Changing time: Proposed calendar would stay same, year after year

If you've ever wondered what day your birthday will fall on in, say, 2018 or even 2051, two professors at Johns Hopkins University have a plan to remove the guesswork. The astrophysicist and the economist are proposing an unchanging, permanent calendar where each year is just like the one that went before it.

Mostly.

Leap Year would be no more, Halloween would always fall on Monday, Oct. 30, and Christmas would forever be on a Sunday. Forget the childhood rhyme though. Thirty days hath not September on what's being called the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar. March, June, September and December would have 31 days. The rest would have 30. And a child born on a future Monday, "fair of face," would celebrate her birthday on Monday for life.

The variety would come every five or six years, when a weeklong "mini month" the professors call Xtr would be tacked on the calendar at the end of December to keep the seasons in sync, according to a website the two have created to promote their proposal. Xtr would occur in 2015, 2020, 2026, 2032, 2037, 2043, 2048, 2054, 2060, 2065, 2071, 2076, 2082, 2088, 2093, 2099, 2105 ....

The target date to begin worldwide adoption of the proposed calendar is this Sunday, Jan. 1. The target day to complete universal adoption is Sunday, Jan. 1, 2017.

The Hanke-Henry calendar was first proposed in 2004 by Richard Conn Henry, the professor of applied physics. Last year, economics professor Steve Hanke joined the push for change, saying it could "save roughly $130 million" just by reducing the possibility of interest-calculating errors that may occur when someone doesn't count the days in the month right. Hanke calls that "ending the rip-off factor."

"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," he said.

"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," said Henry, director of the Maryland Space Grant Consortium, in a written statement. "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."