Proposed World Calendar Reform

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Should be let the capitalist system drive the calendar?

I think not.  The current economic system is on its last legs.  The BS about accounting troubles is exactly that.  Astronomers should tend to their knitting.

How about, instead, a 13 month calendar of 28 days each.  This results in 28 * 13 = 364 days.  In ordinary years, let the new year holiday fall on intercalary day 1 which would be a non-judiciary day and a general holiday.  For leap years, insert intercalary day 2 at the end of month 6 or month 7, or even have these two days together at the beginning of the year.  I leave it as an exercise in history and humour for readers to dream up new names for the months.

By the way, 13 is a prime number.  Let's see you divide that into quarters!  I don't care if there is fiscal chaos because there is anyway.

[MintberryCrunch 83]

I have a proposal for the name of the 13th month, if that happened: Smarch

[LexusInfernus 908]

Meh, whatever, I doubt people care enough about a bunch of poor accountants, people who have to code a calendar into an OS or some university professor who has to update his course and exam schedule once a year. 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

3 minutes ago, LexusInfernus said:

Meh, whatever, I doubt people care enough about a bunch of poor accountants, people who have to code a calendar into an OS or some university professor who has to update his course and exam schedule once a year. 

Yes, and don't you think aiming for 2017 is just a bit pie in the sky?  I think you may find that one of the most vehement resisters of this idea will be the Vatican.

[Sabretooth78 808]

1 hour ago, MintberryCrunch said:

I have a proposal for the name of the 13th month, if that happened: Smarch

To channel some more Simpsons, maybe we should take it one step further than just the calendar:

 

But no such proposal would ever find favor in the US, what with our enlightened populace; perhaps it's no surprise there are many who still think the Metric/SI "thing" is a tool of communists.

 

[Ocram's Razr 964]

I would prefer a lunar month and solar year, where days (solar) and weeks (1/4 a lunar cycle) are the same. There would be roughly 13 months in a year but the (lunar) months would slowly go out of alignment with the (solar) year by roughly 29 hours every year. Then we could split the solar year into seasonal quarters (Winter Solstice, Spring Equinox, Summer Solstice, Autumn Equinox). Unicode time would further drift from natural (solar+lunar) because computers wouldn't use leap seconds and would merely keep counting continuously so they would have to convert to local time, probably using a local time signal sent from proper weather, education, or government centers. Leap seconds wouldn't impact computers because the computer time would remain continuous and perfectly stable but programming would have to be changed to let computers know local time. While we are at it, why not ditch Daylight Savings Time? It has been proven to be a drain to the economy and bad for health.

 

Of course, the Metric System will certainly be the exclusive system off-planet once colonization or exodus begins (if humanity hasn't blown ourselves up by then).

[LexusInfernus 908]

2 hours ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Yes, and don't you think aiming for 2017 is just a bit pie in the sky?  I think you may find that one of the most vehement resisters of this idea will be the Vatican.

Well you know what they say, aim high  Can't blame them for a lack of ambition! 

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

BTW, the metric system is the tool of the French Revolution.  Think of going all the way with SI.  400 Grads in a circle, 100 in a right angle.  Circumference of the earth at the equator 40,000 Km.  So 400 grads in an hour, etc.  One second (100 of them in a minute (or whatever)) defined by a specific frequency of light from some element heated to a specific metric temperature, probably in Kelvin.

New name for month of July would be Thermador, and it would start on the present July 14th (Bastille day).  I suppose if one dug into the history of the Directory one could find all kinds of things that Robespierre and his buddies wanted to change.

Navigationally the equation of time would not change but the units of expression would.  I wonder if they'd keep the nautical mile (1852 metres) or round it up to 2,000.  Would a chain then be 100 metres, currently it is 90 feet.  Fathoms could be two metres without much disturbance.

The world-wide disturbance would please no one except, perhaps, the inhabitants of the Elysee Palace.

[Easy Bakes 253]

Im for 1 day months

 

[Compdude787 916]

17 minutes ago, Easy Bakes said:

Im for 1 day months

 

So, 365 months, huh? 

