Time to Overhaul the Calendar? - Forget leap years, months with 28 days and your birthday falling on a different day of the week each year. Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland say they have a better way to mark time: a new calendar in which every year is identical to the one before. Their proposed calendar overhaul — largely unprecedented in the 430 years since Pope Gregory XIII instituted the Gregorian calendar we still use today — would divvy out months and weeks so that every calendar date would always fall on the same day of the week. Christmas, for example, would forever come on a Sunday. "The calendar I'm advocating isn't nearly as accurate" as the Gregorian calendar, said Richard Henry, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins who has been pushing for calendar reform for years. "But it's far more convenient." "Everybody has to redo their calendars," Henry said. "For sports schedules, for schools, for every damn thing. It's completely unnecessary." "My favorite reason it shouldn't be done is, 'But my birthday will always be on a Wednesday!'" Henry said. "Of course the answer to that is you can celebrate your birthday whenever you want."
This is a real thing? Brilliant, University educated scholars, wasting their time and federally funded resources, researching ways to overhaul a perfectly good calendar, because they don't like re-printing syllabi and calendar companies can't use the same standard template every year? Are you guys freaking kidding me? Of all the things in the world, this is what you have an issue with. You must be the laziest people on Earth. You don't have 10 minutes a year to update the dates on your course schedules? You don't think that calendar manufacturers just use a computer template to handle their printing?
And what's this shit with my Birthday falling on a Wednesday permanently? Fuck that noise. And don't give me the crap about "you can celebrate whenever you want." Sure that shit flies when you're like 8 and in the 2nd grade, mid-week birthdays were killer back then. All your classmates celebrate with a song and some cupcakes your mom sent you to school with on Tuesday (your actual birthday), then you have all the popular kids come over the following Saturday to bring you gifts and play a few rounds of tag (maybe hide n' go seek in the dark in your basement, if there's time). It's the best back then. But you can't get away with that now. Imagine me trying to tell my friends and relatives that I'd like them to provide me cake on Wednesday and then come pay homage to me on Saturday with gifts and free drinks at the bar. I'm sure that would go over like a lead balloon.
No I'd say the calendar situation is just fine the way it is...if you really need someone to take care of your syllabi for you just contact me, we'll arrange for paypal payments and I'll update your dates once a semester for something like $25...I'm completely serious.
Speaking of tackling the big issues...
Fox - The weekend came sooner than usual for the tiny South Pacific island nation of Samoa. When the clock struck midnight Thursday, the country skipped over Friday and moved 24 hours ahead -- straight into Saturday, Dec. 31. In June, the Samoan government passed a law to move Samoa west of the international date line, which separates one calendar day from the next and runs roughly north-to-south through the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Under a government decree, all those scheduled to work on the nonexistent Friday will be given full pay for the missed day of labor.
