Those of you who get all hot and bothered on one side or other of the daylight saving time debate ought to really get exercised about this one:
Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before.
Their proposed calendar overhaul — largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today — would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week.
Christmas, for
example, would forever come on a Sunday.
"The calendar I'm advocating isn't nearly as accurate" as the Gregorian calendar, said Richard Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years. "But it's far more convenient."
Making calendars clean and simple is tough because each year is 365.2422 days long, which means unaccounted for time piles up. Our current calendars parcel out that time now by adding an extra day every four years. By replacing leap year with a "leap week" at the end of December every five or six years, the calendar overhaulers would give us a much clearer seven-day cycle, but the start of the news seasons would be off by as much as three days.
Pretty stupid idea, I'd say. After 430 years, we kind of have the hang of the Gregorian calendar, don't you think? We want to replace it with something less accurate because it would be "more convenient"? This is what a prestigious university like Johns Hopkins is turning out these days?
I think I've mentioned before that I'm a Burkean when it comes to conservative impulses. That doesn't mean holding on to everything in defiance of progress, but it does mean we try to keep what has worked as a foundation for whatever progress we want to attempt. The Gregorian calendar is the perfect example of we keep instead of tossing out
Comments
Just read that the Gregorian Calendar should keep us within a day of the actual solar year for the next 8,000 years. It does this by having a leap year once every four years, except that century years not evenly divisible by 400 do not have leap years (e.g. 1700, 1800, 1900, and 2100).
We haven't been on the Gregorian calendar for a few decades. Instead, we've added "leap seconds" on dozens of days to adjust for tidal braking.
Jan 1, 1961
Aug 1, 1961
Jan 1, 1962
Nov 1, 1963
Jan 1, 1964
Apr 1, 1964
Sep 1, 1964
Jan 1, 1965
Mar 1, 1965
Jul 1, 1965
Sep 1, 1965
Jan 1, 1966
Feb 1, 1968
Jan 1, 1972
Jul 1, 1972
Jan 1, 1973
Jan 1, 1974
Jan 1, 1975
Jan 1, 1976
Jan 1, 1977
Jan 1, 1978
Jan 1, 1979
Jan 1, 1980
Jul 1, 1981
Jul 1, 1982
Jul 1, 1983
Jul 1, 1985
Jan 1, 1988
Jan 1, 1990
Jan 1, 1991
Jul 1, 1992
Jul 1, 1993
Jul 1, 1994
Jan 1, 1996
Jul 1, 1997
Jan 1, 1999
Jan 1, 2006
Jan 1, 2009
I'd suggest the Aztec calendar, except we'd all be dead pretty soon.
How about a calendar that just drops the numbers and months, and replaces them with Fridays and Saturdays. Every other day would be TGIF. We could add Sundays during football season. I think I deserve a Nobel Prize. Or maybe a beer.