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Thursday, July 5, 2012

??!! Can a Calendar Make Too Much Sense?

Posted by Paul Constant on Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 2:32 PM

Earlier today on Twitter, I was lamenting the fact that the 4th of July fell on a Wednesday this week. (Because OH MY GOD waking up this morning was SO HARD.) Twitter user Paul Gude (@sgnp) responded to my whining with this redesign of the Gregorian calendar. from the New York Neo-Futurists. Here are the basic rules:

1. Make every month exactly 28 days.
2. Every day falls on the same day of the week (e.g. The 1st is always Sunday; the 19th is always a Friday. Always.)
3. Add a 13th month (called, say, Trisember)
4. 28 times 13 is only 364 days, SO we will add one extra day at the beginning of the year. This will be New Year’s Day holiday. It has NO DAY OF THE WEEK. It just IS.
5. During Leap Years, we will suspend the calendar for New Years for 48, instead of 24, hours! This will be called Super New Year’s Day
6. No more current holidays! (Chris says “No more arguing about who deserves a holiday named for them, or calculations about Easter, or regional decisions about Rosh Hashanah”) The 26th of every month (always a Friday, btw) will be a national holiday. That is 13 national holidays!

I was just joking with Goldy last week about setting up a metric system of time-keeping, and this sounds pretty close to what I had in mind. Of course, this calendar would never happen. Let's set aside the first obvious roadblock, that the evangelicals would lose their shit over godless heathens doing away with Christmas holiday, and just consider the fact that this plan is a little too monotonous, even with the baked-in chaos of a day-less New Year's Day. As much as we complain about the faults and flaws in the Gregorian calendar (I will never get over paying as much for rent in February as I do for all the other months) I think the fact that holidays move around the week make them a little more special somehow. Sometimes your birthday is on a Saturday and those birthdays are often better than when your birthday falls on a Tuesday. It's not fair, except that it happens to everyone, so it is kind of fair.

Still, like Esperanto, this is an unabashedly utopian idea, and I find it strangely appealing. In a completely rational world, the calendar would definitely look something like this. Would that be a better world or not? Nobody knows for sure, but it's a lot of fun to think about.

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This idea isn't new. Something called the International Fixed Calendar was proposed over 100 years ago. They used it at Kodak for years.

Posted by decidedlyodd on July 5, 2012 at 2:42 PM

Tresember is a stupid name..besides all of our months come from the Roman Pantheon of deities (most anyway) so we should pick one of the unused gods/goddesses.

Posted by Cato the Younger Younger on July 5, 2012 at 2:46 PM

@2: Really? Which deity is July named after?

Posted by Proteus on July 5, 2012 at 2:47 PM

I'm on board, but only because there would be a Friday the 13th every month (but the 19th would always be Thursday, not Friday).

Posted by jzimbert on July 5, 2012 at 2:52 PM

@3, Julius Caesar was deified following his death.

Posted by samktg on July 5, 2012 at 2:54 PM

Can we just have the day AFTER the holiday off instead, like sensical european countries?

Posted by the new danger on July 5, 2012 at 2:54 PM

@ Julius Caesar aka "Divus lulius". Octavian had him deified in 42.

Posted by knobtheunicorn on July 5, 2012 at 2:54 PM

Would it make you feel better to pay less rent in February and have the difference spread out over the other 11 months? If I were your landlord I would let you do that.

Posted by care bear on July 5, 2012 at 2:55 PM

We need to pick our battles here - first, let's either universally embrace or completely ditch DST.

Posted by yelahneb

on July 5, 2012 at 2:58 PM

Ach! No, no, no.

Whatever it's origins and faults I have an emotional/personal-historical/seasonal relationship with the calender as is. One of my small pleasures in life is writing the date in my journal (month, day, year..which is the ONLY appropriate way fyi...).

You could change it but I'd never listen!! No! I'd move into a cabin in the woods, buy a shotgun and leave your abomination-calender-society behind....

I could still have wi-fi though, right?

Posted by ArtBasketSara on July 5, 2012 at 3:04 PM

Why not rig up huge rocket engines to move the earth out to a larger radius orbit around the sun, so that we orbit every thousand days? Then, ten days in a week, ten weeks in a month, ten months in a year ( or "kiloday", as I prefer). That would be doubleplusgood. As a bonus, no more warmig tren in our climate!

Or, with less expenditure of fuel, we could keep the earth in the same orbit about the sun, but spin up the rotation of the earth about its axis, so that the earth day goes about three times faster than it does now, and again we'd have 1000 days in a year, organized into ten calendar months, and if we moved the moon out a little bit, we could have ten lunar months in a year, with the full moon coming on the first day of every calendar month. As a bonus, a further-out moon means less extreme tides!

Rather than offend some god or emperor by removing two months, I suggest we scrap the existing names of the months altogether. The first month of the year could be called Ericone, the second Erictwo, then Ericthree and so on.

Posted by Eric from Boulder on July 5, 2012 at 3:04 PM

@5 Blast you!

