start at 20:00 which would be morning for them.
Why is this better though? When scheduling a meeting, I still have to figure out what "zone" another place is in so as to schedule an event during a normal workday.
The problem is that these are still timezones. It's actually a very trivial change. Instead of saying you're in a different timezone, I say you wake up at 20:00 instead of 8:00 like I do.
Hey look, it worked when the Chinese government in the early 20th century switched to the Gregorian Calendar... Or did it? Paper calendars in China generally represent both Gregorian and Chinese calendar dates.
I'm going to assume when this new calendar is adopted, the chinese will then be able to buy three calendars in one.
I would tend to agree, but then we have things like DST shifting around all the time. The government just states they are making a change, and everyone does. Every software that isn't based on a network time server breaks, and is fixed, and we move on. The same could happen with this new calendar, the government simply mandates that by a certain year it has to be in place.
The largest burden will be on legacy software and getting that patched. That very well could be reason enough for the reversal of this calendar, as every government software breaks, and they find out how slow they are to keeping up with their own mandates.
The whole "everybody should adopt UTC" business makes no sense to me. If a business needs to use UTC because of time zones or whatnot, they already are. It'd be weird having the day of the week change in the middle of the day in Japan, too.
That's an excellent point: "We'll need to be ready by Tuesday morning"... does morning mean 'sunrise' or does it mean 'time near where Tuesday 'starts'?
Agreed with the general proposal: the only time periods that are important to preserve are the day (coz of morning/night), the week (coz of work-week and religious days), and the year (coz of seasons). The month is pretty arbitrary.
They propose a 364-day year with 8x 30-day months and 4x 31-day months. If they're okay with a 364-day year, wouldn't it be better to have 8x 28-day months and 4x 35-day months. Or you could have 13x 28-day months. That way the day-of-week would be even more predictable.
Yeah, except you lose the morning/night distinction, because they also suggest that the entire world use one timezone. This, in my humble opinion, seems to a very cumbersome and onerous system. Yes, there are obvious business advantages to having just one timezone, but it also completely robs us of heuristics that have been developed over centuries.
Interesting but it won't happen. It would have to be adopted throughout the world (especially where religious days are affected) and there would never be agreement on which holidays fall on which day (NYE on Friday or Saturday?).
I don't fully understand the other point in the article about ridding the world of time zones to improve business and trade. How would that work? Do they expect certain countries to agree to work while the sun is down?
I think you understood the point about timezones backwards. The point is for everybody to use, for instance, UTC time. So instead of working the proverbial 9am to 5pm, if you are in Japan you would work from 0am to 8am (UTC).
It makes sense to me, but I can see how lots of people would have a very hard time understanding and accepting this.
I love this idea, but there are a few things that aren't covered in the comments that I want to know about.
1) How does this calendar align to the phases of the moon? How many moons are there per-year? Is this variable? This is important due to archaic calendar systems and dates that are based on solar-lunar calendars (e.g. China & Japan)
2) Is there a quick and easy algorithm for re-mapping dates? My birthday was on Mar 30, 1991 - for example. Would I simply keep the old date, or adopt a new one? I assume keep the old since its still on the calendar, but what about people born January 31st?
3) How do seasons align and fluctuate along these new datelines? And how does this floating week influence it?
This is not far from how most of Sweden operates. Most offices comply to the idea of "half-day before holiday" notion and as where fixing the dates wouldn't interfere with that too much, I doo believe that fixing Christmas to a Saturday would make a lot of Swedes angry.
For one, we celebrate the 24th, and having the 25th on a Saturday sure gives Friday and half of Thursday off. But the 26th is also a holiday, which would then be on a regular Sunday. New Years Eve is not a holiday, and having that on a constant Friday would open the days between Christmas and NYE as a work week. Where as now some years you can have a nice long (10-14 days) vacation with only a couple days of actual leave, because the rest are considered national holidays. (Example: 2012 I can get 14 days off with only 5 days of leave.)
> Now, you can see conflicting interest here, especially between employees and employers :)
Why would there be a conflict of interest? The point is that employees always get the same number of "days off" per year is it not? The conflict of interest would arise in countries where holidays are not carried forward (or stashed in leave entitlements), employers interest would be to have all of them fall on week-ends, whereas employee interest would be to have all of them fall on week-days.
For people who are apparently enlightened enough to realize that no calendar, however rational and perfect, will be accepted if it violates a certain religious rule (the sabbath), they are apparently quite ignorant in their advocacy of UTC for all purposes.
It's all well and good to eliminate time zones as such and have each region operate on a fixed clock, but to suggest that people will simply stop paying attention to the sun is insane. If you want wide adoption you can't expect people to make radical change in their lives. Most people prefer to wake with the sun and sleep when it's dark; some studies suggest that we are biologically predisposed to want or need this. Whether it's 05:00 when I wake or 16:00 when I wake is immaterial to me (that's just a number, just what you call it) but whether it's daylight when I'm out and about just plain matters.
