
Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days - tokenadult
http://edition.cnn.com/2011/12/28/us/calendar-overhaul/
======
tokenadult
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.

~~~
forensic
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

~~~
felideon
The corporate drone pessimist in me thinks that the extra week would just be
another work week, with the best case being "Ah yes, you get an extra half-day
worth of PTO this year."

~~~
MichaelApproved
Humans are slaves to traditions. If it's introduced as a world wide party week
from the start then people will feel like "it's always been done that way" and
be less likely to fight it.

------
jimrandomh
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.

~~~
jaylevitt
Obviously, the calendar ambiguity can be resolved by some sort of calendar
NAT.

~~~
SquareWheel
You know, let's just use Unix timestamps when marking future dates. Removes
all ambiguity from calendar types, time zones, etc.

~~~
martythemaniak
I like your idea, let's get together and discuss it over drinks. Hows your
1325357149?

~~~
SquareWheel
I retract my previous suggestion.

------
Navarr
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.

~~~
ars
No it doesn't. Making a day not be part of any week breaks the strict 7 day
cycle, and will be rejected be the vast majority of the world.

~~~
Navarr
But if its only for seasonal holidays (lets say the two equinoxes, the
solstices, and leap day) they'd make for worldwide accepted celebration points
that wouldn't disrupt the "working week"

It'd be a little strange, but its really not any worse than adding a day in
February every four years.

~~~
ars
No, it would not be accepted. The 7 day cycle is strict - you can not add or
remove days from it. It might be fine for work, but it will not be fine for
religious observance.

If you tried then those who observe religious days will keep their cycle, and
will not go to work on the real weekend (even those who otherwise wouldn't
care would make a point about it), which will be out of sync with the new
calendar weekend. It won't take many people doing that for the calendar to
fail to be accepted.

~~~
Navarr
Dammit. This is why we can't have nice things.

------
uiri
All I can think of is xkcd 927 ( <http://xkcd.com/927/> )

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
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.

------
shimon_e
So in a matter of a few thousand years we have gone from Emperors (Caesar)
dictating calendars to scientists proposing new ones. :)

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.

~~~
gus_massa
The former calendars were proposed by scientists, but named after the ruler
that forced them:

 __Julian:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julian_calendar>

"The Julian calendar began in 45 BC (709 AUC) as a reform of the Roman
calendar by Julius Caesar. It was chosen after consultation with the
astronomer Sosigenes of Alexandria and was probably designed to approximate
the tropical year (known at least since Hipparchus)."

 __Gregorian:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar>

"The Gregorian calendar reform contained two parts, a reform of the Julian
calendar as used up to Pope Gregory's time, [...]. The reform was a
modification of a proposal made by the Calabrian doctor Aloysius Lilius (or
Lilio)."

~~~
shimon_e
Interesting. :)

Any rulers out there want a calendar named after them?

------
scythe
Why preserve the seven-day week? The appropriate factorization of 365 is 73*5.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar>

Plus, the Discordian calendar has the advantage of already being implemented
in Linux!

~~~
notatoad
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.

~~~
LaGrange
Then make the week 73 days long. You can rest on 7th day, and corporations
would really like it.

------
shirro
Brought to you from a country that has not adopted SI units.

~~~
maratd
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.

------
Swizec
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"?

~~~
Too
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>

~~~
obtu
IRC time is pretty convenient: Greet with good morning when joining, good
night when leaving.

------
tylerneylon
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.

<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
If everything is a 0-based index (e.g. first day being 0), why aren't the
years?

~~~
tylerneylon
The 7date doesn't say much about how we count years. It's all about how you
count days and other sub-year units. You could combine it with any method of
counting years that you like. I defaulted to using the year system I'm used to
because it's convenient.

------
deerpig
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.

~~~
usaar333
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.

~~~
meric
I can imagine the faces of the staff (who are too scared to speak up) when the
CEO from overseas calls to organise a meeting at 3.30am in the morning the
next day.

------
yaix
The scientific part is simple, its just a little maths.

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.

~~~
biturd
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.

~~~
yaix
I remember when I lived in Mexico some 12 years ago and the government
introduced DST there. Some schools would actually start an hour later to sync
their starting time with before-DST-time, people where complaing about being
totally confused, etc. Don't know if there is still DST now or if they
abandoned it because of the many (often totally irrational) protests. Its not
easy to change people's habits.

------
kellenfujimoto
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.

~~~
vacri
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'?

------
zhyder
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.

~~~
tabbyjabby
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.

~~~
ams6110
For any purposes which require clear unambiguous time values, we already have
UTC. This is just not a problem.

