World Day
Today, as everyone has probably noticed, is the 29th February. I'd like to wish all the people whose birthdays fall on the leap day a very happy day. That said, I feel that they probably get enough attention; I for one would probably be quite happy to get away with having to deal with birthdays once every 4 years - except that everyone would insist on making a bigger thing of the few that I do have.
The interaction of the orbits of the bodies in the solar system are something the we don't really have the capabilities to change or ignore completely1, but it's not something we should let rule how we name time. I have explained my method of naming days in previous posts. What I'm going to outline here I originally read in, I think, an essay by Isaac Asimov.
Let's start basic - Earth has approximately 365 days in a solar year, and 28 days in a lunar month. A quick bit of division will tell you that there are just over 13 lunar months in a solar year - to be precise, 13 lunar months and a day2. A 28 day month has a number of useful features (assuming we're keeping the 7-day week - something that I feel works quite well), in that each successive month will begin on the same day of the week. This leads to a very nice way of dealing with a 364-day year - 13 months of 28 days. If we take the first day of the first month to be a Sunday, we can either have a number of traditional holidays fall on weekends3.
However, we need to deal with a 365(.24) day year. If we want to keep the weeks all nicely aligned, we need some way to use up the extra day. Already, in the accurate keeping of time, there are leap-microseconds used to keep the different methods of time keeping in sync; as we don't give names to the different fractions of a second, no-one really notices or minds. What if we do the same with the extra day? Have one day a year that is not a part of any month, does not have a day of the week, but is a special named day; Asimov put forward the name 'World Day'.
World Day could even be put somewhere where it could have significance - it could be the first day of the year, for example (day 0, from a computing viewpoint; this method allows the day of the week to be trivially derived from the day of the year). There are of course some issues - events would not fall on different days of the week, so you wouldn't get your Saturday birthdays. However, some things will begin to make more sense - the direct use of a Lunar month will hopefully stop Easter jumping around so much - although, we can't rely on the moon to have any real level of accuracy
I've been ignoring leap years up until now, although the more astute readers might be able to guess the solution - another special day, without a month or day of the week (it was cunningly named 'Leap Day', I believe). Putting it as the 365th day would not add any complexity to programming tasks, and would give everyone an extra day to get pissed.
This would leave us with an extremely simple calendar; the days of the week will always correspond to the same days of the month and, with the exception of leap years, the same layout of the entire calendar every year. We don't escape from the fact that some people's birthdays only show up 24 times a century, but we do get to deal with a calendar that makes a lot of sense. Think of it as a Metric form of dates :).
- 1 ↑ Despite what some MMO players might believe, some people do have to deal with things like sunlight. We don't have robot servitors to deliver everything...yet.
- 2 ↑ On a non-leap year
- 3 ↑ I personally use Mondays as the start of the week, but would be willing to switch if there was an actually logical choice in the matter