In effect you'll probably always need a way to divide the world by when the sun is up, even if the clock doesn't change.
I'm pretty sure they're not advocating screwing with the Circadian cycle. You still wake up and go to sleep with the sun; just now you wake up at 13h00 instead of 8:00 AM.
[+] [-] tokenadult|14 years ago|reply
I note too that the calendar would not "make it easy to plan annual activities" for any of the dates in the "extra week" proposed for the calendar, if by annual activities we mean activities that occur in every calendar year. The extra week occurs "at the end of December every five or six years," and the new memory load everyone would have to bear is remembering which years--2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105, "et cetera" are the extra week years.
[+] [-] forensic|14 years ago|reply
I think it's a nice idea especially if we could have a big weeklong worldwide party once every 5 or 6 years
[+] [-] shimonamit|14 years ago|reply
They say their calendar would make it easy to plan annual activities, from holidays to academic schedules to financial calculations.
[+] [-] jimrandomh|14 years ago|reply
When a date is written down, it needs to be immediately obvious which calendar it's referring to. It needs a special notation that doesn't overlap with any of the currently-used notations for dates, so that it will be unambiguous (and so that the old calendar will remain unambiguous). I propose doing this by giving each month a letter, A-L, and writing dates like this:
With the notations neatly separated, you could then print calendars with the two schemes side by side, and let people convert back and forth for awhile while the new system is adopted. We could give the months fanciful names, too, as long as they start with the right letters. But the important thing is, the two schemes must be unambiguous and distinct.[+] [-] tylerneylon|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating
[+] [-] jaylevitt|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdfaoeu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forensic|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Navarr|14 years ago|reply
Which actually solves the exact same problem in a much cleaner fashion than this proposal.
[+] [-] ars|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ndefinite|14 years ago|reply
We're already used to stat holidays; "Days of Yule" are much less intrusive than leap weeks
[+] [-] rimantas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] uiri|14 years ago|reply
There are already lots of calendars if one cares to look. Why bother with a 7 day week other than the biblical mandate? Why not use a lunar calendar? It would certainly simplify 'calculating' Easter. Having a leap day is a lot less intrusive than a leap week and does anyone actually bother to memorize the Metonic cycle? Is it because lunisolar calendars are uncommon or because they're a pain or both?
I think having timezones benefits us in the sense that we can say "It is lunch in city A when it is dinner in city B". Knowing when people are likely to be sleeping/working/playing in different places helps more than having One Timezone. Pilots use UTC because they're between timezones too much for them to follow a 'standard' schedule according to our approximations of the Sun's movements.
[+] [-] Sorpigal|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shimon_e|14 years ago|reply
These type of reforms were quiet popular in the beginning of the 20th century. E.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_World_Calendar
Had this proposal been suggested a century ago. I would have a good feeling it would have been made a reality since it doesn't interfere with a 7 day work weak.
Today with computers, it isn't really necessary. Anyone is able to check when July 1st will be in 2500 without calculating. So it is not likely to gain to much interest except in by theorists.
This proposal introduces an artificial calendar that is neither solar or lunar but realigns every few years. It is quiet a novel idea.
The Jews did similar engineering in their calendar system. The rabbis did not want some holidays to fall out on certain days of the week because of varied reasons. So they engineered rules for the leap years and new months to happen in a pattern to prevent this.
The Jewish calendar is lunar but realigns itself with the solar calendar. It need to be certain Jewish holidays always accure in the same season.
[+] [-] scythe|14 years ago|reply
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar
Plus, the Discordian calendar has the advantage of already being implemented in Linux!
[+] [-] notatoad|14 years ago|reply
and even if it weren't for religion, everything is structured around a seven day week. changing that would mean a drastic lifestyle change for most people.
[+] [-] fl3tch|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] shirro|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maratd|14 years ago|reply
Which means this proposal has the same probability of adoption as me winning the lottery. And I don't buy lottery tickets.
[+] [-] Swizec|14 years ago|reply
And I love the idea of eliminating timezones, especially the example that pilots already use UTC. Ever considered this might be because the concept of "day" doesn't really apply when you change 10 timezones in 10 hours?
Personally I think eliminating timezones would make relating to people internationally very difficult. It's already weird enough that Australians think of December as a summer month. Consider half the world thinking of 20:00 (8PM) as the morning. How does "everywhere is the same hour" even remotely fix the fact people sleep at night and work at day anyway?
And what do you do with an extra week "every five or six years"?
[+] [-] jerf|14 years ago|reply
What particularly annoys me about timezones is that times are already useless. When does the day start? (And I mean the normal cultural day, not your personal day.) Be it 7am, 8am, 9am, or whatever your answer may be, it sure isn't anything sensible like 0 or 1. If those are anything, that's when the day ends. If the sun rises at 03:00 in one place, 10:00 in another, and 22:00 in another (presumably we'd stop using "am" and "pm" as the a & p would become useless), who really cares? It's not like we're taking away the 00:00 sunrise that you can set your watch by from anybody.