------
k-mcgrady
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?

~~~
Xixi
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.

------
js2
Lovely, the Esperanto of calendars. It's bad enough my birthday falls on
Christmas Eve, now it's forever to be on the Sabbath too? No thanks.

------
Navarr
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?

------
wtvanhest
As long as my birthday is on a Saturday it works for me.

(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
In Malaysia, if holiday falls on Sunday, it'll be "carried forward" to Monday
(you still celebrate on Sunday, but Monday will be extra holiday).

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
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.)

------
Sorpigal
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.

~~~
colanderman
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.

~~~
Sorpigal
Read it again, they are.

Quote from the proposal: "For example, the adoption of Universal Time would
give new flexibility to economic management in the vast East-West expanse of
Russia: everyone would know exactly what time it is everywhere, at every
moment. Opening and closing times of businesses could be specified for every
class of business and activity. If thought desirable, banks and financial
institutions throughout the country could be required to open and to close
each day at the same hour by the world time. This would mean that bank
employees in the far East of Russia would start work with the sun well up in
the sky, while bank employees in the far west of Russia would be at their
desks before the sun has risen. "

The article omits this in its summary.

~~~
fr0sty
A world in which the state mandates that your work day begins before the sun
rises...

Where do I sign up??

 _sarcasm off_

------
vacri
_They would drop the quadrennial 366-day leap years entirely in favor of an
extra week at the end of December every five or six years._

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.

------
mbreese
I'd like to know how much extra complexity these leap weeks add to the
calculations that would supposedly be easier... I would imagine that it is
non-trivial.

Am I the only one that likes the fact that dates occur on different days? This
way everyone's birthday will occur over a weekend every few years.

------
vorg
Some people, groups, or governments could change over on a case-by-case basis
to a week-based system, without a sudden change to the worldwide date system.
Just label the weeks with numbers, e.g. 1-Wednesday, 27-Monday, or 52-Sunday
for Christmas this year.

It seems Chinese people generally don't remember the time of week so much as
the Month and date. Whenever someone in China tells me "this is happening on
the 28 November", in my mind I have to work out what day of week it is before
I can internalize it in my memory. Chinese seem to just remember the month and
date. Schools often say "Monday's and Tuesday's timetable will be shifted to
the previous Saturday and Sunday, respectively".

And of course their idea is Western-centric. Chinese and Muslims both have
their own calendars for festivals.

~~~
knowknowledge
I don't know how popular this is at other companies, but Intel (or at least my
group) does use a week-based system for all dates. Today (December 28) would
be "WW53.3". WW53 is the work week and .3 means Wednesday. Weeks start on
Monday as ".1", whereas Sunday is ".0" and Saturday is ".6".

While this system should in theory make it easy to calculate the days need to
complete a task, I still find myself converting to Month-Day every time. On
the other hand, I don't have a clue what day of the week March 2nd is going to
be, but if it's called WW9.5, then I immediately know that it's on a Friday 9
weeks from now.

------
lambda
Have they come up with any estimate of the global cost of the switch, and
compared that to the benefit of the new calendar? It seems to change a bunch
of stuff, and add a complicated new "leap week", for no particularly good
reason. Yeah, it might reduce the cost of printing calendars slightly, though
a lot of people use new calendars yearly so they can write on them, and a lot
more just use their computer.

The cost of the transition would not be insignificant. In the Western world,
we've had two major calendar changes in the past 2200 years or so. The most
recent one, the transition from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar,
lasted for about 400 years, as different countries transitioned at different
times, with, I'm sure, plenty of friction caused by the lack of
synchronization. Is it really necessary to go through all of that again?

Also, while this proposal would make holidays based on the solar calendar fall
on the same day every year, it would do nothing for the holidays based on the
lunar calendar. They would still drift around.

Reading their proposal on cato.org linked to from the article, it seems that a
large part of their motivation is the synchronization of calendars for various
financial instruments. But that doesn't require changing everyone's calendar;
you can fix just the financial instruments, which already don't follow the
ordinary calendar, without wreaking havoc on every other use of the calendar.

And I'm not sure how this extra week in December ever few years is supposed to
help solve the problems with financial instruments. Under the current system,
you need to deal with the fact that months may differ in length by up to 3
days, and that needs to be dealt with every month; in the new system, months
would regularly vary by 1 day, but suddenly vary by another 7 days once every
5 years or so.

I think one of the reasons we've gotten ourselves into this mess is that we
keep on trying to fit together different cycles of arbitrary length such that
they match up exactly, which is impossible, so we add hacks on top of hacks to
try to fix the problem. We try to make the cycle of days match the cycles of
years, we try to make the cycle of months match the cycle of days (and years),
and this proposal tries to shoehorn the cycle of weeks into that too, with a
hack that adds an extra week every 5 or 6 years seemingly at random (while
there is a regular rule for it, it's not as easily remembered as the Gregorian
"leap year every 4 years, except for years divisible by 100, but an exception
to that exception for years divisible by 400").

Instead of trying to do hacks to get all of these cycles to line up, why not
move in the other direction and take the approach of having regular cycles at
different frequencies that do not line up? You can have a financial calendar
of 30 solar days (or whatever period is most convenient for you), a lunar
calendar of one lunar month, the 7 solar day week, the tropical year that
aligns with the seasons, the sidereal year that aligns with the orbit of the
earth around the sun (which differs from the tropical year due to precession
of the earth's axis). We have computers that can keep track of how all of
these things line up when we care these days; instead of trying to simplify
everything to fit together discretely with hacks added to fix it up, just let
the computers deal with the precise details and allow each cycle to be simple
and independent.

Now, moving to a single worldwide time standard (just use UTC for everyone for
everyday use) seems to make a little more sense. While I understand the desire
to make the hours line up with the solar day in a reasonably uniform way
around the world, timezones (and daylight savings time) are an ugly hack that
add a lot of cost and give you only a very rough approximation of what you are
trying to achieve.

