I ran into an article on-line regarding the purposed calendar reform by two professors at John Hopkins University.   The calendar called the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, named after the two professors who devised and are pushing the reform, is based on a fixed day calendar.  The idea is that there are always 7 days in a week, the year always starts and a Sunday, and you never have to change your calendars to reflect movements of the dates from one day of the week to the next again.

Just because you are employed by John Hopkins doesn’t make you right.

And if this ever did go through . . .   do they really think they that name will stick?  How arrogant to name a new calendar after oneself.  I know it’s the academic thing to do, but it’s not like they just discovered new plant life or developed a new physics theory.  They are proposing to modify how we denominate time.   They are professors . . .   not the pope . . . .

One half of this team, Henry,  wants the reform so your calendar days stay the same every year because he was annoyed at changing the dates for his students for lectures and syllabi.  I am sorry you are annoyed by that.  How inconvenient.  He himself admits: “The calendar I’m advocating isn’t nearly as accurate”; but he goes on to say “But it’s far more convenient.”

Wish that worked for me.  Man, the P&P I just wrote isn’t very accurate . . .   but it sure will convenient to use!!!!  What, we are missing pieces?  That’s okay . . .  I’ll just tag it on the end every few years, no one will notice.

Blink Blink

Oh, you say it’s better for business . . .  by all means.  After all time is money right?  That is the concern driving the second half of this duo to push reform.  Hanke believes that a more business friendly calendar is more right for the times.  Under their reform, The calculation of interest would be more uniform and holidays would be easy to schedule, always falling on the same day, especially not needing to pay people holiday pay for Christmas and New Years for they would always fall on Sunday.

Say good-bye to long weekends and the excitement of your birthday finally landing on a Saturday.  Is that petty?  Maybe.  But I kinda like my birthday floating around year to year.

This is not the first reform proposal in recent decades.  The last century was  full of different concepts from different parties on how to better rearrange our marking of time.  Bigger fish than two smarty pants professors have tried including the UN and their predecessor the League of Nations.  And they failed.

The problem with calendar reform is there is no one solution to the multitudes of issues that people have with the current Gregorian Calendar.

• It is not perpetual. Each year starts on a different day of the week and calendars expire every year.
• Making it difficult to determine the weekday of any given day of the year or month. (this interrupts my daily life)
• Months are not equal in length nor regularly distributed across the year, requiring people to make up ways to remember which month is 28, 29, 30 or 31 days long.  (I have a brain injury, and I can remember without tricks)
• The year’s four quarters (of three full months each) are not equal (being of 90/91, 91, 92 and 92 days respectively).  Equal business quarters would make accounting easier.
• The Calendar is based on religious beliefs.  7 days a week.  Sunday being the final day of the week, the Sabbath.
• Each month has no connection with the lunar phases.
• Leap Year every four years accounting for the .2422 days in a solar cycle not accounted for in the 365 days in the calendar year.

The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar

My biggest beef with this idea:  lets take a giant step backwards and adopt an inaccurate calendar because it is more convenient.  Take an abstract concept of time and make it whatever we want, completely disregarding the only natural indications of passing time:  Nature.    We do not account for the moon, why account for the sun?

The truth of the matter is, no matter how inconvenient the Gregorian calendar might be, when looking in terms of the solar cycle, it is very accurate.

But perhaps what the world needs is to adopt a calendar system more like the Mayans.  They had three calendars.  And they used how these calendars fell with each other to make extremely accurate predictions in solar activity.    They had a Lunar Calendar, their shortest, the solar or agricultural calendar, their largest, and then a really weird 260 day sacred calendar.  260 days, or the human gestational period.  Yeah . . .   we can skip that one.

That will never happen.  MULTIPLE CALENDARS to keep track of?  SHEESH!  How inconvenient.  Well, Hanke and Henry, I don’t find your proposal more convenient enough for the hassle of changing our current system.  I would rather make the move to the metric system. At least that system is indisputably logical.  And despite how accurate  and easy it is, look at the US refusing to make that change.

The big hubbub about this right now is the first day of the new year lands on a Sunday, as purposed by this calendar reform.  It would be an easy transition to start it this year.  Well . . . seeing how that day is tomorrow, I do not think the world is going to come around by then.  They can spend the next five years petitioning.  They will have another perfect opportunity in 2017, when Jan 1 lands on Sunday next.

You know if this Henry dude is so annoyed, he could save his syllabi for five years and just cycle it then.  He would only need five copies.  Really, though, you should freshen your classes more than that I would think . . .

I’m not terribly worried about waking up tomorrow or in five or ten years and having the Henke-Henry calendar on my wall.  The last two times we overhauled the western world’s calendar it took a Pope and an Emperor to make the change.  Sorry guys.  You need a serious backer.  Good luck with that.