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IPFS News Link • Science, Medicine and Technology

A Rethought Calendar Makes Each Year Identical to the One Before

• Clay Dillow via PopSci.com
 

As the calendar turns over to a new year, a couple of researchers over at Johns Hopkins University are rethinking the way we tick off the days during our annual trip around the sun. The duo has devised a new yearly calendar in which each 12-month period is identical to the one before--meaning if your birthday is on a Monday one year, it’s on a Monday every year--until the end of time.

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar--named for Richard Conn Henry and Steve H. Hanke at JHU, the researchers behind the reformed calendar--isn’t just a realignment of the way we count days, but a simplification of the overall economic rhythm of the world. All the time and effort spent adjusting calendars and schedules every year to accommodate shifting days of the week could be saved, they argue. The man hours and money saved by a uniform year would be tremendous.

The calendar consists of the same12 months as the current Gregorian year, but the months have been adjusted subtly to make each quarter exactly 91 days long--two 30-day months and one 31-day month. That means September, June, March, and December would become the long months, while February would gain a couple of days.

1 Comments in Response to

Comment by TL Winslow
Entered on:

The new calendar is a great idea, but probably won't get adopted.  The current system is complex but it can be handled by memorizing some small tables and learning to do mod 7 arithmetic in one's head.

Did you know that you can memorize the current month just by memorizing the day of the month that the first Sunday falls on?

Jan. 2012 is easy: 1

So for instance Jan. 18 will fall on a 4 or Wed. after subtracting multiples of 7.

By continuing with this method, one can mentally compute the day of the week for any date in history by memorizing some small tables.

See my page http://historyscoper.com/gtthowto.html

 

 

 



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