~~~
GreenNight
Timezones are not an ugly hack.

When you travel to a different timezones you just have to adjust your clock
and, without asking, you know that shops open at 8~10am until 4~8pm with or
without a midday stop for lunch (12~3). You have dinner at 18~22, and
breakfast at 8~10. All the divergences depend on the country you are in but
you can get good aproximations that work for 90% of them (breakfast 9, open
shops 10, lunch 13, close 17, dinner 20).

But, if you go for an universal timezone, you've got to learn the different
times for the different activities again and again and again. You change a one
step correction (change time on your watch) to a constant struggle.

With universal timezone: You wake up when travelling, it's 17:30 and you don't
remember the country unless you do the mental effort to wake up, it's time to
get up or not? You start to calculate and... too late to decide, you are
already woken and could not get back to sleep even if you wanted.

With different timezones: You wake up when travelling, it's 2:30 and you don't
remember the country unless you do the mental effort to wake up, it's time to
get up or not? No, time to sleep some more.

~~~
jarin
I ran into a big problem with timezones when I was in the Navy.

I was in charge of a big supply database server on an aircraft carrier, and
every time we changed timezones I had to update the timezone on the server.
Heading from East to West was no problem, but when we went from West to East I
had to shut the server down for an hour when changing timezones, to prevent
timestamps from overlapping.

Admittedly, this was partially due to bad programming, but it's just a small
real-world example of problems caused by the existence of timezones.

~~~
azernik
Best practice - whatever time zone the people are using, keep the internal
time stamps on a single time zone (usually UTC). Then just convert the times
from and to the local zone for input and display, respectively.

~~~
masklinn
> keep the internal time stamps on a single time zone (usually UTC)

Or UNIX time. While not monotonically increasing (it has issues with UTC leap
seconds), it's pretty good.

------
ScottBurson
Yuck. The solstices and equinoxes would be on different dates from year to
year.

And as far as making time calculations simpler for financiers -- that extra
week "every five or six years" will be just as hard to deal with as leap years
are now.

------
clvv
People can accomplish the same thing after learning a mental algorithm to
calculate the day of the week. Doomsday rule, invented by Mathematician John
Conway, is one of the easier ones to remember.

------
teja1990
I dont like this. All the people who have b'days on 29,30 and 31 are screwed.
And its really hard to get whole of the world onto it. No country can force
another country to follow something.

------
codex
I am still typing on a QWERTY keyboard, and that standard only a hundred years
old. The modern calendar is two thousand years old. We will see the
singularity before we see a new calendar.

~~~
mooism2
The modern calendar is nearly 430 years old, but I agree with your broader
point.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregorian_calendar>

------
6ren
Seems unlikely, yet, Europe switched to the euro.

If we get better at software integration, different calendars might not be
such a problem. We already convert between currencies, times and date formats.

Is this really that much different to a new date-format, just with deeper
syntactic changes? (rhetorical)

~~~
salvadors
Except Europe didn't simply switch to the Euro. _Some_ members of the EU (plus
a few others who aren't in the EU) switched to it, over a twelve year period,
with some others pegged to it (and maybe switching some day), some other
countries adopting it 'unofficially' (i.e. it's their official currency, but
they're not officially members of the Eurozone), and some countries who
theoretically _must_ join, voting against it in a local referendum, and thus
deliberately failing to meet the entry conditions on an ongoing basis so as
they _can't_ join.

(And this is, of course, ignoring all the logistical hassles involved in
switching, never mind the much bigger questions, now very pertinent, as to
whether trying to do all this may have been a cause of the downfall of Western
Society, etc.)

So I suspect this example gives more weight to the 'unlikely' side, than the
'yet...' side.

------
vorg
> "You have a whole area in the mathematics of finance that could be cleared
> up, and lots of confusion, lots of error, done away with by going to this
> calendar," he said. People don't realize the time they're wasting simply
> because of the variable calendar, Hanke said.

Most economic and political activity in Western countries is to give people
something to do so they'll conform, be it accounting and tax rules, legal
requirements, or ICT interfaces. The actual labor required to mine resources,
manufacture things, and grow and distribute food is some small percentage of
overall economic activity. Taking away this complexity would put people out of
work, more likely to question governments or occupy Wall Street.

------
ams6110
Classic academic waste-of-time project to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
I hope they didn't have any federal grant funding for this (have skimmed half
a dozen web postings about this and none really address this question).

------
fullsailor
What would happen with birthdays that occur on days that were cut out of the
new calendar? Jan 31, May 31, Jul 31, Aug 31, and Oct 31.

Also, that extra week business seems more confusing than leap years. "Every 5
or 6 years" seems indefinite.

------
hogu
what if your birthday is on that leap week that occurs every 5-6 yrs?

