Restarting the Calendar

The Wall St. Journal had a nice article today on alternate calendar schemes.

The chief advantage of these schemes is that a given date always falls on the same day of the week.

The Symmetry 454 calendar achieves this at the cost of having leap years be a whole week longer than a normal year.

The World Calendar achieves this at the cost of having "intercalary days" - 1 or 2 days per year that don't have a weekday name.

As I was reading the article, I was thinking about having to change computer programs en masse.

The "Y2K" reprogramming was "child's play" compared with what is needed for a world-wide calendar switch, admits Dr. Bromberg.

That quote practically writes itself into a rhyme:

Y2K
was child's play
compared to this switch
which would be a real...
high speed drive into a ditch.

My favorite oddball calendar is also mentioned - the International Fixed Calendar, with 13 months of 4 weeks each, plus 1 or 2 of those "intercalary" days.

Of course, switching to a 13 month year would eliminate financial quarters, would play havoc with associating months with the seasons, and would generally cause even more chaotic reprogramming of computers and human brains.

And some mention should be made, finally, of the French Republican Calendar, which was the law in France for a while. It featured 30-day months and 10-day weeks.

They loved the number ten,
they used it again and again,
they even, to my shock,
pushed a 10-hour clock.