Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Calendar Reform

Starting point is 00:00:00 Our calendar and system of keeping time are rather unique. It isn't nice and tidy like the metric system. It's a collection of odd units, sleep years, and rotating calendars. As such, many people throughout history have thought that they could do better. So they've made proposals for changing our calendar, some of which would be very different from what we are used to. Learn more about proposed calendar reforms on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong?

Starting point is 00:00:42 throughline is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. If you've been listening to this podcast long enough, you know that I frequently say that something will be the subject of a future episode. This is such an episode. I've done many episodes covering the origins of the calendar and timekeeping. It's a rather convoluted mess that has been passed down to us over time from a variety of ancient cultures.

Starting point is 00:01:24 It's why we have 24 hours in a day, but 60 minutes in an hour, seven days in a week and 365 days in a year. It's a rather awkward system, but it works and everybody knows how it works. Our calendar and our system of keeping time are sort of a protocol for society and civilization. That being said, many people have come up with ideas for improving the calendar. So let's start this discussion with some of the problems with the current calendar. The Gregorian calendar, while widely accepted, has been long criticized for its irregularities and inefficiencies. One major issue is the uneven distribution of days across months. Some months have 30 days and others have 31, and February has 29 or 28 days depending on leap years,

Starting point is 00:02:13 making the calendar inconsistent and difficult to memorize or predict without constant reference. This irregularity complicates accounting, scheduling, and planning, especially in business and administrative contexts where predictable periods are desirable. Another significant problem is that the Gregorian calendar does not align cleanly with the seven-day week. Each year, dates fall on different weekdays, which creates inefficiencies for industries that rely on fixed schedules or comparisons across year. years. There's no standardization of which dates fall on which days of the week. For example, last year Christmas was on a Wednesday, and this year it'll be on a Thursday, and the year after

Starting point is 00:02:53 that, it'll be on a Friday. The leap year system, while an effective approximation for aligning the calendar with the solar year, is also a source of confusion. Its rules are not intuitive, requiring exceptions for centuries not divisible by 400. This adds a layer of complexity to what is otherwise a straightforward progression of days. Religious observances further complicate matters. Many holidays such as Easter are movable feasts tied to lunar cycles rather than the solar calendar, resulting in shifting dates that vary from year to year. This inconsistency has made it difficult to standardize international holiday calendars or school years, especially in multicultural societies. Moreover, the Gregorian calendar divides the year into quarters of unequal length,

Starting point is 00:03:39 which is inconvenient for economic reporting and quarterly assessment in businesses. This lack of symmetry has led to calls for calendars with uniform quarters in months, which could simplify accounting and reduced errors in date-based calculations. So with that, let's go through some of the proposed calendars that would replace the Gregorian calendar. And the first is the International Fixed Calendar, which was proposed by the British accountant Moses B. Cotsworth, 1902. It divides the year into 13 months, each containing exactly 28 days, which results in months that are precisely four weeks long. This uniformity ensures that every month begins on the

Starting point is 00:04:25 same day of the week and that the dates always fall on the same weekdays year after year. The 13th month, which is often called soul under this calendar, is inserted between June and July on the Gregorian calendar. Since 13 months of 28 days adds up to 364 days, and because the solar year is approximately 365.24 days, the calendar includes an extra day at the end of the year called year day. This day falls outside the weekly cycle and is not assigned a weekday, so it's not a Monday, a Tuesday, a Wednesday, etc. In leap years, a second extra day called leap day is added after June 28th, and it too stands outside the seven-day week structure.

Starting point is 00:05:13 These additions allow the calendars to stay aligned with the solar year while maintaining the regularity of its 28-day months. Because the weekly cycle is uninterrupted within each month, but paused for the extra day at the end of the year or in the middle of the year, the calendar offers a consistency and symmetry that's not found in the Gregorian calendar. The next proposed calendar is the World Calendar. The idea of the World Calendar was first proposed by Elizabeth Achilles in the early 1930s through the World Calendar Association. She promoted the system as a way to simplify and harmonize

Starting point is 00:05:49 global timekeeping, especially for business and government. It even gained some support initially from the League of Nations. The World Calendar divides the year into equal quarters, ensuring that dates always fall on the same weekdays every year. It retains the traditional 12-month structure, but adjusts the number of days in each month to create four identical quarters. Each quarter consists of three months. The first month has 31 days, followed by two months of 30 days, making each quarter exactly 91 days, or 13 weeks. This allows for a consistent calendar where January 1st always falls on a Sunday, and every date has a fixed weekday. To reconcile this orderly structure with the 365-day solar year,

Starting point is 00:06:35 The World Calendar introduces a single day at the end of the year called World Day, very similar to the International Fixed Calendar. The day is also not assigned a weekday and falls between December 30th and January 1st. In leap years, a second extra leap day is added after June 30th, also outside the normal week cycle. By placing these days outside the seven-day structure, just like the International Fixed calendar, it maintains an unchanging relationship between dates and weekdays throughout the rest of the year. Another proposal is the Hank Henry permanent calendar. The calendar was developed in the 2010s by Richard Henry, a professor of physics and astronomy,

Starting point is 00:07:15 and Stephen Hank, an economist, both of whom are at Johns Hopkins University. The calendar divides the year into 12 months and retains the traditional names of those months, but adjusts the number of days in the months to ensure consistency. Specifically, March, June, September, and December each have 31 days, while all other months have 30 days. This results in a year of exactly 364 days, which is evenly divisible by seven, allowing each date to permanently align with the same day of the week. To account for the difference between the solar year, the Hank Henry calendar introduces a leap week rather than a leap day, that is added every five or six years, bringing the calendar back in sync with the Earth's orbit.