~~~
eigenvector
You would probably do exactly what people who are born on February 29 do.

~~~
throw_away
I wonder what these leap year babies (I am one of them) would do were we to
adopt this new calendar, as presumably that date would no longer exist.

------
dustingetz
And yet, the US still isnt on metric.

------
xoxa
I saw something along these lines recently: a calendar-clock.
<http://clackcolander.tumblr.com/>

------
kschua
This proposal doesn't have my vote.

The present system is good enough in that every one has an equal chance for
special events in their lives to fall on a weekend.

------
JoeAltmaier
Imagine living on a space ark. Any calendar would work, since there would be
no incentive to line up with the motion of any particular planetary body.

Now, imagine we stopped caring about that anyway. Ok, leave days, but the
rest? Superfluous. How about decimal time? 100,000 seconds in a day, count
days and be done with it. When is Xmas? In 300 days.

------
jstclair
Could someeone who is advocating for no time zones please explain how a normal
work "day" that crossed actual days work in practice? So you want to wake up
at 8 Utc and some else wakes up at 20 Utc. Ok, then they start work on Friday
at 21 Utc and work until Sat 4:30. I'd imagine that you'd have to redefine
weekend to mean Sun-Mon?

------
lancefisher
Imagine the cost of changing all the software in the world to use a new
calendar system. This will never happen.

------
texjer
I never remember if we have 30 days or 31 in most months... nope, actually I
got everything right except for May and March.

<http://www.calendarzone.org/calendar/2012-calendar-10.jpg>

~~~
nostrademons
Here's a trick for that (courtesy of Shari Lewis): hold your knuckles up in
front of you, index fingers together, no thumbs. Each peak represents a month
with 31 days. Each valley represents a month with 30 (or 28, for February)
days.

------
tersiag
My bday would always fall on a Monday on this calendar system and that is not
fun

------
waterlesscloud
Happy Thermidor!

~~~
eternalban
My thoughts, exactly. Those magical ("happy") days of The Terror were indeed
too short. And UTC -- practically a symbol of British Naval prowess and Empire
-- is really a nice touch, specially for the "brown/yellow" ones who get to
toil happily at "midnight".

------
ww520
This is interesting but the leap weeks are kind of fussy, 5 or 6 years.

~~~
ndefinite
Yeah the week long adjustment every so often seems excessive

------
artursapek
I wonder if calendar companies would lobby against this. I imagine people
would still buy a new calendar every year or so, since they get worn/written
on.

------
mrpollo
Will this be somehow comparable to the Y2K bug if we switch? a bunch of
software broken?

------
bumbledraven
So the dates of the first "extra week" would be Dec 32-38, 2015?

------
jaequery
sounds like a typical startup idea

~~~
jaequery
a typical _crazY_ startup idea

------
dawilster
Good luck convincing the rest of the world to convert to a scientifically
optimized calender.

~~~
shirro
All those unscientific countries still haven't adopted rods and hogsheads. I
guess it will just be the US, Burma and Liberia again.

------
tuananh
No don't do this. My birthday is on 31st 0_o

------
tapsboy
Whose in re-writing lot of software?

I am not :)

------
wavephorm
A more simple solution is to have 13 months of exactly 28 days, plus one day
for new years day. That's even better because every month is exactly the same
number of days which means semi-monthly and bi-weekly billing systems are the
same thing. And because there's the same number of days anything billed per
month can be easily prorated per day, and any billing cycle will match up with
every other billing cycle... so basically everything imaginable becomes
considerably easier.

The only real problem is coming up with a name for a new 13th month and where
to insert it.

~~~
divtxt
Pretty nice! Too bad a non-trivial segment of the population won't be happy
with 13. You might as well call the new month Deviluary. :D

~~~
gnosis
Just skip 13 and make it the 14th month.

~~~
silon4
Or the zeroth month.

