The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #77229   Message #1376289
Posted By: McGrath of Harlow
10-Jan-05 - 08:33 PM
Thread Name: BS: Metric Speed Limits (IRL)
Subject: RE: BS: Metric Speed Limits (IRL)
Right then, if you're into change, how about this one ( from the New Scientist):

Novel calendar system creates regular dates

A US physicist is lobbying for people to adopt his novel calendar in which every date falls on the same day of the week each year.
..."For many years, I've had to make up a new schedule to tell my class when homework is due," says Dick Henry, a physicist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US. "Here I am putting all this totally unnecessary work in and I decided I better do something about it..."

So Henry designed a calendar that uses 364 days, which breaks down evenly into 52 weeks. In his so called "Calendar-and-Time" (C&T) plan, each month contains 30 or 31 days. He decided on each month's length by forbidding the new calendar to differ from the old one by more than five days and by setting Christmas Day, 25 December, to always fall on a Sunday...

His constraints meant eight months would have different lengths than they do now. March, June, September, and December would each contain 31 days, while the other months would each get 30. To keep the calendar in synchronisation with the seasons, Henry inserted an extra week - which is not part of any month - every five or six years. He named the addition "Newton Week" in honour of his favourite physicist, Isaac Newton.


You can read the rest of it on the New Scientist website.