Click pic for more Moore

A one-world government could enact this. Only change I’d make would be to have all holidays occur on a Tuesday or Thursday to create four day weekends.

Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before.

Their proposed calendar overhaul — largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today — would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week. Christmas, for example, would forever come on a Sunday.
[…]
What bothers him about the Gregorian calendar, though, is the frustrating tendency for days of the week to jump around. Because 365 is not a multiple of seven, 7-day weeks don’t fit evenly into the Gregorian calendar. That means that each year, dates shift over one day of the week (two during leap years).
[…]
The calendar follows a pattern of two 30-day months followed by one 31-day month.

I am curious how one gets funding to study something like this. I have this idea for studying the correlation between drinking heavily and peeing more. There seems to be some sort of correlation, but that could be coincidence…



  1. Lynn says:

    During the French Revolution, the names of the months of the year and the days of the week were changed, and a ten-day week was instituted. The intention was to break free of the Christian calendar, feasts and celebrations. I seem to recall reading somewhere that people couldn’t handle a ten-day week. There seems to be some kind of natural rhythm among humans that perhaps is what instituted the fairly common idea of some type of rest break after four, five or six days. Interesting.

  2. Gildersleeve says:

    This strikes me as a solution to a non-existent problem. The professor in the article complained he had to recreate his schedule each year. Well that sounds like a perfect opportunity to re-examine how you’re doing things on a regular basis. A simple driver of change.

    And a Leap WEEK?!? Only if it’s universally observed as a holiday, otherwise that is a big variable to work around for a less accurate calendar.

    Like changes in the season, the regularly changing calendar keeps things fresh and vibrant. Let’s stick to getting rid of daylight savings time, which is too much change coming too quickly.

  3. Gildersleeve says:

    Oh, and that is a great pic by the way. Hearkening back to the days when girls weren’t built like emaciated adolescent boys (using pasties), as seems to be the custom today.

  4. JS says:

    Should you ever need subjects to study for the “drink heavily / pee more” study, I am your man (assuming the heaving drinking involves a quality beer or scotch/whisk(e)y/bourbon).

  5. Dallas says:

    Leave it to some dumb ass Pope to impose a jacked up calendar on the world for all eternity.

  6. Peppeddu says:

    Actually the idea makes sense, even though we are so used to, we need a better calendar and time measuring system.

    It’s a long term investment, that it will pay off in the long term, same as the metric system, that is insanely easier to use than the imperial/us system.

    But (and there’s always a but) this will require huge investment in both education, productivity loss, computerized systems change. etc, etc.
    And this is THE possible worst time (worldwide crisis) to propose something like this.
    So, IMHO it will never happen, at least, not this time.

  7. Harry says:

    I think if we switched to a 13 month lunar calendar we would be more insync as a people.

    • Harry says:

      Every month would contain 28 days.

      • Lynn says:

        this would be helpful for most women 🙂

        • Animby says:

          When I read this article a couple of days ago, I couldn’t see any advantage to their calendar over the Gregorian. Now I see it: we can all pretend to be math prodigies predicting what day of the week someone’s birthday will fall on.

          And it would do away with that awful leap day every four years. Replacing it with a leap WEEK? Landlords don’t charge for the extra day, would they give away a week? What about salaried employees? Will they work a week for free? How would annual percentage rates be affected by a leap week? Payroll and financial firms continue to suffer problems accounting for a leap day, what would happen with a week?

          As for DST? Scrap it. Most studies show it doesn’t do what it was designed to do but it certainly causes confusion.

    • The DON says:

      The trouble with a 28 day month is that the lunar cycle is a little over 29 days, and thus cannot be sub-divided evenly. That may not be a problem in itself as 365.

      7 days in a week makes sense naturally speaking as 7 governs a lot of things on this planet.
      7 colours in rainbow – indigo/violet always appeared vague to me, but 7 is the accepted number.
      7 fundamental units of measurement in the SI – from which all units of measurement are derived.
      7 wonders of ancient/modern world – why 7?
      7 deadly sins
      7 virtues
      A week is split into 5 working days and 2 holidays – 5 loaves and 2 fishes
      The list goes on.

      For a small fee I can use numerology and predict your future or provide you with a farcical prediction on your soul mate…

      🙂

  8. Olo Baggins of Bywater says:

    I’m gonna be pissed if my birthday is always on a Wednesday.

  9. B. Dog says:

    Americans are so unreceptive to crap like changing to the metric system that we won’t even get to try to change to the Mayan calendar before the end of the world.

    The anxiety before this would boost firearm and ammo sales , further enriching George Soros, who for some reason now owns many U.S. firearms manufacturers. We survived the Y2K menace, and now people are considering tempting fate again?

  10. dittmv says:

    I stopped reading the article at this point.

    “The calendar I’m advocating isn’t nearly as accurate” as the Gregorian calendar, said Richard Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years. “But it’s far more convenient.”

    Convenient for HIM, rather than people who depend on an accurate calendar.

    Read the wikipedia article on the Gregorian Calendar. Please, blame the Pope all you want for the calendar, pure ignorance. The mathematical accuracy of the Gregorian calendar vs Earth’s orbit is quite impressive.

    • Donald says:

      And the Jesuit priest, Christopher Clavius, did the math for the calendar without the aid of a computer or even a calculator.

  11. msbpodcast says:

    Pick a zero meridian in the middle of the pacific about half an hour off the current time zone.

    As for the calendar

    1 year = 365.2524 days which can be evenly mapped onto

    12 months of 5 weeks of 6 days each + 5 Earth days (or 6 every 4 years, except every century)

    This would work for a long time, until the Earth’s rotation period changed enough to be noticeable.

