Richard Conn Henry has a potentially revolutionary new idea, with a few bugs…

Richard Conn Henry (he credits others on the site, but I will just mention his name here) has created a new calendar system so that every date is the same weekday, every year. The idea is similar to the one familiar to any huge LotR buffs as the calendar of the hobbits. The difference is that instead of having days that are not part of the year, you end up with a whole extra week in its own ‘mini-month’ ever 5 or 6 years. The whole thing is worked out, except for a few quibbles I have with it, listed below as taken from an email I sent him. I may have thought of other stuff, but this is my main analysis:

– You mention the problem of people born on Jauray 31, etc. You solution (just celebrate on the new last day of the month) is very good, but there is the other option of celebrating when your birthday WOULD be, according to the Gregorian calendar date (i.e., the first of the next month)

– Most of the point of C&T is convenience, however you suggest the elimination of time zones… how is this convenient? I, for one, think waking up at midnight being normal is just plain inconvenient. Everyone already uses UTC for international dealings, why change how it is done locally?

– I really like the idea of going to 24hr time everywhere.

– The idea that everyone born on a Newton week should celebrate their birthday on the 4th of July is, in my opinion, a bigoted American idea. It would be the same situation as someone born on leap-day according to the current calendar. They would probably just move to the closest day.

– I like the idea of removing daylight savings time, however changing working hours in its place may be a problem. Most employers would simply refuse to do it.

– Although yyyy-mm-dd is ISO standard, I don’t see the problem with using the worldwide (excluding north america) standard of dd-mm-yyyy, it is just the same thing backward.

– Moving Christmas to a Sunday is not such a hot idea, for two reasons. One, it ceases to be a real holiday and is just a special weekend. Two, we Christians (who pretty much invented the original holdiay) will no longer be able to have a special Christmas service to celebrate the birth of Our Lord. We will be required to ‘specialise’ the normal Sunday service, thus degrading the holdiday.

– Are you aware that JRR Tolkein created a calandar based on a similar idea for use by the hobbits in LotR?

I found the original article on it at: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20041222/news_1c22singular.html
and the site for the calendar itself is at: http://henry.pha.jhu.edu/calendar.html

Tags: Research

This is a good quote, too long for an excerpt.

Slashdot – perky
Things I want on a phone:
1. Small
2. Lots of space for contacts
3. Synch with Outlook
4. Some flash memory with a USB socket, like a USB memory stick
5. Well designed UI
6. Good audio quality
7. Shold look recognisably like a phone
8. Predictive text

Things I don’t want on a phone:
1. Camera
2. Video camera
3. Games
4. Audio recorder
5. mini qwerty keyboard
6. flashlight
7. GPS
8. Compass
9. Microsoft Office
10. A meda player

Things that are acceptable as long as they don’t get in the way:
1. GPRS
2. Some kind of WAP/internet thing
3. Bluetooth
4. a Java runtime

Someone is thinking, who wants a camara in a phone anyway??? Some of this stuff is okay, but some of it is rediculous! I must admit I have used some of these features on my dad’s phone, but they didn’t work really well. What we really need is a PDA that works as a phone, not a phone that works as a PDA. Incidentally, why did he want it to sync with Outlook? Outlook is pretty much useless and is getting worse every release.

Tags: Technology