The perpetual calendar
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From: Andrew Usher on 22 Feb 2010 18:59 Robert Bannister wrote: > > Once again, I said that I excluded having days outside the week. And > > the first day of the week is Sunday, not Monday - that is an > > incontrovertible fact. > > Oh dear. I had thought that you weren't a crank up till now. Right. So now believing what has been held for over two millennia makes one a crank. All hail ISO, our new overlords! > > Having 13 months, in addition, would screw up a bunch of things ; in > > particular, 13 can't be divided. > > Why is that so important? Why is not having days outside the week > important? I seem to have lost the point of having a calendar change. Don't people use halves, thirds, and quarters of the year? Andrew Usher
From: Andrew Usher on 22 Feb 2010 19:07 Peter Moylan wrote: > Andrew Usher wrote: > > > And I moved the start of the week numbering to August from Nov. 1 so > > that the academic year and the US football season would be on the > > fixed schedule, and I think there can be no objection to that. > > Aha. Now I understand an aspect of your proposal that hadn't been clear > to me. You're proposing different calendars for different countries, > right? An interesting idea. I wasn't actually thinking that way. Doesn't everyone start the academic year in the fall, between late August and early October? I guess you don't down there; well, I'd have no problem with you using a different week numbering if necessary, but it would probably be best to just extend mine later than August, and it keeps the perfect link with the Church calendar as long as you end before All Saints'. In fact that is nothing more than using my original idea of using Nov. 1 as the start. > While you're at it, though, why not have the academic year line up with > the calendar year, the way we do it here? Making an academic year > straddle two calendar years sounds just plain silly. Presumably this is only done in the Southern Hemisphere. > True, there are > good historical reasons for it, but if you're going to modify the > calendar anyway you might as well fix the glaring problems too. That's a different issue, though. Andrew Usher
From: Transfer Principle on 22 Feb 2010 19:23 On Feb 22, 11:02 am, spudnik <Space...(a)hotmail.com> wrote: > how about a leap-fortnight, half as often? > > Just use a 364-day year with a leap week. What's troublesome about that? I never thought about it that way, but come to think of it, the calendar that Usher describes really is a "leap week" calendar in disguise. To answer the question, "what's troublesome about that?" it must be emphasized that the more changes there are to the standard calendar, the less likely it would actually be implemented. Of course, it's unlikely that any calendar change would be implemented at all, but still, slight changes to the current leap year rule are more likely to be implemented than changing to a full leap week calendar. More radical changes, such as switching to 13-month years, are even less likely to be implemented than either type of calendar. As I mentioned earlier, the Usher calendar contains three leap weeks every 17 years. The following two links describe the accuracy of leap week calendars in general: http://www.hermetic.ch/cal_stud/palmen/lweek1.htm http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/leap/index.htm The first link describes the Usher leap week rule: Years Leap weeks Mean Year 17 3 365.2353 but later on the page, it mentions: Years Leap weeks Mean Year 986 175 365.242394 17yr cycle corrected by extra leapweek In other words, the Usher 17-year cycle will be off by one week in 986 years, and would need to be corrected by an extra leap week. This is fairly accurate for now. I'm not sure how one would insert that extra leap week into Usher's calendar, but then again, we'd have 986 years in order to figure it out... According to the second link, the corrected 986-year cycle gives a mean year of only about three seconds longer than the mean vernal equinox year. To answer spudnik's question: > how about a leap-fortnight, half as often? The only problem with having a leap fortnight in the Usher calendar is that it would extend the possible dates of Christmas to a fortnight. We'd have to have a range of either December 14th-27th, or December 21st-January 3rd. It's already awkward enough in the Usher calendar to celebrate Christmas on any day other than December 25th, so to have Christmas on December 14th or January 3rd would be awkward even more.
From: Andrew Usher on 22 Feb 2010 19:43 Peter Moylan wrote: > Andrew Usher wrote: > > > I chose the Christian holidays because they are international, > > ??? They're more so than any other holidays, are they not? Andrew Usher
From: Andrew Usher on 22 Feb 2010 19:49
Peter T. Daniels wrote: > > The Catholic Church has stated, I believe more than once (it's linked > > to somewhere in this thread) that fixing Easter to a particular week > > would be acceptable. > > "The Catholic Church" (which refers to no specific organization) > hasn't spoken for all of Christendom for nearly half a millennium. 'The Catholic Church' or simply 'The Church' refers to exactly one organisation. It's disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Also, it's been longer than half a millennium if one includes the East. > (It > took almost 200 years to get their newfangled calendar accepted just > throughout Western Europe, and it took the Russian Revolution to get > it used across the East.) Nowadays, though, globalisation would be much faster. AndrewUsher |