That depends on what you mean by adopted. The federal government/education establishment/etc. all use SI units. It's the general populace which couldn't care less.
Which means this proposal has the same probability of adoption as me winning the lottery. And I don't buy lottery tickets.
The US Department of Transportation, for example, does not use SI units. They did try to pass a mandate to change to SI by 2000 by tying federal funds to states that make the change, but that was rejected.
My thoughts, exactly. Those magical ("happy") days of The Terror were indeed too short. And UTC -- practically a symbol of British Naval prowess and Empire -- is really a nice touch, specially for the "brown/yellow" ones who get to toil happily at "midnight".
Here's a revolutionary thought - the calendar is already fixed. Sporting events (etc.) don't have to happen on the same weekday, they can just always happen on the same date. Voila, predictable time planning that doesn't have to be redone every year.
And I love the idea of eliminating timezones, especially the example that pilots already use UTC. Ever considered this might be because the concept of "day" doesn't really apply when you change 10 timezones in 10 hours?
Personally I think eliminating timezones would make relating to people internationally very difficult. It's already weird enough that Australians think of December as a summer month. Consider half the world thinking of 20:00 (8PM) as the morning. How does "everywhere is the same hour" even remotely fix the fact people sleep at night and work at day anyway?
And what do you do with an extra week "every five or six years"?
In the UK there have been discussions about stopping DST. The main problem is that in places Scotland it would be darker for longer in the morning which could lead to more traffic accidents.
The affects on crime and traffic accidents would be huge. And it would never be possible to get half of the planet to agree that they will forever work while it's dark and sleep while it is light.
I don't think the suggestion is that the working day everywhere should start at X:00. The idea is that 4:00 in California is 4:00 in Britain and 4:00 in China. When the day starts would vary from place to place; perhaps 1:00 somewhere and 12:00 somewhere else. The point is to eliminate the confusion caused by timezones, especially those like Nepal's which are 15 minutes off other time zones for no good reason.
Instead of DST, we will be starting work and school one hour later for half of the year. We have universal time. It's GMT.
There are many people who don't care what time it is in another country (domestic jobs and the unemployed). There is no real incentive to have everyone relearn what time they get up and go to sleep.
Actually, China did get rid of timezones and daylight savings: officially, everywhere is on "Beijing time" (GMT+8).
This understandably causes problems in the far western provinces such as Xinjiang, so everyone just observes an unofficial GMT+6 time instead. This wreaks utter havoc on conversationd about time: bus schedules, shop opening hours, etc. Aside from the ambiguity, since it's not an official time zone, people overseas just assume they can call you to discuss business at 9am, even though you've barely woken up.
Time zones are complex because, well, the world is a big and complicated place. But theanswer is certainky not to just get rid of them!
Aside from the ambiguity, since it's not an official time zone, people overseas just assume they can call you to discuss business at 9am, even though you've barely woken up.... But theanswer[sic] is certainky not to just get rid of them!
Add metadata to all phone records that makes it easy to specify and query the hours in which one would like to be called.
What's the difference between needing to know what timezone some place is in, vs. needing to know about where their day falls?
What particularly annoys me about timezones is that times are already useless. When does the day start? (And I mean the normal cultural day, not your personal day.) Be it 7am, 8am, 9am, or whatever your answer may be, it sure isn't anything sensible like 0 or 1. If those are anything, that's when the day ends. If the sun rises at 03:00 in one place, 10:00 in another, and 22:00 in another (presumably we'd stop using "am" and "pm" as the a & p would become useless), who really cares? It's not like we're taking away the 00:00 sunrise that you can set your watch by from anybody.
In all seriousness, it would be easier to adopt this proposed calendar than it would be to:
- Not have football on Sundays
- Tell students that they have to go to school Thursday
through Monday this year (But church is still on Sundays!).
- a bunch of other weekday/weekend-aligned activities.
> Here's a revolutionary thought - the calendar is already fixed. Sporting events (etc.) don't have to happen on the same weekday, they can just always happen on the same date. Voila, predictable time planning that doesn't have to be redone every year.
