Time to change the Calendar System?

A Gregorian calendar

Think of ever getting rid of the boring calendar system we have with so odd arrangement of number of days and having a leap year with an extra day and your birthdays and festivals coming on different days of the week every year. Think how it would be to have a revolution in our calendar systems with two months of 30 days followed by one month with 31 days? Also every year the dates coming on the same day. Won't that be simply great?


Yes, as some of you might have guessed it as well, I am talking of the new Hanke-Henry permanent calendar which claims to be able to put the calendar dates in the same day of the week every year.

Although it's developers agree that this calendar is not as accurate as the Gregorian calendar, but htey say that this one is far more convenient than that one.

The main problem with the designing of a new calendar for the regular purpose is that every year has 365.2422 days thereby leaving some extra time that don't adjust well into a system of 24 hours. This extra time is dealt with by the Gregorian calendar by adding one extra day to February on every 4 years which makes a leap year. The Hanke-Henry calendar deals with this by dropping the leap year and instead makes a leap week at the end of 5 to 6 years.

But the redoing of the calendars in the Gregorian calendar is really boring and in fact unnecessary when we got to do it for the simplest of things like a sport schedule, etc. The Hanke-Henry calendar claims to fix this by putting every calendar day on the same day of the week every year.

This type of calendar is surely going to be more convenient to be used by people, especially in case of commercial organizations. This is going to reduce the amount of time taken to create a new calendar every year.

But this is going to create a big confusion when adopted. Calculations for interests would be complicated by the shuffle of days every month. Different groups would deal differently with this confusion and thus create a big confusion for the common people to understand this month based calculations.

Also, are people going to change their birthdays? Will anyone like the monotonous routine of having his birthday on the same day every year? Because everyone wants to celebrate his birthday on different days every year.

Due to these failures of the calendar might not be warmly welcomed. But still Henry has some hope in this calendar and says, "Real change is possible." Maybe this calendar will be accepted some day as other things change, like new names of some cities and countries, new rules, etc. We should hope for the best.

[via: Scientific American]

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