Comments about ‘Changing time: Proposed calendar would stay same, year after year’

I vote . . . . . . no

There is no question that our current calendar is too complex.
According to Paul Harvey and the rest of the story the King of France (don't remember who) changed the calendar because new years day had moved into the spring. Some people refused to change and celebrated new years day on what we now call April 1st. They called them April Fools.

If memory serves the Mayan Calendar has 18 twenty day months (for 360 days) and 5 or 6 days of festival, depending upon the year. The concept is very similar. The quarter system with 91 days, two months with 30 days and one month with 31 days is a better solution for our culture. If they could some how get a week of festival built in to the calendar each year I would be a happy camper.

The idea of calendar reform has real merit, but this calendar would arguably be worse than the one we have now, due to the scheduling, billing, and accounting problems caused by having an irregular leap week every five or six years.

A calendar year composed of 13 months of 28 days, where each month starts on Sunday or Monday, and one or two extra days that do not form part of a regular week at the end of the year, would be much cleaner, and arguably worth the considerable effort required to make such a change. This one is not.

Umm... no thanks. The calendar system we have now has been working just fine for a few centuries.

I would, however, like to see the names of months changed so they actually make sense.

September... Sept... Seven.
October... Oct... Eight.
November... Nov... Nine.
December... Dec... Ten.

Yet we have:

September... Ninth month.
October... Tenth month.
November... Eleventh month.
December... Twelfth month.

That defies logic.

As far as holidays go... a simple legal resolution tying holidays to DAYS instead of DATES would fix a lot of the mess involved when holidays fall at bad times. Just make Halloween the last Friday of October and Christmas the last Friday of December, problem solved. But when governments have to be involved the simplest solution to a problem is rarely the one chosen.

Isn't the one we have now complicated enough? I recall somewhere reading or hearing about the problems of a thirteenth month, but can't remember right off hand.

In 1999 many were afraid of the Y2K bug, which never really happened on the scale some predicted. This proposed calendar has all the markings of a disaster of Biblical proportions from a computing point of view. The cost and manpower to switch the computing world over to this proposed calendar is beyond comprehension.

Older computers/devices that did not get BIOS/firmware upgrades would be useless for accurate record keeping or may completely fail. Many could not afford to replace electronic devices that work just fine with our current calendar.

This calendar must not be forced on the public without a VOTE by the People. Government are too stupid to make decisions like this.

I know this isn't a particularly serious exercise but enough already. For those of us who work with perfectly functional but older computers, for example, the modifications of when the switch to and from daylight saving time still haunt us. A whole new calendar would be ugly to make work on a computer, especially one that does not have net access to get whatever patch they came up with. Beyond that, everything from my answering machine to my clock radio to my car would not make the change. It would be nasty. Not 'world is going to end y2k style' nasty, as that was plain stupid. Just annoying, because things which display the date now or schedule based on it would never do so with a new calendar.

Just say no to drugs and just say no to a new calendar system. Both will mess up your mind.

@DeltaFoxtrot,

Blame that on the Romans. August used to be the sixth month until January and February were added to the front of the calendar.

@CTR Stan: The gov't made everyone change from analog 4:3 TV to new digital 16:9 HDTV and even gave coupons for free converter boxes.

Why not switch to this calender...OS's go out of style and taking 5-6 years to get worldwide acceptance allows people to upgrade. Windows won't be around as everyone will be running iOS or Android anyway.

@Kearns_Dad:

This is completely different from the analog 4:3 TV to digital 16:9 HDTV conversion. The primary reason for switching from analog to digital television was for improved emergency communications by freeing up frequencies in a post 911 world. Also, commerce is not dependent on TV resolution or transmission.

Unless you are a hardware or software engineer, then you may not comprehend the seriousness of this calendar change. Messing with the way date/time is calculated will make a hardware and software programming nightmare. I do not believe it is worth the risk of such a drastic change.

Small businesses will be hit the hardest by being forced to upgrade. Small business is the backbone of our economy.

Why should we continue to fill our landfills with perfectly good hardware just because they cannot handle the new calendar and time systems? One more symptom of our throw-away mentality.

I don't think anyone will disagree that Y2K was way over-hyped. However, this proposed change has the potential to be so much bigger than Y2K ever dreamed of.

There is no way to adequately respond to this issue with 200 word limit of this comment forum.

Who in their right mind would want their birthday on the same day of the week for life. What if I got stuck with Monday, for example. We all need alittle variety in life and our current calendar does that. I also think this is an attempt to erase Christ from our calendar. Their next step will be to eliminate 2012 and call it 0000.

shoot.....that means I'd lose my birthday.....which actually happens to mean a lot to me. so even if there were no other reason to oppose a new calendar.....

and let's not forget how utterly confused the entire world would be for many, many years.

Methinks Johns Hopkins isn't keeping these two guys busy enough. Or maybe they have trouble at home so they "work" at night. Either way, they are in desperate need of a life.

I know a calendar system that works. The sun goes up, then down. lol

I kinda like the messy calendar we are all in right now. It's a unique scheduler that keeps us refreshed with randomness.

No way on this proposal. But here is what I've wanted to do for years: add two days to Feb so that it has 30 days. Do this by taking a day each from 2 months with 31 days. Then every month would have 30 or 31 days. If your birthday was the 31st of a month that lost its last day, just celebrate on the 30th.

If we can't even go to the metric system, America will never embrace something as rational and logical as an unchanging calendar or a global time.

Sure think the smart move is a change to the lunar calendar. More accurate than the leap concept and simpler to understand. Puts us more in touch with the world around us. Might make us more observant of nature and how we impact our habitat. Of course it means only 28 days in a month and we would have months that precess over time on the seasons, but that is much less data to worry about and since we mostly have overcome the limitations of the seasons with air conditioning and heating it really doesn't matter much which month the winter solstice is in.

About Daylight Savings time; really it is used because we are dishonest with ourselves about getting up and going to work. Nobody wants to have to rise at "dawn" so we set our clocks and rise when ever we think it best to start our day. The workplace drives that for most so business controls when the shift starts and the clock is just a place keeper.

My only question is how many Federal dollars were wasted on THIS research project?