Two professors, of astrophysics and applied economics respectively, have proposed a new and rational calendar. You'd never really have to buy a calendar each year because every 364-day year would essentially be the same, repeating over and over...at least until Dec 21, 2012 when the world will end, according to the Mayan calendar. It's more efficient for business and banking, they say, as well as making scheduling easier.
Retaining the sevenday week, --an absolute requirement for Christians, Jews and Muslims-- they come up with four quarters of three months each, with 30, 30, then 31 days. Each date would always fall on the same day of the week. Christmas always on Sunday, Memorial Day always on May 28th, 4th of July always on Wednesday, etc. Your birthday would always fall on the same day of the week.
Since Mother Nature is not as rational as professors like to be, instead of our current quadrennial Leap Year, with its one extra February day, every five or six years (they have a list) there would be an extra week added after December, to bring the days back into alignment with the solar seasons. In those Hop Skip Jump Years, there'd be 53 weeks and 371 days.
There was a time in my life when my rational nature --I do have one--, my desire for order and my obsessive-compulsive streak would have made me very much in favor of such a project. It's impressive, but my first reaction now to this plan ---partly because it does seem so do-able--- is "No!". It is not out of loyalty to Pope Gregory* but for the same reason that I want to keep the 12 hour clock, the dollar and the English measuring system. Because anything which smacks of further rationalizing and regimenting uniformity on a global basis wipes out locality, plurality, definition, tradition and familiarity. Even the complexities of the current calendar feel somehow more human than the professorial time machine.
The professors then propose an even more destabilizing change: the abolition of time zones, so that everyone on earth would follow Greenwich Mean Time...now neutered and de-Eurocentricized by calling it Universal Time. This means that everywhere on earth right now, as I write, it would be 6.22 pm or 18.22. But in San Francisco, it's 10.22 in the morning. For these two guys, the business benefits would outweigh the unbelievable strangeness of people in England having a Nine to Five working day, but in San Francisco it would be a Two to Ten day? This would disconnect clock time from any relationship at all to the light/dark flow of morning, noon and night. Seems nuts. Next we'd have the Star Date numbering system from Star Trek?
China already has one official time zone for the whole country. I am told, however, that people keep a second clock so they know what time it really is!
*Although now that I think of it, it's quite a comedown to have your calendar no longer euphonically and nobly named after a Roman Caesar (Julian) or a Pope (Gregorian) but two Baltimorian academics: the Hanke-Henrician?
2 comments:
Blech, I don't want rationality in every part of my life - there is something to be said for the messiness of the universe.
The basic calendar problem is that the year has such a peculiar number of days -- 365 (plus a fraction) -- a number you just can't do much with. An even 360 would be much better, being evenly divisible so many ways. So, the solution is to move the earth to a closer orbit to the sun, or slow down its rotation. That'll fix it.
--Nathan
Post a Comment