I was annoyed by something that came up in my job today because of the fact that there is no firm correspondence between dates and days of the week from year to year. Any previous attempts I’ve seen to try to make them consistent has suggested making certain days outside the regular 7-day cycle. This will never get traction from the religious communities that rely on the 7-day cycle to tell them which day to do certain things on. But I did come up with a different way: leap weeks.
So the first thing is to throw away December 31 in most years so that most years have a multiple of 7 days. Then on some sort of cycle that more calculation-inclined people would be able to determine, we would add a full week to the end of the year, bringing back December 31 as well as adding December 32 through 37, so that the seasons don’t shift relative to the calendar, incorporating both the current leap day needed roughly every 4 years as well as the fact that most years would be a day short.
Your thoughts on such a proposal? Perhaps your suggestion on what cycle to use for determining which years have leap weeks?
For a high school science class in an earlier millennium I drafted a modest proposal to use some unspecified scheme of giant rocket motors to change the Earth year to 333-1/3 days, with some corresponding shenanigans to break the new 3 year interval of 1000 days into some rational decimal calendar. I hadn’t studied the French Revolution yet, so wasn’t aware of how well THAT worked. Alas, I’ve lost those notes somewhere in the last 50 years.
I would favor four seasons of 90 days, though, to have a winter, summer and two inbetween seasons, as we do today. Then a Festivus of five days at the end of each year (six in leap years).
Seasons are partly cultural artefacts; they result from regional climate conditions and local agricultural practices, and they vary from face to face. Large parts of the world don’t have four seasons — many places have two seasons, “wet” and “dry”, while others have six or even more seasons.
If you’re looking for a calendar that will be accepted globally, then it needs to ignore local seasons.
This proposal is similar to the Hanke-Henry calendar in using leap weeks rather than leap days, although Hanke-Henry changes the length of some of the months so that each quarter is the same length (30+30+31 days). The Hanke-Henry rule for leap weeks is: a year has a leap week if the corresponding Gregorian year begins or ends on a Thursday. The Common Civil Calendar and Time proposal is similar to Hanke-Henry but uses a leap week rule that’s more similar to the Gregorian rule: a year has a leap week if the year is divisible by 5, but not if it’s divisible by 40 and not divisible by 400.
I mean, we’ve gotten used to it, but our calendar is kinda broken. Leap years, exceptional leap years that aren’t, leap seconds, months that are all different lengths, and yes, the creep of weekdays across the calendar.
If God existed and created the Universe for humans, what would be the logic behind the current number of days in the year, as well as having leap years?
Easily fixed. Magically force the length of the year to be a precise integral number of days. Your discretion as to whether that’s by manipulating Earth’s orbit or its period of revolution.
While you’re hosing around with natural durations, maybe you could convince the mass concentrations and density balance of the Earth to stop shifting around and stop decelerating so that we don’t have to diddle with the ever-changing, ever-slowing length of the day.
Even tho many have decided that we cant use Christian nomenclature, such as AD and BC (CE and BCE are often used instead), we still have ancient pagan names for the days of the week.
People hate change.
The French tried to change things with a new, better calendar, with nothing named after pagan gods, etc. It failed horribly.