    What ever you want to call the months is fine, (but one through twelve works just great [Evenly divisible by 2,3,4,6].)

    You now have the possibility of naming the weeks, but one through five works just great.

    What ever you want to call the days is fine (but one through six works just great [Evenly divisible by 2,3].)

    • msbpodcast says:

      I forgot to mention Earth days are paid double overtime for serving food and drinks to all the hedonists who are required to be licentious as all Hell each Earth day.

      Think of it as “Safety Valve Day” for all the reluctantly good not-so-little boys and girls and boy wannabes and girl wannabes.

      Nobody gets arrested for public nudity or drunk and disorderly on an Earth Day.

      The rest of the year, you gotta be good.

      Nobody’s going to cut you any slack.

    • msbpodcast says:

      Here is esperanto are the numbers one through twelve;
      01 => unu
      02 => du
      03 => tri (pronounced tree for the English speakers)
      04 => kvar
      05 => kvin
      06 => ses
      07 => sep
      08 => ok (pronounced awk for the English speakers)
      09 => naý
      10 => dek
      11 => dek unu
      12 => dek du

  12. Dr Spearmint Fur says:

    Thanks for the Al Moore pinups. Endlessly fascinating.

    “It’s the artistic technique that I’ve always found most fascinating.”

  13. sargasso_c says:

    The Gregory calendar was a prayer calendar and a farmers planting timetable. It has been remarkably efficient but at times inconvenient. The economic advantage of the proposed new calendar is it eliminates end-of-month interest roundups, which banks use to shave interest on loans.

  14. Uncle Patso says:

    Olo Baggins of Bywater :
    “I’m gonna be pissed if my birthday is always on a Wednesday.”

    Yup, me too. After all, “variety is the spice of life.”

  15. So what says:

    This is a problem that needs a solution why?

  16. nunyac says:

    Daylight savings time sucks! The new calender scheme would probably not be worth the confusion it would cause the generation that suffered the change.

  17. Animby says:

    Editor: Somehow, the sucky new format decided my comment (above) should be nested and appear as a reply to Pedro. It was written as a stand alone comment. Can you un-nest it?

    • Uncle Dave says:

      You must have hit reply instead of entered a comment at the end. Unfortunately, I can’t see a way to move it. You could re-enter it and I can delete the original.

      • Animby says:

        Thanks Unc Dave. It seems to have passed unnoticed so we just won’t worry about it. Have a great New Year.

  18. The Watcher says:

    We could do without DST…. If it had value, I never quite figured out what it was, other than a presumption that nobody had clocks at one time….

    As to the calendar thing, nonsense….

    If we want confusion, we should use the Jewish Calendar. Seven times every 19 years an entire MONTH is added to straighten the seasons out.

    Must have been something in the incense….

    Or the “Ancient Aliens” guys are very definitely on the right track…. 😀

    About the calendar…. The former day job used to get those every year. At some point the producers switched to real photos, and shortly thereafter, they became a little too “real”….

    Happy New Year

  19. Holdfast says:

    That “calendar” is one of the most stupid ideas I have come across in a long time. It provides a solution we don’t want for a problem we don’t have.

    And if someone did try and adopt it, we would have yet another calendar floating round the world used by a group .

    It certainly would not be universally used in the USA. You can’t even adopt units of measure that are not corruptions of something out of the dark ages. I can imagine slogans like “You’ll take my calendar from my dead fingers.”

    Getting the whole planet to use the same time would be nice, and is done to an extent already. GMT or UCT is an agreed standard for military and airlines. I can’t see most of your compatriots using it though. It would mean they were using an offset and a lot of your compatriots are not aware there is anywhere else to be offset from.
    This would be another rallying cry for your most insane who see many/most trans-national ideas as communist plots.

  20. Angel H. Wong says:

    Wouldn’t it be hilarious if doctor Richard Henry’s close circle of friends is composed by a short, tiny, nearsighted white guy; an Indian who’s so shy to girls he can’t speak to them unless he’s drunk; a skinny, Jewish NASA enigneer who still lives with his mom; and finally a blonde bombshell from Nebraska who is an aspiring actress while she works as a waitress at the Cheesecake Factory?

  21. Thomas says:

    It’s a windmill. The effort to switchover would be gargantuan and prohibitively expensive. It was only recently (1926), that we managed to get every country on the same calendar and narrowed to only a handful of notation formats. The “problem” of calculating interest rates? Solved. We have computers for that and everyone understands the difference between “a month” and “30 days”. The effort to switch everyone and everything over to the new calendar would unbelievably expensive and for this expense we get the benefit of making it easier to remember on what day of the week a given day falls? As I said, it’s a windmill.

  22. e? says:

    Funding: the only difference between this “astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years” and the proprietor of Time Cube.

  23. deowll says:

    If you want accurate just use the Mayan calender. However it should be noted that the Chinese, orthodox Jews, Muslims, etc. don’t use the Gregorian calendar which is a slightly modified Roman Calendar.

  24. Rick says:

    Why not make a metric calendar? 10 days in a week, 10 weeks in a month, you would only have 1 slop month with an odd number of days and weeks.

    It certainly would make planning easier.

  25. Buzz Mega says:

    Better yet; four day weeks. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday.

    Everybody could celebrate gloomy Mondays, TGIF and have a nice weekend.

    On leap year, we’d throw in a Wednesday. Just for spelling class.

  26. President Amabo & my wife Chewbacca (Give us a flat, chronological (civilised) comment view please) says:

    How does changing the calendar get more Americans driving 4×4’s and living in big houses? Priorities people.


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