Except you want work days off to be near a weekend. I'd rather have a 3 day weekend than Wednesday alone off...
Removing time zones would break any kind of cultural joke and reference to time. "omg, i woke up at 4am today!"... Especially in todays internet connected world.
Swatch tried to intruduce timezone-free time many many years ago called "swatch internet time", Ericsson even had it as default on some of their cell phones to promote it. Needless to say it didn't work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
Interesting but it won't happen. It would have to be adopted throughout the world (especially where religious days are affected) and there would never be agreement on which holidays fall on which day (NYE on Friday or Saturday?).
I don't fully understand the other point in the article about ridding the world of time zones to improve business and trade. How would that work? Do they expect certain countries to agree to work while the sun is down?
I think you understood the point about timezones backwards. The point is for everybody to use, for instance, UTC time. So instead of working the proverbial 9am to 5pm, if you are in Japan you would work from 0am to 8am (UTC).
It makes sense to me, but I can see how lots of people would have a very hard time understanding and accepting this.
I like this idea. Unfortunately, it can't coexist with the Gregorian calendar in its current form; if a small fraction of the world switched to it, they'd always have to wonder which calendar someone writing "Jan 1" was referring to.
When a date is written down, it needs to be immediately obvious which calendar it's referring to. It needs a special notation that doesn't overlap with any of the currently-used notations for dates, so that it will be unambiguous (and so that the old calendar will remain unambiguous). I propose doing this by giving each month a letter, A-L, and writing dates like this:
2012-A01 = New calendar, first day of first month of 2012
2012-L30 = New calendar, thirtieth day of twelfth month of 2012
2012-01-01 = Gregorian calendar, first day of first month of 2012
C30 = New calendar, thirtieth day of third month of whatever year this is
With the notations neatly separated, you could then print calendars with the two schemes side by side, and let people convert back and forth for awhile while the new system is adopted. We could give the months fanciful names, too, as long as they start with the right letters. But the important thing is, the two schemes must be unambiguous and distinct.
I would tend to agree, but then we have things like DST shifting around all the time. The government just states they are making a change, and everyone does. Every software that isn't based on a network time server breaks, and is fixed, and we move on. The same could happen with this new calendar, the government simply mandates that by a certain year it has to be in place.
The largest burden will be on legacy software and getting that patched. That very well could be reason enough for the reversal of this calendar, as every government software breaks, and they find out how slow they are to keeping up with their own mandates.
I remember when I lived in Mexico some 12 years ago and the government introduced DST there. Some schools would actually start an hour later to sync their starting time with before-DST-time, people where complaing about being totally confused, etc. Don't know if there is still DST now or if they abandoned it because of the many (often totally irrational) protests. Its not easy to change people's habits.
Hey look, it worked when the Chinese government in the early 20th century switched to the Gregorian Calendar... Or did it? Paper calendars in China generally represent both Gregorian and Chinese calendar dates.
I'm going to assume when this new calendar is adopted, the chinese will then be able to buy three calendars in one.
It was done mainly by force and in a society that had almost no reading skills back then. The same methods are (thankfully) difficult to apply in the West today.
And it only "kinda" worked, because in the Chinese countryside, where most people live, 80 years later they still mainly use 农历, not the Western calender, despite all government stuff being done in Western calender dates. (I lived in China for some 6 years, just left the country yesterday, walking across the border to Vietnam).
From another point of view, a given date gradually occurring on every day of the week is a feature, not a bug. I see that the proposed calendar puts my birthday on a weekend, every year year after year, but I kind of like my birthday (and my wedding anniversary, and other important dates) occurring on a new day of the week each year, for variety.
I note too that the calendar would not "make it easy to plan annual activities" for any of the dates in the "extra week" proposed for the calendar, if by annual activities we mean activities that occur in every calendar year. The extra week occurs "at the end of December every five or six years," and the new memory load everyone would have to bear is remembering which years--2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105, "et cetera" are the extra week years.
that "new memory load" is functionally zero, since no one would have to remember that. By the time the Extra week actually arrived, people would have been looking forward to it for an entire year, and it would not catch anyone by surprise. No memory required. Even subterranean cave trolls would be aware it is coming.
