Imagine the cost of changing all the software in the world to use a new calendar system. This will never happen.
Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
31–40 of 174 posts
Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#32Agreed with the general proposal: the only time periods that are important to preserve are the day (coz of morning/night), the week (coz of work-week and religious days), and the year (coz of seasons). The month is pretty arbitrary. 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 co…
Yeah, except you lose the morning/night distinction, because they also suggest that the entire world use one timezone. This, in my humble opinion, seems to a very cumbersome and onerous system. Yes, there are obvious business advantages to having just one timezone, but it also completely robs us of heuristics that have been developed over centuries.
Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#33Imagine the cost of changing all the software in the world to use a new calendar system. This will never happen.
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Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#34Seems 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)
Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#35I wonder if calendar companies would lobby against this. I imagine people would still buy a new calendar every year or so, since they get worn/written on.
Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#36Classic academic waste-of-time project to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I hope they didn't have any federal grant funding for this (have skimmed half a dozen web postings about this and none really address this question).
Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#37Agreed with the general proposal: the only time periods that are important to preserve are the day (coz of morning/night), the week (coz of work-week and religious days), and the year (coz of seasons). The month is pretty arbitrary. 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 co…
Yeah, except you lose the morning/night distinction, because they also suggest that the entire world use one timezone. This, in my humble opinion, seems to a very cumbersome and onerous system. Yes, there are obvious business advantages to having just one timezone, but it also completely robs us of heuristics that have been developed over centuries.
For any purposes which require clear unambiguous time values, we already have UTC. This is just not a problem.
Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#38Wow, 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.
The problem is that these are still timezones. It's actually a very trivial change. Instead of saying you're in a different timezone, I say you wake up at 20:00 instead of 8:00 like I do. That's not a very significant change ...
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Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#39I like this idea. Unfortunately, it can't coexist with the Gregorian calendar in its current form; if a small fraction of the world switched to it, they'd always have to wonder which calendar someone writing "Jan 1" was referring to. 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 notation…
Obviously, the calendar ambiguity can be resolved by some sort of calendar NAT.
You know, let's just use Unix timestamps when marking future dates. Removes all ambiguity from calendar types, time zones, etc.
Re: Scientists' proposed calendar synchronizes dates with days
#40Yuck. The solstices and equinoxes would be on different dates from year to 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.