Calendar Reform

[xman]

Only when the inconsistencies of the Gregorian calendar are pointed out or we take the time to try and determine which day of the week a certain date fell on or will fall on do we come face to face with the problem of the calendar. Even then we're so used to being crippled by its senseless ramblings that we rarely consider that there could be another way. What is a calendar but a kind of clock, a timepiece for the months and years as the clock works on minutes and hours.

The ancient Egyptians had a very elegant solar calendar consisting of twelve thirty day months each with three ten day weeks. They included 5 intercalary days all stacked together and they were holidays. This calendar didn't account for the lunar holidays for which they apparently had a separate calendar or the leap year even though they were aware of (in later dynasties at least) the Sothic cycle.

Ptolemy III was the first to recommend the leap year, but it would be over 200 years later that it was finally adopted. I fear we are in the same kind of holding pattern now. For almost 100 years now we have been suffering under the limping Gregorian calendar all the while having several perfectly good options to replace it with so what's stopping us?

2012 corresponds to another opportunity to change our calendar adopting the World Calendar (http://www.theworldcalendar.org/) to the great benefit of all who would use it, but nobody seems interested. The main objection to the World Calendar is that there are one or two (in leap years) intercalary days not within the confines of a Monday to Sunday week. This throws off the religious seven day worship cycle. Apparently they can't take the extra worship days and must have a precise seven day schedule. Well, I say, let them rotate their Sabbath around the proper clock/calendar which "God" chose to put us in and the rest of us can have a rational calendar that we can predict perfectly and will provide four identical quarters for commercial reasons.

Is there any hope for moving this forward and how could we do it?

 

[Aught3]

Hell yeah! Lets do it.

 

[Homunclus]

Seems to be a little more practical.

 

[Master_Ghost_Knight]

It is boud to failure. Altough our calendar has had an historical component with religiouse folk, it has very litle to do with religion, the calendar is a way to track the status of astronomical important events such has the change of seasons, the lunar cicles, etc... But the diffrent astronomical events are not in sync with each other, so you will inevtiably have inconsitencies like strange paterns of leap years (did you know that you have leap years every 4 years, but in each 100 years 1 of the leap years doesn't happen except in each 400 years?, :shock: Yeah holy crap, on the year 2000 was the year in which the leap year that didn't supoused to happen due to the 100 cicle happened because of the 400 cicle)
This sort of stuff is inevitable.

 

[xman]

Sure that stuff won't change. It can't change. That's how our world spins and rotates in the universe. It's a bit wonky because our year isn't exactly three hundred and sixty days long or a month isn't exactly thirty days long, but should we throw out calendars? I like the thirty day month because it's closest to the twenty nine and a half day lunar cycle. The next month would always have the full moon on the previous date or two dates in the case of thirty-one day months. It's very close to our current calendar so folks would be familiar with the format as opposed to a thirteen twenty-eight day months with a leap week every five or six years. I mean, we don't even need seven day weeks, but going to six days a week or ten would be hard for people. the real benefit of the world calendar is that it takes the existing system and makes it graspable to any third grader. You could tell the date as easily as you tell time because you can memorise the calendar as easily as a clock. September fifth is always a Monday.