Starting point is 00:08:01 This leap week known as Extra is inserted at the end of December during designated years. Because the system eliminates the irregularities of month length and varying weekday alignments, it too claims to simplify scheduling, accounting, and timekeeping on a global scale. Yet another proposed calendar is the Symmetry 454 calendar. The Symmetry 454 calendar was proposed in the early 2000s by Irv Bromberg, a calendar reform advocate and mathematician with the University of Toronto. Bromberg's goal was to create a calendar that offered advantages of perpetual scheduling and consistent date-week-day alignment without violating the weekly rhythm of other proposed calendars.

Starting point is 00:08:44 Its name comes from the distinctive pattern and imposes on each quarter. Every quarter consists of three months arranged in a four-five-four-week pattern, meaning that the first and third months of the quarter have four weeks, and the middle month has five weeks. Each quarter thus contains exactly 91 days, which totals 364 days in a standard year, like all the other proposed calendars. This symmetry ensures that every month starts on a Monday and ends on a Sunday,

Starting point is 00:09:16 and every date always falls on the same weekday year after year. To align with the solar calendar, this calendar also adds a leap week at the end of December, approximately every five to six years. This extra week, known as Leap Week, keeps the calendar in sync with the Earth's orbit without breaking the seven-day weekly cycle. I should also give a mention to the French Revolutionary Calendar, which I covered on a previous episode. It restructured the year into 12 months of 30 days each, with names inspired by nature and agriculture,

Starting point is 00:09:49 such as Broomer and Thermidor. Each month was divided into three 10-day weeks called decades, and the remaining five or six days of the year were designated festival days, not part of any week. So what are the problems with all of these proposals? Each of these systems puts an emphasis on trying to put the same day each year on the same day of the week. For example, January 1st would always be on a Sunday or Monday depending on the calendar. And the only way that can achieve this is by inserting days into the calendar that are either not part of any week or weeks that are not part of any month. month. In our current calendar, every day is accounted for. Every date on the calendar has a day of the

Starting point is 00:10:33 week and is a part of a month. One of the biggest objections to the extra day proposals comes from religious groups. And by religious groups, I mean Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and probably a whole bunch of other ones. Friday is the Jumua in Islam, which is a community day of prayer. Saturday is the Sabbath in Judaism, and Sunday is the Lord's Day in Christianity. If you toss in a day that isn't part of any week, are the days of the week that follow really those days? Would Sunday be Sunday if there was an extra day thrown in since the last one? The proposals to insert occasional leap weeks attempt to solve this problem, but they just create another problem. Instead of a floating random day, you now have a floating random week that is not part of any month.

Starting point is 00:11:24 Personally, I think all of these ideas are bad. While I can see the appeal in having months or quarters that are the same size or having the same dates each year fall in the same day of the week, I don't really think that these are big problems. The current system works, even if it doesn't appeal to our more obsessive-compulsive natures, trying to make everything neat and tidy. However, there's a much more important reason why I think all of these proposals are a bad idea. idea. It would make the concerns over Y2K look like a walk in the park. Unlike Y2K, which was a simple concern over how computers would handle a number, this would be a total replacement of the entire calendar system, which is hard-coded into pretty much every computer in the world. Everything would have to be rewritten, and everyone on Earth would have to adapt to a new system. The cost of changing such

Starting point is 00:12:22 an ingrained system is simply not worth whatever the potential benefits would be of a new calendar. So is there a calendar reform that I would support? Actually, yes. It's an incredibly simple change that require changing almost nothing and hardly anybody would even notice. Yet it would solve one very annoying problem. It's called the Holocene calendar. All it does is add 10,000 to the current year. So instead of the year 2025, it would be the year 12,025. Everything else is the same. In fact, for all practical purposes, we could keep saying it's the year 2025. So what is the point of this?

Starting point is 00:13:06 Well, it completely eliminates the annoying BC timing, where 2,025 years ago, you have to start counting backwards. It's a system that would mostly be used by historians, archaeologists, and scientists. 10,000 years is just a nice round number that puts the start of the calendar at a point well before anything in recorded human history. So under this calendar, the year one would be the year 10,001. The pyramids would have been built sometime around the year 7441. The city of Jericho, believed to be the oldest city in the world, was founded approximately

Starting point is 00:13:43 9,600 BC, which would be around the year 401. Our calendar isn't something that can be changed on a number. a whim. When the Gregorian calendar was adopted in 1582, it faced an enormous amount of resistance, and that was 450 years ago, and all it did was change a few days. The interconnectedness of the modern world has made it exponentially harder to change the calendar. Reforming the calendar doesn't really solve any problems so much as they just shift the problems to something else. We live in a world where days, months, and years do not evenly divide into each other. And as such, no matter what calendar we use, something has to be fudge to make it work.

Starting point is 00:14:26 So we might as well just stick with the one we got. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Austin Oakden and Cameron Kiefer. I want to thank everyone who supports the show over on Patreon. Your support helps make this podcast possible. I'd also like to thank all the members of the Everything Everywhere community who are active on the Facebook group and the Discord server. If you like to join in the discussion, there are links to both in the show notes.

Starting point is 00:14:55 And as always, if you leave a review or send me a boostagram, you two can have it read on the show.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Calendar Reform

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