Calendar Reform Revisited

So this morning I listened to my morning radio show “Sarah and No Name,” and they had a guest called the Human Calculator. His name is Scott Flansburg, and he had been on the show twice before but I missed it because I was away for college. I was really looking forward to listening to him do this ultra fast calculating thing, being the inner math geek that I am.

After he did the math thing, though, he talked about a thirteen-month calendar that would make every day of the year fall on the same day of the week, which was pretty close to what I was talking about a few weeks ago about changing the calendar and proposing a Leap Week or something.

What I couldn’t resolve was the 365^th day of the year where it would shift the day of the week every year, making the day of the week not align anymore. Then he mentioned making the first day of the year a special off-calendar day that we would celebrate and stuff, and then we go on our 13-months-of-28-days calendar.

I know that he didn’t come up with that idea (which I realized when I looked at a Wikipedia article on Calendar Reform), but that’s such a good solution! My mind was so confined to having to conform and assign each day to a day of the week that I pseudo-literally didn’t think outside the box. Nothing in nature requires a week to be seven days, and nothing in nature requires a day to be outside of a week; only we humans made that up, and we humans can just as simply reason everyone to leave a day out of the week for the greater good of better organization in the calendar for the next millions of years.

So now, we would have New Year’s Day to be out of the week, a day for us to celebrate, blah blah. Then starts January 1, or whatever we decide to call the months if we want to change it (to fix the “September does not associating with 7 and so on” problem), and we move on to a structured calendar where I know the 25^th of every month is a Thursday.

And when leap year comes around, we could just add another off-calendar day, maybe next to New Year’s, or maybe six or seven months into the year to even it out, although that might mess people up when they want to plan something exactly 70 days (10 weeks) from May but there’s an extra day after June or July because of the Leap day, so then putting it next to New Year’s to “get it over with” may actually be a better solution.

As “perfect” as that would work out, here are some reasons that people would oppose to changing the calendar to this system:

1. People with birthdays as well as holidays on the 29^th, 30^th, and 31^st don’t exist anymore and have to reconfigure, as mentioned in my other post.
2. People’s birthdays will fall on the same day of the week every year, which would suck for a majority of the people in the world whose birthdays fall on a weekday, every single year. That might lead to a “birthdays of the week” culture, which may encourage more group/social celebration.
3. The whole world needs to approve and adopt this.
4. Calendar makers won’t support it because they can’t sell new calendars.
5. People scared of the number 13 would hate this, as mentioned in my other post.
6. Having days of the month fall on the same day of the week every month may seem boring to people, and boring is bad, apparently.
7. Oppositely, people don’t enjoy change as much as I do.

Flush.

Leap Week

If we made a leap week every seven years and an extra leap week every twenty-eight years, we could spend a lot less money on new calendars every year. There would be exactly 52 weeks every year, 53 every seven, and 54 every twenty-eight years, so that the dates of the week will always be on the same day of the week.

Of course, I’m only speaking from a calendar design point of view. I’m sure we would get warmer winters and cooler summers in the years before a two-leap-weeks year and the equinoxes and solstices will be out of alignment every year, and therefore so will Persian New Year’s and Easter and other things like that. But think of how convenient it would be to know which day of the week May 21 or September 3 would be? (Both are Mondays, assuming January 1 always starts on a Sunday.)

And while we’re at it, let’s make all the months 28 days, and then put together all the extra days into a new month, the thirteenth month, which triskaidekaphobes would just love. That way, we only need to remember only one month, and everyone would know which day of the week the 13th is (Friday, another day that triskaidekaphobes would love every month, especially on Triskaidekaphobember.

I’m sure that is not going to happen, since people’s birthdays and anniversaries will be messed up. Maybe we could do that if/when we ever terraform and start living on Mars, just so our lives won’t be any more complicated that it needs to, what with one of Mars's moons eventually colliding with Mars or that Mars being farther from the Sun and therefore colder all the time and everything.

Flush.