I think it's a nice idea especially if we could have a big weeklong worldwide party once every 5 or 6 years
The corporate drone pessimist in me thinks that the extra week would just be another work week, with the best case being "Ah yes, you get an extra half-day worth of PTO this year."
Humans are slaves to traditions. If it's introduced as a world wide party week from the start then people will feel like "it's always been done that way" and be less likely to fight it.
Agreed with the general proposal: the only time periods that are important to preserve are the day (coz of morning/night), the week (coz of work-week and religious days), and the year (coz of seasons). The month is pretty arbitrary.
They propose a 364-day year with 8x 30-day months and 4x 31-day months. If they're okay with a 364-day year, wouldn't it be better to have 8x 28-day months and 4x 35-day months. Or you could have 13x 28-day months. That way the day-of-week would be even more predictable.
Yeah, except you lose the morning/night distinction, because they also suggest that the entire world use one timezone. This, in my humble opinion, seems to a very cumbersome and onerous system. Yes, there are obvious business advantages to having just one timezone, but it also completely robs us of heuristics that have been developed over centuries.
Wow, after reading the comments it's amazing how difficult it is for most people to understand that eliminating time zones doesn't mean that anyone will change when they work. You will just have a different number for the time you do things than in than other parts of the world. In England you might start at 09:00, but on the other side of the world they would start at 20:00 which would be morning for them.
The problem is that these are still timezones. It's actually a very trivial change. Instead of saying you're in a different timezone, I say you wake up at 20:00 instead of 8:00 like I do.
Why is this better though? When scheduling a meeting, I still have to figure out what "zone" another place is in so as to schedule an event during a normal workday.
I can imagine the faces of the staff (who are too scared to speak up) when the CEO from overseas calls to organise a meeting at 3.30am in the morning the next day.
If we get better at software integration, different calendars might not be such a problem.
We already convert between currencies, times and date formats.
Is this really that much different to a new date-format, just with deeper syntactic changes? (rhetorical)
Except Europe didn't simply switch to the Euro. Some members of the EU (plus a few others who aren't in the EU) switched to it, over a twelve year period, with some others pegged to it (and maybe switching some day), some other countries adopting it 'unofficially' (i.e. it's their official currency, but they're not officially members of the Eurozone), and some countries who theoretically must join, voting against it in a local referendum, and thus deliberately failing to meet the entry conditions on an ongoing basis so as they can't join.
(And this is, of course, ignoring all the logistical hassles involved in switching, never mind the much bigger questions, now very pertinent, as to whether trying to do all this may have been a cause of the downfall of Western Society, etc.)
So I suspect this example gives more weight to the 'unlikely' side, than the 'yet...' side.
Computers have had to deal with multiple currencies from their inception, so the technical aspects of euro conversion were fairly minor. But they have never had to deal with an actual change in the rules of the calendar.
I wonder if calendar companies would lobby against this. I imagine people would still buy a new calendar every year or so, since they get worn/written on.
Classic academic waste-of-time project to solve a problem that doesn't exist. I hope they didn't have any federal grant funding for this (have skimmed half a dozen web postings about this and none really address this question).
Yuck. The solstices and equinoxes would be on different dates from year to year.
And as far as making time calculations simpler for financiers -- that extra week "every five or six years" will be just as hard to deal with as leap years are now.
This is not far from how most of Sweden operates. Most offices comply to the idea of "half-day before holiday" notion and as where fixing the dates wouldn't interfere with that too much, I doo believe that fixing Christmas to a Saturday would make a lot of Swedes angry.
For one, we celebrate the 24th, and having the 25th on a Saturday sure gives Friday and half of Thursday off. But the 26th is also a holiday, which would then be on a regular Sunday. New Years Eve is not a holiday, and having that on a constant Friday would open the days between Christmas and NYE as a work week. Where as now some years you can have a nice long (10-14 days) vacation with only a couple days of actual leave, because the rest are considered national holidays. (Example: 2012 I can get 14 days off with only 5 days of leave.)
