Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
edition.cnn.com
edition.cnn.com
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.
I think it's a nice idea especially if we could have a big weeklong worldwide party once every 5 or 6 years
They say their calendar would make it easy to plan annual activities, from holidays to academic schedules to financial calculations.
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
Which actually solves the exact same problem in a much cleaner fashion than this proposal.
We're already used to stat holidays; "Days of Yule" are much less intrusive than leap weeks
What I can't figure out is what algorithm they use to calculate when to add an extra week. It seems slightly irregular, but I asssume there must be a simple formula I could use in a date library to account for it.
It'd be a little strange, but its really not any worse than adding a day in February every four years.
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.
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.
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.
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)."
Any rulers out there want a calendar named after them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar
Plus, the Discordian calendar has the advantage of already being implemented in Linux!
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.
Which means this proposal has the same probability of adoption as me winning the lottery. And I don't buy lottery tickets.
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"?
The affects on crime and traffic accidents would be huge. And it would never be possible to get half of the planet to agree that they will forever work while it's dark and sleep while it is light.
There are many people who don't care what time it is in another country (domestic jobs and the unemployed). There is no real incentive to have everyone relearn what time they get up and go to sleep.
This understandably causes problems in the far western provinces such as Xinjiang, so everyone just observes an unofficial GMT+6 time instead. This wreaks utter havoc on conversationd about time: bus schedules, shop opening hours, etc. Aside from the ambiguity, since it's not an official time zone, people overseas just assume they can call you to discuss business at 9am, even though you've barely woken up.
Time zones are complex because, well, the world is a big and complicated place. But theanswer is certainky not to just get rid of them!
Add metadata to all phone records that makes it easy to specify and query the hours in which one would like to be called.
What particularly annoys me about timezones is that times are already useless. When does the day start? (And I mean the normal cultural day, not your personal day.) Be it 7am, 8am, 9am, or whatever your answer may be, it sure isn't anything sensible like 0 or 1. If those are anything, that's when the day ends. If the sun rises at 03:00 in one place, 10:00 in another, and 22:00 in another (presumably we'd stop using "am" and "pm" as the a & p would become useless), who really cares? It's not like we're taking away the 00:00 sunrise that you can set your watch by from anybody.
- Not have football on Sundays
- Tell students that they have to go to school Thursday
through Monday this year (But church is still on Sundays!).
- a bunch of other weekday/weekend-aligned activities.Except you want work days off to be near a weekend. I'd rather have a 3 day weekend than Wednesday alone off...
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
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.
That's not a very significant change ...
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.
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.
The difference between adapting to Y2K and adapting to the HH calendar is minor. If the gov survived Y2K they would survive the HH-adoption.
I'm going to assume when this new calendar is adopted, the chinese will then be able to buy three calendars in one.
And it only "kinda" worked, because in the Chinese countryside, where most people live, 80 years later they still mainly use 农历, not the Western calender, despite all government stuff being done in Western calender dates. (I lived in China for some 6 years, just left the country yesterday, walking across the border to Vietnam).
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.
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?
It makes sense to me, but I can see how lots of people would have a very hard time understanding and accepting this.
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?
(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.
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 :)
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.)
Why would there be a conflict of interest? The point is that employees always get the same number of "days off" per year is it not? The conflict of interest would arise in countries where holidays are not carried forward (or stashed in leave entitlements), employers interest would be to have all of them fall on week-ends, whereas employee interest would be to have all of them fall on week-days.
Or did I miss something?
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.
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.
Where do I sign up??
sarcasm off
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.
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.
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.
I believe most Ayis get 1 day off per month. Factory workers 1 day off per 10 days. Office workers 1 day off per week.
Actually, with the bigger factories their workers are getting 1 day off per week (e.g. established textile factories, foxconn, etc.).
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.
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.
With that system, how do you refer to a particular date? YYYY-MM-DD doesn't make much sense anymore, since a month can span multiple years, and a day can span multiple months and/or years.
First was the "Calendar Round", they had two non-synchronous "yearly" calendar of 365 days (Haab') and 260 days (Tzolk'in), giving a date in both calendars provided an exact identification in a repeating cycle (era) of 18980 days (~52 solar years).
Second was the "long count", a monotonically increasing calendar from a root date (think CE/BCE, except including days). A "long count" date is composed of a number of counters mostly in base 20: K'in (day), Winal (20 K'in), Tun (18 Winal), K'atun (20 Tun), B'ak'atun (20 K'atun) (dates have been found with even higher orders, but they're rare, those are the most common). A B'ak'atun unit represents ~394 solar years. This provides an unambiguous and very long term calendar. It's essentially what the UNIX system does, except starting from days (interestingly, a standard 5-units long count fits in just 22 bits, 31 bits [to account for signing] allows for 5.8 million years before wrap-around)
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.
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.
Or UNIX time. While not monotonically increasing (it has issues with UTC leap seconds), it's pretty good.
Given that servers frequently changing timezones can be sorted out by a modicum of thought by programmers and is actually pretty rare in the grand scheme of things, I don't think it's too heavy a price to pay.
You basically have to reinvent timezones every time you make any kind of calculation involving people in another timezone.
