I began thinking about reforming the Gregorian calendar three years ago, at the beginning of another academic year at Johns Hopkins. Once again, I had to rearrange the dates on my astronomy course syllabus. I spend a full day every year simply updating class schedules and Web pages.
The cost of this to the economy, from loss of my services in more worthwhile endeavors, is about $500 a year. Multiply that by 200 professors and you get $100,000 a year. Multiply that by 1,000 schools and colleges around the world and you get $100 million per year lost. All businesses and institutions lose productive time this way. Think of the rescheduling involved in professional sports. The total cost of this inefficiency to the economy may be small in percentage terms, but it is enormous in absolute terms.
In less than a day, I designed a calendar that would look exactly the same from year to year. My proposed calendar has a year of 364 days, a number that is divisible by seven.
Anyone who has ever designed a calendar has been more or less stumped by the fact that it takes the Earth an uneven number of days to complete its revolution around the sun: 365.2422 to be exact. Our present calendar adds an extra day every four years. Instead of leap years, I would offer an extra week, every five or six years. I would name it in honor of Sir Isaac Newton, and ask that employers make it a paid holiday week to compensate for having both Christmas and New Year’s Day annually fall on Sundays.
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