End-of-year pop quiz: What day of the week will New Year’s Day fall on one year from tomorrow?
An economist and an astrophysicist from Johns Hopkins University want to make it easy for you. Under their proposed new calendar, New Year’s Day would always fall on a Sunday, just as it does for 2012.
Your birthday would fall on the same day of the week, year after year. Christmas would always come on Sunday. And Halloween would disappear. (Well, not really. It would just have to move to Oct. 30.)
While calendars have been subject to change and reform for centuries, this new calendar likely won’t transform our lives anytime soon.
But, if the same date were to arrive on the same day of the week year after year, it could have an enormous impact on businesses, the creators say.
“The number of days used to calculate interest in bond markets, swap markets, forward rate agreements and mortgages varies from institution to institution and country to country,” said Steve H. Hanke, an applied economist at the Whiting School of Engineering at Johns Hopkins.
“I made a rough calculation in the world bond market, and the magnitude of the error is around $130 billion a year,” he said.
And what about planning?
“Our plan offers a stable calendar that is absolutely identical from year to year, and which allows the permanent, rational planning of annual activities, from school to work holidays,” wrote Richard Henry, an astrophysicist in the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.
For some of us, though, unpredictability is the spice of life.
“I don’t know how I would feel about my birthday always being on a Thursday,” said Kelvin Wilkerson.
As a retail manager from the Old Fourth Ward, he appreciates the way the plan would simplify comparisons of sales from year to year.
But his birthday? Always on a Thursday? Never on a Saturday?
Under the Hanke-Henry permanent calendar, every quarter would consist of two 30-day months, followed by a 31-day month.
Thus, Oct. 31 would disappear, along with the 31st days of January, May, July and August. And four new days would appear: June 31, Sept. 31 and Feb. 29 and 30.
Because every quarter would be the same length, it would simplify calculations in financial markets.
But David Dundee, an astronomer at the Tellus Science Museum in Cartersville, pointed out that some holidays, based on the lunar calendar, will still be unpredictable.
Because it is scheduled to occur on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of spring, Easter, for instance, will still float.
And many holidays in the Jewish and Muslim calendar are also calculated by phases of the moon, which refuse to line up with days of the week.
Another element of the Hanke-Henry plan that may provoke even more consternation is their suggestion that the world go to “universal time,” in which everyone’s clock is set to Greenwich time on a 24-hour scale.
That would mean that, for most Atlantans, the clock would read 3:30 a.m. rather than 8:30 a.m. when they arrived at work in the morning. Lunchtime would come around 7 a.m. Bars would announce last call shortly before 9 p.m.
So will this new calendar be universally adopted on Jan. 1, 2017, as the creators have suggested? (They chose that year because it’s the next one, after 2012, when New Year’s falls on Sunday according to the current, Gregorian calendar.)
“We don’t have a particular judgment about that one way or another,” said Hanke. “We have a calendrical and temporal mess. We’re proposing a solution to fix the mess.
“My view is, you do your scientific research, you prepare, you let people take a look at it and let the chips fall where they may.”
Only time will tell.
The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar
Dates would occur on the same day each year based on the new structure.
January
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30
February
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30
March
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
April
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30
May
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30
June
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
July
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30
August
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30
September
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
October
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5 6 7
8 9 10 11 12 13 14
15 16 17 18 19 20 21
22 23 24 25 26 27 28
29 30
November
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3 4 5
6 7 8 9 10 11 12
13 14 15 16 17 18 19
20 21 22 23 24 25 26
27 28 29 30
December
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
1 2 3
4 5 6 7 8 9 10
11 12 13 14 15 16 17
18 19 20 21 22 23 24
25 26 27 28 29 30 31
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The following extra week will be added at the end of December, every 5 or 6 years: Sun. 1, Mon. 2, Tue. 3, Wed. 4, Thu. 5, Fri. 6, Sat. 7
Note: the “Extra-Week Years” are every year in which the Gregorian calendar begins or ends on a Thursday: 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105, 2111, 2116, 2122, 2128, 2133, 2139, 2144, 2150, 2156, 2161, 2167 ...
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