Time for a new calendar?

[PlainSimpleJoel]

No need to change the calendar. One of the silliest ideas I've heard so far this year.

 

[Maestro]

Why, God?! WHY?! Why couldn't you have made our year exactly 365 days long? Why is the extra .2422 days necessary?!

So much for Intelligent Design.

I'm sure that God will just tell us our math is off.

 

[Bob Karo]

The only thing I have a hard time adjusting to is writing "2012" instead of "2011" when January rolls around...but it's now the 3rd, and I'm over that problem.

So...no...the calendar is really not that difficult, and I like that holidays and things fall on different days every year.

Good for you. Meanwhile, I'll get comfortable with it sometime in late September.

 

[M'Sharak]

[...]

Now, here's my thought on it: Is it really that much of a problem for anyone? I've never had any problem adjusting each year, and in reality, this would cause more trouble than it's worth. Anyway, what do you all think of this?

link

The calendar we're already using is quite satisfactory and presents no significant problems, as far as I'm concerned. This new calendar proposed by the Johns Hopkins guys is interesting when viewed as an exercise, but I don't see it as being an improvement over the Gregorian calendar.

Oh look, another leap week calendar...

The current calendar is a complete mess and could use a lot tweaking, <snip>

It's not a mess and is the end product of several rounds of tweaking already.

 

[Lindley]

we must switch to universal time and drop the time zones. While the time zones also need some work, dropping them altogether is like Ron Paul's view of fixing the economy.

We already have universal time, they call it Zulu. But it's only used in a few industries such as aviation for now.

 

[ThankQ]

There is every logical reason for a new calendar.

But it will never happen because people give a shit about logical reasons.

They're used to it. To change would be odd. In fact, most of what is crap about the world is crap because it was crap some old crap came up with and the rest of us are too crap to change the crap we're used to.

 

[Holdfast]

Thirty days has September, April, June, and November. It's not that hard to remember.

All the rest have thirty-one
Except the second month alone
To which we twenty-eight assign
'Til leap year gives it twenty-nine.

Alternate final couplet:

. . .Which has but twenty-eight days clear
And twenty-nine in each leap year.

I prefer the first version. It rolls more smoothly off the tongue, even with the inverted grammar.

Of course, there are numerous variants, including plenty of silly ones.

It's far simpler/less memory-intensive just to use your knuckles: count off the months using your knuckles and the dips in between, starting with your left hand. If the month is a knuckle, it's 31 days. If it's a dip it's 30 (with the obvious exception of Feb, which is easy to remember).

Re: changing the calendar - I can't see the point; it works fine. Besides, if things were changed, that might risk Easter becoming a fixed date, and that would be no fun at all. Seriously, if you've never thought about the calculation before, take a look: it's wonderfully complicated and amusing.

 

[PKTrekGirl]

The poem is easy for me to remember, so I have no trouble with the calendar.

 

[RJDiogenes]

I'm working on my own version of the calendar that has eight-day weeks and four-day weekends. I'll let you know when it's ready (I'm shooting for RJDiogember 1st, but that's subject to change).

 

[Cicero]

The Hebrew calendar, which is based on the cycles of the moon, solves the discrepancy by adding a whole extra month every 4 years. An extra day, an extra week, an extra month -- what's the difference?

The Gregorian calendar makes every year divisible by 4 a leap year, except that end-of-century years -- those ending in 00 -- are leap years only if divisible by 400. So the years 1700, 1800 and 1900 weren't leap years, but 2000 was.

No calendar is perfect, but the current one used by most of the world is pretty well in sync with the seasons. IIRC, the calender will be 1 day out of sync by the year 6000-something. We'll worry about that then, if we're still around.

I would make a slight change to the calendar: eliminate leap days by adding an hour to the first day of every other month. This would have two benefits. First, the calendar would be slightly more accurate. Second, most persons would gain an extra hour of sleep every month, which could save lives.

As it stands, we really gain nothing from a leap day than a longer year. Why not extra sleep once every two months?

The drawbacks I see are the loss of February 29th (which happens three of every four years as it is) and the added work of resetting clocks for the first decade or so of the new system, as updated clock programming phases in through replacement purchases (some older clocks worth keeping would never adjust to the change). On the whole, though, I think the benefits would outweigh the ever-diminishing inconveniences - particularly if Daylight Saving Time were eliminated as well.

 

[Trekker4747]

I see no need for a new calendar. None whatsoever.

Nor do I see the need for any device through which to remember how many days are in each month beyond "every other month has 31 days/less-than 30 days accept July and August which both have the same number of days, 31.

It's convoluted, yes, and not as neat and when pushed, yeah, I may fall to the knuckle thing, but overall I just know how many days each month has.