[+] [-] Too|14 years ago|reply
Swatch tried to intruduce timezone-free time many many years ago called "swatch internet time", Ericsson even had it as default on some of their cell phones to promote it. Needless to say it didn't work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
[+] [-] usaar333|14 years ago|reply
Except you want work days off to be near a weekend. I'd rather have a 3 day weekend than Wednesday alone off...
[+] [-] function_seven|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|14 years ago|reply
The affects on crime and traffic accidents would be huge. And it would never be possible to get half of the planet to agree that they will forever work while it's dark and sleep while it is light.
[+] [-] tylerneylon|14 years ago|reply
http://tylerneylon.com/b/archives/122
I don't really expect many other people to use this, despite being a better designed system. I think hardcore math/cs people would like it, though. I've written some small pieces of code that work with this system, if anyone's interested.
[+] [-] graywh|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deerpig|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] usaar333|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Swizec|14 years ago|reply
That's not a very significant change ...
[+] [-] yaix|14 years ago|reply
The difficult part is to get 8 billion people to agree to pull in the same direction. And my guess is, that it will never happen, unfortunately.
[+] [-] meric|14 years ago|reply
I'm going to assume when this new calendar is adopted, the chinese will then be able to buy three calendars in one.
[+] [-] biturd|14 years ago|reply
The largest burden will be on legacy software and getting that patched. That very well could be reason enough for the reversal of this calendar, as every government software breaks, and they find out how slow they are to keeping up with their own mandates.
[+] [-] kellenfujimoto|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zhyder|14 years ago|reply
They propose a 364-day year with 8x 30-day months and 4x 31-day months. If they're okay with a 364-day year, wouldn't it be better to have 8x 28-day months and 4x 35-day months. Or you could have 13x 28-day months. That way the day-of-week would be even more predictable.
[+] [-] tabbyjabby|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k-mcgrady|14 years ago|reply
I don't fully understand the other point in the article about ridding the world of time zones to improve business and trade. How would that work? Do they expect certain countries to agree to work while the sun is down?
[+] [-] Xixi|14 years ago|reply
It makes sense to me, but I can see how lots of people would have a very hard time understanding and accepting this.
[+] [-] js2|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Navarr|14 years ago|reply
1) How does this calendar align to the phases of the moon? How many moons are there per-year? Is this variable? This is important due to archaic calendar systems and dates that are based on solar-lunar calendars (e.g. China & Japan)
2) Is there a quick and easy algorithm for re-mapping dates? My birthday was on Mar 30, 1991 - for example. Would I simply keep the old date, or adopt a new one? I assume keep the old since its still on the calendar, but what about people born January 31st?
3) How do seasons align and fluctuate along these new datelines? And how does this floating week influence it?
[+] [-] wtvanhest|14 years ago|reply
(seriously though, imagine how mad people will get when a particular event happens on the "wrong day" every year)
I like it though. I'd even take a Tuesday birthday to make it happen.
[+] [-] wiradikusuma|14 years ago|reply
And in some companies, if holiday falls on Saturday, you get extra 1 day leave entitlement.
Now, you can see conflicting interest here, especially between employees and employers :)
[+] [-] devolve|14 years ago|reply
For one, we celebrate the 24th, and having the 25th on a Saturday sure gives Friday and half of Thursday off. But the 26th is also a holiday, which would then be on a regular Sunday. New Years Eve is not a holiday, and having that on a constant Friday would open the days between Christmas and NYE as a work week. Where as now some years you can have a nice long (10-14 days) vacation with only a couple days of actual leave, because the rest are considered national holidays. (Example: 2012 I can get 14 days off with only 5 days of leave.)
[+] [-] masklinn|14 years ago|reply
Why would there be a conflict of interest? The point is that employees always get the same number of "days off" per year is it not? The conflict of interest would arise in countries where holidays are not carried forward (or stashed in leave entitlements), employers interest would be to have all of them fall on week-ends, whereas employee interest would be to have all of them fall on week-days.
Or did I miss something?
[+] [-] paxswill|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Sorpigal|14 years ago|reply
It's all well and good to eliminate time zones as such and have each region operate on a fixed clock, but to suggest that people will simply stop paying attention to the sun is insane. If you want wide adoption you can't expect people to make radical change in their lives. Most people prefer to wake with the sun and sleep when it's dark; some studies suggest that we are biologically predisposed to want or need this. Whether it's 05:00 when I wake or 16:00 when I wake is immaterial to me (that's just a number, just what you call it) but whether it's daylight when I'm out and about just plain matters.
In effect you'll probably always need a way to divide the world by when the sun is up, even if the clock doesn't change.
[+] [-] colanderman|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vacri|14 years ago|reply
and
The two men also propose eliminating time zones and adopting a universal time around the world to streamline international business.
indicate that there are some fundamental things they don't understand about business.