Friday, December 30, 2011

Does anyone really know what time it is?

Just in time for New Years, here's an interesting little piece about efforts to reform the calendar... yet again...
Time is eternal, but methods of tracking it are not — and so a Johns Hopkins University astronomer wants to replace the Gregorian calendar, with its leap years and floating dates and 15th-century effluvia, with a sleek and standardized system for the world.

According to Richard Conn Henry’s calendar, eight months would each have 30 days. Every third month would have 31 days. Every so often, to account for the leftover time, a whole extra week would be added.
The upshot: Years would proceed with clockwork regularity, with no annual re-jiggering of schedules required. Each day would occupy the same position as it had the previous year and would in the next. Were this 364-day calendar, known officially as the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, adopted on the first day of 2012, both Christmas and New Year’s Day would forever fall on Sunday...
Personally, I think God gave us a 365.24-day year and a 28-day lunar cycle just to ensure we'd eventually have to grapple with math...

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