 

On a more serious note, I see why some people want this to happen, and though it may seem like a good idea, it's going to be too hard to convince people to support this calendar change. I think it's even harder than trying to get the US to switch over to the metric system (I personally wouldn't care if this happened); both changes would take a lot of getting used to by everyone on the face of the earth.

[Easy Bakes 253]

1 minute ago, Compdude787 said:

So, 365 months, huh? 

 

On a more serious note, I see why some people want this to happen, and though it may seem like a good idea, it's going to be too hard to convince people to support this calendar change. I think it's even harder than trying to get the US to switch over to the metric system (I personally wouldn't care if this happened); both changes would take a lot of getting used to by everyone on the face of the earth.

yep So many names to come up with

And it would  only be friday once a year

[AkemiAzula 280]

While as somebody who eats maybe one portion of vegetables a month I do not always see eye to eye with our spiky haired friend, one thing I have in common with Lisa is a belief in the superiority of the metric system.

Here in Britain we use miles and feet but our currency is metric...

Ten hours a day, ten a night. Ten days a week with each fifth day a rest day. One hundred days a year.

Of course the problem lies with Luna and Sol... Alas a month is not precisely thirty days nor a year precisely three hundred and fifty, and neither are close to ten or one hundred...

I date my drawings adm or anno daria morgendorffer, thus my recent drawings are adm xxii. But I have yet to escape the shackles of astronomical resistance to metrication...

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

Well, the Romans had a nine day week, and their calendar kept slipping because they had the wrong number of days in the year and knew nothing of fractional days nor orbital elements.  Some of their dates of importance kept slipping.  Things haven't been much better until we got the current calendar (derived from the Latin Kalend).  I think we are stuck with a calendar that reflects the facts, not the dream of some economic maven.

[hym 358]

18 hours ago, A Nonny Moose said:

Should be let the capitalist system drive the calendar?

I think not.  The current economic system is on its last legs.  The BS about accounting troubles is exactly that.  Astronomers should tend to their knitting.

How about, instead, a 13 month calendar of 28 days each.  This results in 28 * 13 = 364 days.  In ordinary years, let the new year holiday fall on intercalary day 1 which would be a non-judiciary day and a general holiday.  For leap years, insert intercalary day 2 at the end of month 6 or month 7, or even have these two days together at the beginning of the year.  I leave it as an exercise in history and humour for readers to dream up new names for the months.

By the way, 13 is a prime number.  Let's see you divide that into quarters!  I don't care if there is fiscal chaos because there is anyway.

Easy. 364 days divides into four 91 day quarters. A quarter would be every 13 weeks.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

^ And your proposal for the one or two intercalary days is?

[hym 358]

Same as theirs. Ignore the missing 365th day, plus the leap day and replace them both with a leap week instead. If you look at the numbers over a century, you find that such a system would operate on a 6-6-5-6-5 year cycle with a full reset every 28 years. You could even declare the leap week to be a national holiday week with financial incentives for companies to give their employees the week off.

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

That would cause the calendar to slide until the adjustments were made.  It means that in all likelihood Christianity would stick to the Gregorian calendar like glue, and same way that the Orthodox church sticks to the Julian.  Whether you believe it or not, there are still a lot of religious people out there who want their high holidays to be not slipping around from year to year.

[NMUSpidey 3,956]

I refuse to allow Christmas to slip into August.

[Compdude787 916]

Well, big business certainly wants the Christmas season to begin in August, that's for sure! They seem to forget that Thanksgiving exists and start advertising Christmas stuff immediately after Halloween. (Okay, I really don't have much of a problem with this, and I know it sounds like I'm hating on capitalism all of a sudden. But regardless, I recognize that anything created by humans is not and never will be perfect, and capitalism is currently the best economic system we have right now.)

[A Nonny Moose 8,262]

This year we had at least one department store in the west that refused all Christmas decorations and references until after Remembrance Day.

I don't think the current calendar is a tinker toy.