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Cosmography

Happy Same Year

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More calendar bollocks. I linked to this a couple of days ago but it’s been picked up by Time, so now it’s real.

Some people think we should change the calendar so that each date falls on the same day of the week ever year. It’s one of those ideas that’s so brilliantly simple you wonder why no one’s ever done it. Until you realise the reason why no one’s ever done it is that there’s no bloody point in doing it.

The chief stumbling block to the enterprise is that 365 is not divisible by 7. But while others might give up at that point, these two have a simple solution: Adding a day that has no name. It ain’t a Tuesday or a Sunday or nothin’, it’s just “Worldsday”.

The advantages of this? Well, you wouldn’t need to buy a new calendar every year. If you still buy calendars. And you’ll be able to work out which day of the week every date is, forever. Instead of asking a computer to.

Any disadvantages? Well, we’ll have to memorise a different set of month lengths. Thirty days hath… November? And there’s the little detail that it puts an end to a seven-day cycle that has been unbroken for thousands of years. That… seems a shame.

I believe we have a seven day week simply because it divides evenly into both a 364-day solar year and a 28-day lunar month. Of course we know now that the year and month are both a little longer than that, but when the ancients came up with it I bet they thought it was really cool. It isn’t sacred though. Well, not any more. We don’t have to stick with their mistake. Indeed throughout history, people have tried to clear that mess up. What bugs me most about this attempt though is that it is so much change to achieve so little. The sixteenth of May will be a Thursday, forever. So ****ing what? If we’re going to rip it up and start again, let’s replace it with something that will be worth the trouble, something that will really blow the doors off calendrical conformity.

They tried to decimalise it after the French revolution. Unfortunately, ten divides into 365 even less well than seven does and the system was ridiculed. Merely being revolutionary for its own sake doesn’t cut it. For a new system to catch on, it will need to have real benefits. I’ve had a go at this myself, spending weeks on a radical but no doubt ultimately doomed scheme to harmonise the rhythms of the firmament. I’ll tell you how it works if there’s time – and such a thing as – tomorrow.

9 replies on “Happy Same Year”

How about a 5 day week, with 6 week months. That’s 12 months with 5.25 days left over.
Of course then you only have room for about 1 day off a week… but to keep the same amount of time off you could give folks 2 “flex weekend days” which still amounts to about 8 days off a month.
As it stands now, assuming 2 days off a week that’s 104 weekend days.
With my plan you’d get 101.25 (including the 5.25 year end days).

Or we could do at 10 day week, with 3 weeks per month. Then you could give people 3 days off each week which would amount to 113.25 days off (including the 5.25 year end days).

My easy solution would be to simply have the 31st of December and 1st of January as “Old Year’s Day and New Year’s Day”, and then continuing the calendar as if they were a single day (Jan 2nd would be the Monday That Starts It All). And 29th of February would be “the 29th – also not a real day” holiday.

Alternatively, we could just ditch the whole week and month thing and just number ALL the days. “I have some time off the 251st, how about a movie at the 30th minute of the 22nd hour of that day?”. It’d be verbose, but it’d at least be simple and unambiguous!

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