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Create a Truly Happy New Year
Lester Earnest https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/
2017.03.12
Summary. Given that we live in a four-dimensional world,
keeping track of time and planning future uses of it are important aspects of
our lives. Numerous calendars have been used around the world, each associated
with an organized religion, the most widely used today being the Gregorian.
This note proposes a non-sectarian Planetary Calendar that can also be used to
track religious and other holidays and is so simple that you can carry it in
your head. One radical element of this proposal is that it puts the entire
planet in a single time zone. This note also reviews some local calendar
history that spread around the world.
Our early ancestors saw that there was a
big clock visible above, namely the daily movements of the Sun, Moon, stars and
planets. They soon figured out that the positions of the stars correlated with seasonal
climate changes and after they invented writing they started creating calendars
in conjunction with organized religions that established various religious
holidays. Over time the Mayan, Chinese,
Hebrew, Julian, Eastern Orthodox, Gregorian, Arabic, Islamic,
Persian, Khmer, Thai, and Tongan Calendars were developed, among others. The
Gregorian Calendar was named
after Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in
October 1582.
As you likely have noticed, it includes a dozen irregular
months with some bearing the names of ancient Roman Emperors. There are 14 kinds of Gregorian calendars that
occur in semi-random order, each starting on one of the seven alternative days
of the week and are either Leap Years or Step Years.
The reason that the Gregorian Calendar
dominates today is a byproduct of some intertribal wars that began about 50,000
years ago and a successful world domination scheme started a couple of hundred
years ago by racist Christians– see How modern fake
racial classification systems came out of the old fake continent of Europe.
LESCAL. In 1966 I designed, set up, named, and started managing the
Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). Using the DEC PDP-6
timesharing system that had been ordered by John McCarthy, I found a fixed-format
calendar-printing program that I think was called CAL. I then wrote for myself
a program called LESCAL that made customizable Gregorian Calendars in assorted
formats. It was evidently the first to enable users to keep track of events of personal interest online
and that idea soon spread around the world.
LESCAL provided 63 alternative formats
with weeks starting either on Sunday or Monday and with choices between one
month per letter-size page, one year per big page, or weekly 2 x 4 inch pages.
I used the latter because there were no pocket computers then and I could put a
year’s worth of those little pages into a small pocket notebook to manage my
life. I put in family birthdays and other things such as the dates, locations
and starting times of the thousands of bicycle races at which I officiated, ranging
from local to Olympic and other international events.
When the Stanford University Registrar
heard about LESCAL he asked me to set it up to cover recognized holidays and
main academic events such as the beginnings of classes each quarter as well as
Midterm and Final Examinations. For years, I kept his office supplied with
calendars looking ten years ahead for planning purposes.
Planetary Calendar. I now propose a new
kind of calendar without any built-in holidays so that it can be used around
the world in a consistent way and has an associated timekeeping system that
makes it easier to keep tabs on the rest of the world. It dumps the use of
months along with the Roman Emperors and instead identifies dates by their week
number (two digits) and day number (one digit). However, for practical reasons
I suggest retaining one element of the Gregorian Calendar, namely counting
years from its “Current Era” beginning date since many of our historical
records are based on that. Instead of having 14 kinds of calendars, like the
Gregorian, it will have just two: Step and Leap Years, which are identical
except for the last day of the year. However, there are some related choices to
be made about when to start years and days, time zones, and how long weeks
should be, as discussed below.
Note that when we are given a specific
date in the Gregorian Calendar it is necessary to look it up in order to figure
out which day of the week it is on whereas under any of the calendars proposed
below the day of the week is specified by the low order digit of the date,
which substantially simplifies planning.
New Year’s Day. When should we start each year? Several
calendars, including the Gregorian, start near the winter solstice, when the
duration of sunlight is shortest. That made sense when most people were farmers
and that was a turning point toward increasing sunlight in the northern
hemisphere. Of course, when the duration of sunlight is shortest in the
northern hemisphere it is longest in the southern hemisphere.
