If you’re among those IT professionals scrambling to deal with the upcoming changes in Daylight Savings Time, brace yourself: A Johns Hopkins University professor of physics and astronomy wants to ditch the entire Gregorian calendar and start anew with one whose most prominent – and controversial – feature would be that any given date would always fall on the same day of the week.
Weep not, however, as this proposal from Prof. Richard Conn Henry is almost certainly destined for the same bit bucket that captures every attempt to get rid of the penny or convert the U.S. to the metric system. The idea is still interesting to think about though, and is detailed in the January Smithsonian.
Using computer programs and mathematical formulas, Henry has created a standard calendar that is identical from year to year. It is twelve months long and consists of 364 days. January 1, no matter the year, would always fall on a Sunday. So would Christmas. The same could possibly be said of your birthday. Say so long to surprises.
And what about those leap years, created because it takes 365.2422 days for the Earth to revolve around the sun? The current calendar adds an extra day every four years to account for the uneven number. Henry’s calendar would offer an extra seven days every five or six years. It would be called “Newton Week,” in honor of Sir Isaac Newton, and would be a paid holiday.
Besides his personal interest, Henry believes the new calendar could have a major economic impact on the world, saving an “enormous amount of money.” Imagine all that productivity wasted when every year numerous organizations like sports teams, schools, and businesses have to renegotiate their schedules. And think of the ecology, too, with all those trees cut and killed to create those countless paper calendars. “All of this,” he insists, “would vanish completely if my simple system were adopted.”
Hmmm, imagine the fun.
The setting of any such 364-day calendar would begin with placing Christmas and New Year’s Day on Sunday.
Then the biggest obstacle to adoption:
“Your birthday will always fall on the same day of the week,” Henry says. “An astonishing number of people don’t like that. They like the variety.”
Don’t laugh. It’s not just the appeal of variety, of course, there’s status: Saturday and Sunday birthdays: cool. Weekday: not so cool. And there’s convenience: A mid-week birthday for the kiddies means facing that decision of celebrating the weekend before or the weekend after.
So let’s imagine the worst: Parents would plan to have their children on Saturday or Sunday, must as cesareans and inducements are planned for medical reasons today.
Obstetricians and hospitals will not be pleased … at least not until they realize the premiums that some parents would be willing to pay to make this happen.
Feel free to add your own unintended consequence.
Hello to Blues News readers, Buzzblog regulars and various passersby. If you have time, here’s another recent item that you may find of interest:
Battery fires, rootkits and what they mean to a brand name like Sony.