Leap years, 31 days, 30 days, 28 days, whatever. Yeah it can all be a bit daunting but when we've got months based on moon cycles, and a year based on trips around the sun, and neither of those things are aligned to one another and the trip around the sun isn't an exact number of days there's going to be some oddities.

The only "alternative" would be to align all of the months with moon cycles and just accept that the year (a trip around the sun) is going to change in the middle of a month and that over the course of time the alignment of months to seasons is going to get screwy. (In very little time the Northern Hemisphere will experience winter in July.)

And, really, is that hard or bad to keep track of the days, the starts of seasons, leap years and the like in a very digital world where a calendar is literally at your fingertips?

I wonder more when a new epoch will start and what will that be based on? That's to say, when will we have another "year 1?" What will cause that to occur?

One of the things I liked about the ending of the movie "2012" was that it suggested that after the disastrous events of the Winter Solstice Coming of Natural Disasters a new "epoch" of sorts started and the remains of humanity starting counting time up from 1 again.

So when will we do this? As a kid, I thought it would happen after 1999, not really knowing yet we'd just keep counting. Now, I wonder if it'll happen in 9999, or will it just go on to 10,000? Or will it start counting down again and then back? What will the new "CE/AD" be?

These are important questions and we've only millennia to answer them!

I would make a slight change to the calendar: eliminate leap days by adding an hour to the first day of every other month. This would have two benefits. First, the calendar would be slightly more accurate. Second, most persons would gain an extra hour of sleep every month, which could save lives.

A few years ago Daylight Saving Time was extended by four weeks. Doing so caused an enormous hassle as computers and other systems around the country had to be upgraded to recognize the change in order to stay in sync. And even today I still have devices that don't deal well with the DST switch.

Making a change of what you suggest would just be an enormous problem with computer systems and lifestyles around the world. People now have a hard enough time with the DST switch, how are they going to remember if it's a "Leap Hour" month? Is everyone going to need to buy new clocks that will do this switch on their own?

That's what's nice about a Leap Year. Every four years, a major election year in America, you get an extra day. About the biggest problem that causes is people born on that day don't "really" have a birthday for most of their life.

About the "biggest" problem with the Leap Year is that every 100 years or so is not a leap year. Years that are equally divisible by 100, but not equally divisible by 400, are not Leap Years. (2000 was a Leap Year because it's divisible by 400. 2100 will not be a leap year because it's divisible by 100, but not 400.)

But that little kink won't matter to many of us here so, meh.

 

[Lindley]

I would make a slight change to the calendar: eliminate leap days by adding an hour to the first day of every other month. This would have two benefits. First, the calendar would be slightly more accurate. Second, most persons would gain an extra hour of sleep every month, which could save lives.

As it stands, we really gain nothing from a leap day than a longer year. Why not extra sleep once every two months?

The drawbacks I see are the loss of February 29th (which happens three of every four years as it is) and the added work of resetting clocks for the first decade or so of the new system, as updated clock programming phases in through replacement purchases (some older clocks worth keeping would never adjust to the change). On the whole, though, I think the benefits would outweigh the ever-diminishing inconveniences - particularly if Daylight Saving Time were eliminated as well.

There's another drawback. Adding random hours will eventually make the sun set at noon. Days would no longer be days. Maybe they won't care in Alaska, but the rest of us would be confused.

 

[scotpens]

. . . About the "biggest" problem with the Leap Year is that every 100 years or so is not a leap year. Years that are equally divisible by 100, but not equally divisible by 400, are not Leap Years. (2000 was a Leap Year because it's divisible by 400. 2100 will be a leap year because it's divisible by 100, but not 400.)

I assume you mean 2100 will not be a leap year. Neither were 1700, 1800 or 1900.

Wiki:

The Gregorian calendar modified the Julian calendar's regular cycle of leap years, years exactly divisible by four, including all centurial years, as follows:

Every year that is exactly divisible by four is a leap year, except for years that are exactly divisible by 100; the centurial years that are exactly divisible by 400 are still leap years. For example, the year 1900 is not a leap year; the year 2000 is a leap year.
​

Interestingly, although the changes to the Julian calender under Pope Gregory XIII took effect in 1582, it was well over three centuries before the entire Western world recognized the new calendar. At first, many Protestant countries didn’t want to use it because of the papal connection. That’s dumb. It’s like refusing to drive a Volkswagen because the car was Hitler’s idea.

 

[Trekker4747]

. . . About the "biggest" problem with the Leap Year is that every 100 years or so is not a leap year. Years that are equally divisible by 100, but not equally divisible by 400, are not Leap Years. (2000 was a Leap Year because it's divisible by 400. 2100 will be a leap year because it's divisible by 100, but not 400.)

I assume you mean 2100 will not be a leap year. Neither were 1700, 1800 or 1900.

Yeah, typo.