Changing Times: The Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar

I have a long history of supporting worthwhile but hopeless causes so it should come as no surprise that I am officially declaring myself as a Hanke-Henry man.

Steve H. Hanke and Richard Conn Henry have proposed a new calendar.  Dates would always fall on the same day of the week.  For example, December 25 would always be a Sunday.  (That saves me an extra church day every year.) No more leap days, but every 5 or so years we'd have to add an extra week to keep the seasons in line.  (Call it an extra week of vacation and you have my vote!)  The best part is that they get rid of Daylight Saving Time.

The transition to the new calendar works well for 2012 as January 1 is a Sunday in both the old and the new calendars.  I'm switching and I hope you'll join me on New Year's Day.

For more details, read here:

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=13940

We propose a new calendar that preserves the Sabbath, with no exceptions. That calendar is simple, religiously unobjectionable, business-friendly and identical year-to-year. There are, just as in Eastman's calendar, 364 days in each year. But, every five or six years (specifically, in the years 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105, ..., which have been chosen mathematically to minimize the new calendar's drift with respect to the seasons), one extra full week (seven days, so that the Sabbath is unaffected) is inserted, at the end of the year. These extra seven days bring the calendar back into full synchrony with the seasons. In place of Eastman's 13 months of 28 days, we prefer 4 identical quarters, each having two months of 30 days and a third month of 31 days (see the accompanying permanent calendar**).

Moving on from the calendar to time, we recommend the abolition of all time zones, as well as of daylight savings time, and the adoption of atomic time — in particular, Greenwich Mean Time, or Universal Time, as it is called today. Like the adoption of a modern calendar, the embrace of Universal Time would be beneficial.

The new calendar is available here:

http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/hanke.henry.pdf

Posted via email from miner49r