Dates would always fall on the same day of the week every year in a new calendar designed to simplify business and social planning.
Astrophysicist Richard Conn Henry and economist Steve H. Hanke of John Hopkins University used computer programs and mathematical formulae to create the new calendar, in which each 12-month period is identical to the one that came before it. If you were born on a Monday, your birthday would be on a Monday every year.
In the Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar, all months would have 30 days, except March, June, September, and December, which would have 31 days, making each quarter of the year identical in length.
“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 in a press release.
“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.”
The economic benefits, in particular, would be huge, say the researchers, with their calendar having a direct impact on the way interest, for example, is calculated on loans and mortgages.
“Our calendar would simplify financial calculations and eliminate what we call the ‘rip off factor,’” explained Hanke in the release. “Determining how much interest accrues on mortgages, bonds, forward rate agreements, swaps and others, day counts are required.
“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.”
The Gregorian calendar currently adopted in many parts of the world has been in use since 1582, when Pope Gregory amended the Roman calendar Julius Caesar instituted in 46 BC.
Several suggestions for revised calendars have been put forward over the years. Henry and Hanke say theirs is the simplest and most convenient of all those offered so far.
“Attempts at reform have failed in the past because all of the major ones have involved breaking the seven-day cycle of the week, which is not acceptable to many people,” Henry explained. “Our version never breaks that cycle.”
A challenge to all calendar designers is the fact that the Earth’s year is 365.2422 days long. This is traditionally overcome by adding an extra day every four years—a leap year, such as 2012 will be—which keeps the calendar in synch with the seasons.
Henry and Hanke drop the leap year, instead adding an extra week at the end of December every five or six years. Henry, in the “frequently asked questions” section of his website, suggests that for people born during this extra week, they “be like Queen Elizabeth” and select a birth date of their choosing.
Time Zone Reform
Henry and Hanke also want to reform world time to aid international business. They suggest abolishing world time zones and daylight savings time and adopting atomic time or “Universal Time” to synchronize dates and times around the globe.
“One time throughout the world, one date throughout the world,” they write in a January 2012 Global Asia article. This could be of benefit to large countries like Russia, which currently spans nine time zones, they explained.
“The adoption of Universal Time would give new flexibility to economic management in the vast East–West expanse of Russia: everyone would know exactly what time it is everywhere, at every moment.”
While most people would rise with the sun and go to work during “sunlight hours,” financial institutions could adopt the same opening hours.
“If thought desirable, banks and financial institutions throughout the country could be required to open and to close each day at the same hour by the world time. This would mean that bank employees in the far East of Russia would start work with the sun well up in the sky, while bank employees in the far west of Russia would be at their desks before the sun has risen. But, across the country, they could conduct business with one another, all the working day.”
Such a system is currently employed by airline pilots, note Henry and Hanke.
Daylight savings would also still exist in the form of a change to “working hours” but not to the actual time.
While for people living in the U.K. and other countries on Greenwich Mean Time it would mean that things would stay as they are, for other countries, the proposals could take some getting used to.
Henry gives the following example on his website: “In Eastern Standard Time Zone, a ‘9-to-5’ job is defined as a 14:00-to-22:00 (14 o‘clock to 22 o’clock) job. The next calendar day begins at what we now call 7 p.m. in the Eastern Time zone. (On the West Coast of the U.S., the next day begins at 4 p.m.)”