Similarly, you are on holiday and someone tells you a museum is open till 04:30. Can you go to dinner first?
I guess that a main question is what kind of query is more frequent: "What time is it now in X", or "At what time is X where I am now?". I thought the former was way more frequent, but now, I do not know anymore.
Maybe the best thing to do is to drop absolute references altogether. IMO, "Shall we meet in 3 hours" is easier for handling across timezone discussions, and will work equally well for "in a different timezone than the one I am used to".
Of course, your SMS/ping/twitter/email client would have to automatically count down such timers for you.
For someone who travels a lot, a single time zone may well be more inconvenient, hard to say.
Times relative to now would work well but could be unwieldy. How do you do it if you're e-mailing or texting? If you want to meet next Monday afternoon, do you say "in 2 days and 5 hours"?
If there are ANY benefits at all from switching, then that benefit can be enjoyed every year forever, dwarfing the one-time cost of switching no matter how big that cost is.
Give me $1000 and I'll give you (and your heirs, their heirs, etc) $0.01/year forever. Give me $10k and I'll sweeten the deal to $0.15/year. Give me $100k and go to $2/year.
What? You don't believe that any forever benefit justifies any one time cost?
Sure, but back then there wasn't even a globally recognised calendar. Nor did they have a near-instantaneous global communications network, or a global governing body such as the UN. These days, if the UN decided to take such a step, they could give 10 years advance notice, and on the decided day everyone would just flick the switch. We've already shown that w are capable of managing this sort of change when we went through the y2k "bug" without any major dramas, despite this requiring a large percentage of the world's information systems needing to be updated / tested. So I personally wouldn't anticipate any significant friction after the UN signed-off.
The UN doesn't have that authority, either politically or morally. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Durban_Review_Conference
The Y2K bug is a very different case. That's a case in which the calendar system was perfectly able to deal with reality, but some people had buggy code implementing it. All it took was those people fixing their bugs, mostly completely independently, not some big coordinated effort.
As for y2k, you know what, I could have stuck a load of different examples in there. Changes to http for example. Or how about the switch from national currencies to the Euro in Europe. Each one is different, but they all demonstrate that important changes can be made to large interconnected systems, and that the change can be activated at the flick of a switch if the need for synchronisation exists. Also, I assume you're too young to know much about y2k if you can talk so blithely about people working independently in an uncoordinated manner. Y2k was huge - if you change one system to requiring 4 digit years, but just one of the systems it communicates with requires two digit years, your system stops working. Both need to switch to 4 year dates on that interface simultaneously. When the systems you're talking about are command and control circuits, financial transfer systems etc, this was a major issue.
You might be able to get Europeans to transition, you might even get the whole rest of the world to transition, but without the United States, it's not truly a universal system.
This is the part that makes the least sense to me - I could buy the rest until then, but after that it starts to read like some sort of elaborate joke.
It seems like you thought "redesigning the calendar of every single organization in the world" meant re-printing the shifted dates when it actually means doing all of the work that has to go into scheduling events.
You also missed: "From simple mortgages to complex financial derivatives, he said, calculations could be made much simpler if there were only one calendar to use, year after year."
And: "Hanke said drug prescriptions could be more accurate with a fixed calendar, sports teams could have a fixed playing schedule year after year, and schools and universities wouldn't have to waste time devising each new academic year."
The rest of the arguments are really just throwaways. Not waste time devising new academic calendars? You're going to be devising new schedules each year anyhow, as the courses offered change, professors change, new students change and enroll in different classes, sports league pairings change, and so on. And the existing system doesn't require re-doing the basic calendar every year; you can devise 14 calendars up front (one for each day of the week, times two to account for leap years), and then do the scheduling within one of those 14 basic calendars. The cost of that is going to be pretty minimal, going from 14 calendars to 2 calendars isn't that big of a win.
Drug prescriptions? People are imperfect; they don't necessarily take drugs precisely and regularly, such that you can avoid all variance in the rate of drugs being prescribed. With many drugs, if you miss one dose, you just take your regular dose the next day, and are now off by a day from the prescription cycle. Or sometimes, people might take a little more of a drug than prescribed, or lose it and need a refill sooner. And drug prescriptions should be reviewed by doctors on a yearly basis anyhow. If prescription systems have to deal with that, there is basically no benefit to be gained from having months and days line up precisely year after 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.
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)
And isn't that working out really well.
(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.
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.
Also, that extra week business seems more confusing than leap years. "Every 5 or 6 years" seems indefinite.
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.
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.
I am not :)
The only real problem is coming up with a name for a new 13th month and where to insert it.
We could even send a Krampus to go rattle their doors and windows on the appropriate day.
12 is a handy number of months to have in the year. 12 is divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. Not by 5, but you can't have everything (unless we had 60 months of 6 or 7 days each... let's not go there).
13 is prime.
I think not bothering with months at all would be better than having a 13 month year.
I think not bothering with months at all would be
better than having a 13 month year.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon and see the synodic period (quoted to a tenth of a second even though full moon to full moon can vary by about ¼ day either way).)
The strange month is called 'Gidouille' and goes from june 15th to july 13th. http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendrier_pataphysique