> Now, you can see conflicting interest here, especially between employees and employers :)
Why would there be a conflict of interest? The point is that employees always get the same number of "days off" per year is it not? The conflict of interest would arise in countries where holidays are not carried forward (or stashed in leave entitlements), employers interest would be to have all of them fall on week-ends, whereas employee interest would be to have all of them fall on week-days.
I love this idea, but there are a few things that aren't covered in the comments that I want to know about.
1) How does this calendar align to the phases of the moon? How many moons are there per-year? Is this variable? This is important due to archaic calendar systems and dates that are based on solar-lunar calendars (e.g. China & Japan)
2) Is there a quick and easy algorithm for re-mapping dates? My birthday was on Mar 30, 1991 - for example. Would I simply keep the old date, or adopt a new one? I assume keep the old since its still on the calendar, but what about people born January 31st?
3) How do seasons align and fluctuate along these new datelines? And how does this floating week influence it?
People can accomplish the same thing after learning a mental algorithm to calculate the day of the week. Doomsday rule, invented by Mathematician John Conway, is one of the easier ones to remember.
173 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadWhich means this proposal has the same probability of adoption as me winning the lottery. And I don't buy lottery tickets.
And I love the idea of eliminating timezones, especially the example that pilots already use UTC. Ever considered this might be because the concept of "day" doesn't really apply when you change 10 timezones in 10 hours?
Personally I think eliminating timezones would make relating to people internationally very difficult. It's already weird enough that Australians think of December as a summer month. Consider half the world thinking of 20:00 (8PM) as the morning. How does "everywhere is the same hour" even remotely fix the fact people sleep at night and work at day anyway?
And what do you do with an extra week "every five or six years"?
The affects on crime and traffic accidents would be huge. And it would never be possible to get half of the planet to agree that they will forever work while it's dark and sleep while it is light.
There are many people who don't care what time it is in another country (domestic jobs and the unemployed). There is no real incentive to have everyone relearn what time they get up and go to sleep.
This understandably causes problems in the far western provinces such as Xinjiang, so everyone just observes an unofficial GMT+6 time instead. This wreaks utter havoc on conversationd about time: bus schedules, shop opening hours, etc. Aside from the ambiguity, since it's not an official time zone, people overseas just assume they can call you to discuss business at 9am, even though you've barely woken up.
Time zones are complex because, well, the world is a big and complicated place. But theanswer is certainky not to just get rid of them!
Add metadata to all phone records that makes it easy to specify and query the hours in which one would like to be called.
What particularly annoys me about timezones is that times are already useless. When does the day start? (And I mean the normal cultural day, not your personal day.) Be it 7am, 8am, 9am, or whatever your answer may be, it sure isn't anything sensible like 0 or 1. If those are anything, that's when the day ends. If the sun rises at 03:00 in one place, 10:00 in another, and 22:00 in another (presumably we'd stop using "am" and "pm" as the a & p would become useless), who really cares? It's not like we're taking away the 00:00 sunrise that you can set your watch by from anybody.
Except you want work days off to be near a weekend. I'd rather have a 3 day weekend than Wednesday alone off...
Swatch tried to intruduce timezone-free time many many years ago called "swatch internet time", Ericsson even had it as default on some of their cell phones to promote it. Needless to say it didn't work. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatch_Internet_Time
I don't fully understand the other point in the article about ridding the world of time zones to improve business and trade. How would that work? Do they expect certain countries to agree to work while the sun is down?
It makes sense to me, but I can see how lots of people would have a very hard time understanding and accepting this.
(seriously though, imagine how mad people will get when a particular event happens on the "wrong day" every year)
I like it though. I'd even take a Tuesday birthday to make it happen.
