GardenBanter.co.uk - View Single Post - calendars of 6 year intervals; calendar of trees

06-01-2004, 02:02 AM

In article ,
(Archimedes Plutonium) wrote:

Ken Pledger wrote in message
...
In article ,
(Archimedes Plutonium) wrote:

I collect pretty calendars and knew that one year I could revisit an
old calendar and hang it up to use for that new year. I had to wait 6
years because now I am re-using a 1998 calendar for year 2004. So that
I can basicly recycle my old calendars and have a stock of 6 calendars
to cover every future year....

You need 14, not 6. A year may begin on any day of the week (7
possibilities), and it may be either a leap year or not (2
possibilities), giving 14 possible year-patterns altogether. This
ignores holidays such as Easter.

.... You see, I am certain that 14 will cover all bases,
but will 7 cover all bases if I make a double switch in leap years....

Yes, certainly; but I prefer to use 14 because I'm too lazy to
change calendars at the end of February. :-)

....
If we made the Autumnal equinox or if we made say 14Dec or 7November
as 1 January, by that way, we can have all the four seasons into one
year without winter divided between two different years. And when we
make such a switch we have all the months have either 30 or 31 days, including February. And
a leap year in such a revision would have December, the last month
have either 30 or 31 days depending on whether it is leap year or not....

Our calendar is undoubtedly a mess, and there have been various
quite good ideas for reforming it. However, many people are very
conservative about the calendar, either for religious reasons or just
because they don't like familiar things to be disturbed. It would be
much easier to convert the U.S.A. to metric weights and measures,
because that involves only one country. (Good luck to the Americans who
are trying!)

As for your equinoxes etc., IIRC both Christmas Day and New Year's
Day were originally approximations to the southern solstice. If they
had hit it accurately, we would have Christmas on the 1st January which
would also be the southern solstice (midsummer here and midwinter in the
northern hemisphere). There are lots of nice ideas like this in the
literature of calendar reform, but the general public of the whole world
isn't easy to convince.

Ken Pledger.