Enjoying today? It’s OK, I guess. I don’t feel much different. It’s just an extra day, a calendar patch needed because the Earth actually takes 365.2422 days to get around the Sun. Every four years we have to take account of that .2422. 2012, for instance, has 366 days. Imagine a world without leap years though: a pair of researchers at Johns Hopkins University have a solution that will create a more uniform calendar when holidays are always on the same day, leap years are gone, and every year will be the same, calendar-wise, forever and ever."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," says Hopkins astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry. "Think about how much time and effort are expended each year in redesigning the calendar of every single organization in the world and it becomes obvious that our calendar would make life much simpler and would have noteworthy benefits."We use the Gregorian calendar (the Christian calendar) now and have for about four centuries, when it was instituted as a replacement for the Julian calendar, which used a value for the length of a year off by enough to mess things up pretty good. The main difference between the two is that the Gregorian calendar drops a few extra leap days every 100 years to make up for that small fraction of a day the Julian calendar was off.The Hopkins calendar, actually called the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar after its founders, ditches the leap day idea altogether in favor of adding a week every five or six years to the calendar as a sort of mini-month, which actually seems way more disruptive than having a birthday on different days of the week every year. Hey, I like the variety. But the researchers have a motivation a bit deeper than personal convienience: financial markets."Our calendar would simplify financial calculations and eliminate what we call the 'rip off' factor,'" explains Hopkins economist Steve H. Hanke. "Determining how much interest accrues on mortgages, bonds, forward rate agreements, swaps and others, day counts are required. Our current calendar is full of anomalies that have led to the establishment of a wide range of conventions that attempt to simplify interest calculations. Our proposed permanent calendar has a predictable 91-day quarterly pattern of two months of 30 days and a third month of 31 days, which does away with the need for artificial day count conventions."It gets better. The pair also want to do away with time zones and daylight savings time, again for the sake of finance and the global stream of business, “greatly facilitating international understanding.” So, like, you in New York could call your mate in Australia at 4 p.m. (assuming they want to keep the a.m./p.m. convention) and say “Hey, I’ll call you at four” and both ends of the line would be in the same time zone at four. So the New Year would come at the same midnight all around the world, no matter how much it happens to look like noon. Neat.Anyhow, I’m pretty in favor of ditching the seven day week altogether. We time our lives according to something in the Old Testament? C’mon. Also: insert joke about the Mayan calendar here because I’m not gonna think of one. It’s a holiday, somewhere at least.A version of this post originally appeared Jan. 31, 2011.Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.
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