Posted by knobtheunicorn on July 5, 2012 at 3:08 PM

If we ever decide to invest in space exploration again, I vote we pick planets to colonize primarily based on how easily we can fit their orbital dynamics into a decimal calendar. Who needs accessible water when you have precisely 1000 days in a year?

Posted by tired and true on July 5, 2012 at 3:11 PM

@11 I'm on board.

Posted by OuterCow on July 5, 2012 at 3:15 PM

We could make these posts much more efficient with the Decabet.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRtyBBiyY…

By the way, with this redesigned Gregorian calendar, I think July 4, the 185th day of the year on non-leap years, would fall on a Tuesday.

Posted by seatackled on July 5, 2012 at 3:16 PM

There is no reason that the calendar should be designed for the convenience of humans. It should serve as a daily reminder that the universe is the way it is and our opinions on it are not relevant.

Posted by Tyler Pierce on July 5, 2012 at 3:20 PM

With this system, why bother with months at all? 3F2012 = the third friday of 2012. Fewer digits, and the letter makes a nice seperation so you don't need dashes or slashes. The only issue is differentiating between Tue and Thur (my college schedules used "R" for Thur) and Sat and Sun (I suggest "U" for Sun).

Posted by Matt the Engineer on July 5, 2012 at 3:22 PM

Dude. Changing the rules of the calendar will make us programmers' Y2K freakouts look like a walk in the park. You'd need a lead time measured in decades, because some of that stuff is burned onto silicon these days.

Posted by djlynch on July 5, 2012 at 3:24 PM

@11: Speeding up the Earth's rotation would also have the benefit of dropping the altitude of geosynchronous orbit. That would make space elevator construction that much easier.

Posted by Ben on July 5, 2012 at 3:32 PM

So, from now on my birthday would always fall on a Monday..?

You go fuck yourself.

Posted by UNPAID COMMENTER on July 5, 2012 at 3:47 PM

Agreed with 18... all the GPS satellites, and airplane flights, and server backups, and anything computerized using date/time critical functions that need to be in-sync with each other would just go to hell if we had a random calendar "suspension" for "Super New Year's Day". Look at what happened when computers worldwide choked on the "leap second" at the beginning of July. Now imagine that happening regularly.

This calendar dude should talk to the people who want to implement a more computer-compliant "internet time code" so computer will be able to keep time correctly.
THAT'd be a fun conversation with no solutions.

Posted by treacle on July 5, 2012 at 3:53 PM

The French already tried this for about 12 years from late 1793 to 1805, and again for 18 days in 1871 (during the Paris Commune).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Repu…

Posted by You_Gotta_Be_Kidding_Me on July 5, 2012 at 3:54 PM

@19: Now you're thinking! Also, faster earth rotation makes it easier to dance, dance, dance the night away.

Posted by Eric from Boulder on July 5, 2012 at 3:59 PM

The entire time system could clearly be improved upon: http://xkcd.com/1061/

Posted by thrillho on July 5, 2012 at 3:59 PM

I don't know how to tell you this.. other than, Duh! Re: rule 2:

If there are seven days in a week, and you begin your month on a Sunday, the Fridays will fall on the 6th, 13th, 20th, and 27th. Never on a 19th.

Posted by Brooklyn Reader on July 5, 2012 at 4:11 PM

This is actually (nerd alert) kind of like the calendar Tolkien invented for the hobbits. The difference (which would please those of us who don't want Monday birthdays forever) is that the hobbits had 12 months of 30 days each with 5 (6 on a leap year) days left over. These days were not counted as days of any month but had their own special number and were split between the winter and summer solstices. Tolkien arranged these days to keep days of the week stable from year to year, but all you'd have to do is stick all 5 or 6 days at the end of a calendar for a big year-end festival where we all get a vacation, which you'd think would work pretty well for our Christmas-mad country.

Posted by Park on July 5, 2012 at 4:11 PM

Stardates or nothing. The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!

Posted by Joe Szilagyi

on July 5, 2012 at 4:42 PM

@22: And did they experience any computer glitches because of it?
No?

Well then,
@18 & @21: Take note of that, alarmists.

Posted by aiff on July 5, 2012 at 5:08 PM

Canada only recently went of the 20-hour metric day. I heard that from the CBC's Rick Mercer talking to Americans.

Posted by Tsam on July 5, 2012 at 6:00 PM

All hail Super New Years!

Posted by Ashley on July 5, 2012 at 6:30 PM

Lousy Smarch weather!

Posted by JonnoN on July 5, 2012 at 7:01 PM

That means 4/20 would always fall on a Saturday. I for one support this endeavor.

Posted by A Concerned Parent on July 5, 2012 at 8:26 PM

Solstices? Equinox? These days matter for agriculture, which is why the calendar is set-up the way it is.

Super New Year sounds pretty great, but not great enough to starve to death for.

Posted by malcolmxy on July 6, 2012 at 7:43 AM