When a date is written down, it needs to be immediately obvious which calendar it's referring to. It needs a special notation that doesn't overlap with any of the currently-used notations for dates, so that it will be unambiguous (and so that the old calendar will remain unambiguous). I propose doing this by giving each month a letter, A-L, and writing dates like this:
With the notations neatly separated, you could then print calendars with the two schemes side by side, and let people convert back and forth for awhile while the new system is adopted. We could give the months fanciful names, too, as long as they start with the right letters. But the important thing is, the two schemes must be unambiguous and distinct.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_dating
The difficult part is to get 8 billion people to agree to pull in the same direction. And my guess is, that it will never happen, unfortunately.
The largest burden will be on legacy software and getting that patched. That very well could be reason enough for the reversal of this calendar, as every government software breaks, and they find out how slow they are to keeping up with their own mandates.
The difference between adapting to Y2K and adapting to the HH calendar is minor. If the gov survived Y2K they would survive the HH-adoption.
I'm going to assume when this new calendar is adopted, the chinese will then be able to buy three calendars in one.
And it only "kinda" worked, because in the Chinese countryside, where most people live, 80 years later they still mainly use 农历, not the Western calender, despite all government stuff being done in Western calender dates. (I lived in China for some 6 years, just left the country yesterday, walking across the border to Vietnam).
I note too that the calendar would not "make it easy to plan annual activities" for any of the dates in the "extra week" proposed for the calendar, if by annual activities we mean activities that occur in every calendar year. The extra week occurs "at the end of December every five or six years," and the new memory load everyone would have to bear is remembering which years--2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105, "et cetera" are the extra week years.
I think it's a nice idea especially if we could have a big weeklong worldwide party once every 5 or 6 years
They say their calendar would make it easy to plan annual activities, from holidays to academic schedules to financial calculations.
They propose a 364-day year with 8x 30-day months and 4x 31-day months. If they're okay with a 364-day year, wouldn't it be better to have 8x 28-day months and 4x 35-day months. Or you could have 13x 28-day months. That way the day-of-week would be even more predictable.
That's not a very significant change ...
The present system is good enough in that every one has an equal chance for special events in their lives to fall on a weekend.
I am not :)
If we get better at software integration, different calendars might not be such a problem. We already convert between currencies, times and date formats.
Is this really that much different to a new date-format, just with deeper syntactic changes? (rhetorical)
And isn't that working out really well.
(And this is, of course, ignoring all the logistical hassles involved in switching, never mind the much bigger questions, now very pertinent, as to whether trying to do all this may have been a cause of the downfall of Western Society, etc.)
So I suspect this example gives more weight to the 'unlikely' side, than the 'yet...' side.
And as far as making time calculations simpler for financiers -- that extra week "every five or six years" will be just as hard to deal with as leap years are now.
And in some companies, if holiday falls on Saturday, you get extra 1 day leave entitlement.
Now, you can see conflicting interest here, especially between employees and employers :)
For one, we celebrate the 24th, and having the 25th on a Saturday sure gives Friday and half of Thursday off. But the 26th is also a holiday, which would then be on a regular Sunday. New Years Eve is not a holiday, and having that on a constant Friday would open the days between Christmas and NYE as a work week. Where as now some years you can have a nice long (10-14 days) vacation with only a couple days of actual leave, because the rest are considered national holidays. (Example: 2012 I can get 14 days off with only 5 days of leave.)
Why would there be a conflict of interest? The point is that employees always get the same number of "days off" per year is it not? The conflict of interest would arise in countries where holidays are not carried forward (or stashed in leave entitlements), employers interest would be to have all of them fall on week-ends, whereas employee interest would be to have all of them fall on week-days.
Or did I miss something?
1) How does this calendar align to the phases of the moon? How many moons are there per-year? Is this variable? This is important due to archaic calendar systems and dates that are based on solar-lunar calendars (e.g. China & Japan)
2) Is there a quick and easy algorithm for re-mapping dates? My birthday was on Mar 30, 1991 - for example. Would I simply keep the old date, or adopt a new one? I assume keep the old since its still on the calendar, but what about people born January 31st?
3) How do seasons align and fluctuate along these new datelines? And how does this floating week influence it?