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Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

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Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

that "new memory load" is functionally zero, since no one would have to remember that. By the time the Extra week actually arrived, people would have been looking forward to it for an entire year, and it would not catch anyone by surprise. No memory required. Even subterranean cave trolls would be aware it is coming. I think it's a nice idea especially if we could have a big weeklong worldwide party once every 5 or 6…

The corporate drone pessimist in me thinks that the extra week would just be another work week, with the best case being "Ah yes, you get an extra half-day worth of PTO this year."

Humans are slaves to traditions. If it's introduced as a world wide party week from the start then people will feel like "it's always been done that way" and be less likely to fight it.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#92
post #25

Wow, after reading the comments it's amazing how difficult it is for most people to understand that eliminating time zones doesn't mean that anyone will change when they work. You will just have a different number for the time you do things than in than other parts of the world. In England you might start at 09:00, but on the other side of the world they would start at 20:00 which would be morning for them.

Why is this better though? When scheduling a meeting, I still have to figure out what "zone" another place is in so as to schedule an event during a normal workday.

I can imagine the faces of the staff (who are too scared to speak up) when the CEO from overseas calls to organise a meeting at 3.30am in the morning the next day.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#93
post #55

Why preserve the seven-day week? The appropriate factorization of 365 is 73*5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discordian_calendar Plus, the Discordian calendar has the advantage of already being implemented in Linux!

This would be great if we had already achieved the 1950s dream of the three-day work week.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#94
post #76

A more simple solution is to have 13 months of exactly 28 days, plus one day for new years day. That's even better because every month is exactly the same number of days which means semi-monthly and bi-weekly billing systems are the same thing. And because there's the same number of days anything billed per month can be easily prorated per day, and any billing cycle will match up with every other billing cycle... so…

This breaks quarterly cycles.

It doesn't. Quarters just become 13 weeks. They'd mostly correspond to existing quarters as well, give or take a couple of days at each end.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#95
post #54

I just pointed this out to a friend and she gladly brought up the Shire calendar from Tolkien's works, which according to her has 12 months, 30 days a month, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with the date of each month staying the same weekday due to the separation of the five other days as holidays that are separate from the months (including leap-day, which doesn't belong to any day of the week). Which actually solve…

No it doesn't. Making a day not be part of any week breaks the strict 7 day cycle, and will be rejected be the vast majority of the world.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#96
post #54

I just pointed this out to a friend and she gladly brought up the Shire calendar from Tolkien's works, which according to her has 12 months, 30 days a month, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with the date of each month staying the same weekday due to the separation of the five other days as holidays that are separate from the months (including leap-day, which doesn't belong to any day of the week). Which actually solve…

I was going to mention this alternative (have read it long long time ago in some amateur astronomy book), but I had no idea about its origin. Thank you for providing it :)

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#97
post #94
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This breaks quarterly cycles.

It doesn't. Quarters just become 13 weeks. They'd mostly correspond to existing quarters as well, give or take a couple of days at each end.

OK, it breaks the assumption that quarters are a whole number of months.

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.

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#98

In Malaysia, if holiday falls on Sunday, it'll be "carried forward" to Monday (you still celebrate on Sunday, but Monday will be extra holiday). 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 :)

This is not far from how most of Sweden operates. Most offices comply to the idea of "half-day before holiday" notion and as where fixing the dates wouldn't interfere with that too much, I doo believe that fixing Christmas to a Saturday would make a lot of Swedes angry.

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.)

Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days

#100
post #34

Seems unlikely, yet, Europe switched to the euro. 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)

>yet, Europe switched to the euro

And isn't that working out really well.

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