Do you wonder what day of the week or month your anniversary is going to fall on? How about whether or not your next paycheque will come before the end of the month? How about something as simple as making plans with friends on a certain date on the calendar? Today I describe how to fix the calendar, so that confusion about dates that certain events are scheduled will hopefully be fixed.
We are used to a 7 day week cycle in our modern world, so I'm not going to touch that. 6 days of work, and one holy day of rest, or 5 days of work and 2 days of weekend, are ingrained into our psyches. I figured out how to make a 4-day work week possible, but I won't get into that here. I'm just going to fix up the calendar so we can have scheduled events on the same day of the week (or month) every year. The problem is that 7 days do not divide evenly into 365. That's why we have 52 weeks and one day. The process is further obfuscated every 4 years by leap day. Both day 365 and 366 are necessary, because they count up the actual amount of time that Earth orbits the Sun. Without them, the seasons would eventually be out of whack with our calendars.
How do we reconcile this with the desire for a nice, evenly planned out calendar?
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=is-it-time-to-overhaul
These people proposed a solution, but I still think it has some flaws in it, so on to my approach.
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I say that we get rid of the extra day and a quarter by redistribution of that time throughout the year.
An extra quarter day (21,600 seconds) divided by 364 days is 59.3 seconds, which would be an extra "leap minute", added to each day at midnight. (On the clock, this would be recorded as 11:60 pm.) That gets rid of the quarter day, leaving us with 365 days. To get rid of that extra day, we need to add four more leap minutes. (11:60 am and 11:60 pm, as well as 5:60 pm, 5:60 am, and either 2:60 am or pm.) All of a sudden, we have magically redistributed (effectively made disappear) 30 hours (that's 108,000 s) in our calendar, by spreading them over 364 days. I didn't believe the math at first either, but I double-checked it, and it panned out. 108,000 s / 364 d = 296.7 s/d, or just 5 additional minutes added to each day.
In an increasingly computerized world, these changes would be easy to implement. And even if your clock or watch didn't account for leap minutes, you could always adjust your clock manually by five minutes or so each day (yes, I know that sounds like a pain, but if it's so hard, just get a watch that can auto-adjust).
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So, there it is. I fixed the calendar. Every year now starts on a Sunday, and ends on a Saturday. Thoughts?
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