Proposal would keep calendar same every year – USATODAY.com.

Each year, Jan. 1 falls on a different day of the week, and the entire following year shifts accordingly. Schools, sports teams, businesses and banks spend many hours and millions of dollars calculating on what day of the week certain dates will fall, to schedule holidays and set interest rates.

Yesterday was the day to adjust our calendar to be aligned with the sun. We do that every four years on the 29th of February.  Our current calendar was invented about 1582 and is called the Gregorian calendar. It was named after Pope Gregory III.  Popes were pretty much the world leaders back in those days. They controlled much of what was going on.

The Gregorian calendar seems pretty screwed up to me so I don’t understand how it has lasted as long as it has. Most of us have memorized the rhyme “30 days has September, April, June, and November. Thirty one has all the rest except February…..”  Anyway according to the source article above a guy named  Richard Conn Henry who is a professor of applied physics at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore has figured out how to make the calendar day the same day of each week year after year. Currently the day of the year advances one day each year except during leap year when it does I don’t know what. :)  The author says that this new calendar will save millions of dollars that we now spend to remaking signs and such due to the constant day of the week change for calendar dates. It also affects interest somehow but that bean counting is beyond my interests.

I guess with the old calendar we are currently using we are using a 365.25 day year when in reality we have a 365.242 (and some more decimal points) year. Back in the days  before computers (yeah that includes 1582) it didn’t matter much but I guess it does now. How likely will it be that we will switch to an improved calendar? Given that we can’t seem to agree to anything now days it probably won’t occur anytime soon.

There are all kinds of calendars around today: solar calendars, lunar calendar, Hindu calendars, Chinese calendars, and fiscal calendars. I have never understood why most businesses start their year in October instead of January?

All this stuff is pretty complicated for us common folks. So, lets just skip the whole thing…..

But what do I know…