Another choice, which was used in some old
calendars, is to begin at the vernal equinox, when days and nights are of
approximately equal length. Note that the vernal equinox in the northern
hemisphere coincides with the autumnal equinox in the southern hemisphere, making
the length of the days about the same in both places then. That makes sense to
me because the vernal equinox is about the time that plants start growing a lot,
making it a true beginning. Since most of the world’s population lives in the
northern hemisphere, I suggest that its vernal equinox be used.
Whatever starting date is chosen for the
calendar, it will be necessary to make a one day adjustment approximately every
four years to deal with the fact that the earth’s orbit around the Sun is not
an integral number of days.
Time Zones. After clocks were
invented, various cities around the world set up standard times for their
locations, so there were hundreds of time zones. The start of each day was put
at midnight because that made sense for farmers, who were the dominant group then
and who were normally asleep at that time.
When railroads started operating, they had
a serious scheduling problem with so many time zones and managed to get the
world divided into 24 zones, each an hour apart, so that their schedules could
be made more coherent. However, that still leaves us with some problems when
trying to guess in which time zone a given city is located and whether or not
they are on Daylight Savings Time. Things get more confusing on long flights
over multiple time zones.
I suggest a radical change: put the whole
world in one time zone, which will allow everyone to know what time it is
everywhere. Under that system schools, businesses and the like would set their
own operating hours as they like, just as they do now, and would likely
continue to show them on their web sites. Daylight Savings Time would be
eliminated but organizations would be free to adjust their business hours with
the seasons if they wish. For timekeeping, I recommend representing hours and
minutes in a form that is already widely used, with 2143 specifying hour 21 and
minute 43.
Under this scheme, normal work days in
some parts of the world would span parts of two calendar days, but that happens
a lot already and people manage to deal with it. The start of the day would
have to be assigned to a particular longitude and the simplest choice would be
zero degrees longitude, which would put everyone on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), though
arguments can be made for other choices. Note that the typical start of working
days under Pacific Time (9 AM) would then become 0100 GMT and what are now
Mountain, Central, and Eastern Times would each be incrementally one hour
later. Also, the silly imposition of Leap Seconds at the end of each year would
be eliminated.
Weeks. Still another thing to
be chosen is the length of the week., which began as a marketing cycle. Ancient
communities generally held farmers’ markets a fixed number of days apart, the
intervals ranging from about 5 to 10 days in various parts of the world. Some early
Romans settled on 7 day weeks somehow and various
organized religions, chose different week days to meet so as to distinguish
themselves from others.
We can stick with 7 day weeks but it
appears to me that advancing technology, with the increasing use of machines to
replace people, makes it possible to maintain productivity with a shorter week,
such as six days – nominally four working days with two day weekends. Again that is up for grabs. I offer two versions below.
Days. In talking about days
of the week, I suggest dropping names like Sunday and Monday and their
translations into other languages and instead use two character codes, such as
“d1” for Monday.
7 Day Weeks. As at present, divide each year into 52 weeks, numbered 1 to 52,
which would naturally have 364 days but add an extra day called “d0” to Week 1
every year and call it “New Year’s Day.” In Leap Years, add another day, called
d8, to the last week of the year, making those years 366 days long.
6 Day Weeks. Alternatively, divide each year into 61 weeks, numbered from 1
to 61, yielding 366 days in the year, just right for Leap Years. Identify the
days in each week as d1 to d6 but in Step Years omit d6 from week 61. In other
words, Step Years would take a step backwards of one day.
In Summary, I suggest starting each year at the northern hemisphere’s
vernal equinox, running the whole world on Greenwich Mean Time, and using six
day weeks. There are other proposals to drop daylight savings time and use a
single time around the world as proposed here,
but that one would needlessly preserve months, including those named to honor
corrupt Roman Emperors.
Other
alternatives can also work but whatever we do, let’s dump the Roman Emperors!
I have now added the goal of getting this
proposal adopted worldwide by 2042 to my Bucket
List so that I can die peacefully in 2043, as planned.