In a few hours, it will cease to be 2023 and become 2024. Unless, of course, you live in a country like Iran or Ethiopia that doesn't use the Gregorian calendar. Or you live in a timezone further east than UTC+7, in which case it's already 2024 for you.

Thread time!

1/

Calendar reform has a long and distinguished history. For the most part, the goal has been to make things more accurate. Every Chinese emperor was expected to commission a revision to make the calendar more precise, though not all of them did so. Indian calendars have frequently been adjusted to match observations, and we have multiple siddhāntas which all show increasing refinement and precision in calculating the positions of the sun and the moon.

2/

Julius Caesar brought in Sosigenes to fix the Roman calendar, Jalaluddin Malik-Shah I, hired Omar Khayyam to improve the Iranian calendar, and Pope Gregory XIII employed Aloysius Lilius to improve on the Julian calendar to give us the Gregorian calendar that most of us use today.

3/

Since the Gregorian calendar became standard, various people have tried to improve upon it. Curiously, most have little interest in making it more accurate; rather, the prevailing goal seems to be to have the days of the year always fall on the same day of the week. The cycle repeats every 400 years (which in the Gregorian calendar is 20,871 weeks), but some people think it should repeat every year.

4/

One of the earliest proposals was submitted by Hugh Jones, under the pseudonym Hirossa ap-Iccim, in 1745 AD. Jones' proposal was pretty reasonable - the year number is 4 higher than the Gregorian year so that it counts years from Jesus' actual birth, and New Year's Day is moved back so as so coïncide with the southern solstice.

5a/

Additionally, every 4th year is a leap year except those that are integer multiples of 132, which is actually slightly more accurate than the Gregorian calendar. The year would consist of 13 months of 28 days, with Christmas Day falling on the extra day.

5b/

In 1849, August Comte came up with another proposal, in which the year consisted of 13 months of 28 days plus one extra day, the Festival of All the Dead. Each month would have been named after a significant historical figure; since this was 1849 and Comte was French, that meant one Jew (Moses) and 12 white European men.

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/comte.html

6/

A dude named Flammarion proposed a new calendar in 1905, in which a normal year consists of 364 days (52 weeks). Years that are integer multiples of 5 have a leap week, but those which leave a remainder of 0, 50, or 75 when divided by 100 are normal years. This is as accurate as the Gregorian calendar, and achieves the important goal of having an integer number of weeks in a calendar year at the mere cost of being harder to work with.

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/Searle.html

7/

In the 1920s, Moses Cotsworth proposed another new calendar. It retains the leap year rule of the Gregorian calendar, but consists of 13 months of 28 days. 12 of those months have the same names as in the Gregorian calendar; the extra month, Sol, falls between June and July. The last day of the year is called Year-Day and is not par of any month or year. In leap years, the extra day falls between June and Sol; it is also not part of any week or month.

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/cotsworth.html

8a/

Each year stars on Sunday, and Easter Sunday always falls on 9 April. Cotsworth, a railway accountant, argued that this would make it easier for railroad companies to compare income and expenditures between different years.

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/cotsworth.html

8b/

George Eastman, the founder and first president of Kodak, was a known fan of the Cotsworth calendar, and implemented it internally at Kodak, where it was used until 1983. Those who worked under with it apparently liked it a lot, but faced problems when converting their own dates into dates used by the public.

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/eastman.html

9/

In 1930, Elisabeth Achelis designed the World Calendar, and made repeated attemps to get the UN to adopt it. Under Achelis' proposed reform, January, April, July, October, and December each have 31 days, and the rest of the months have 30; June gets an extra day in leap years. Leap Day and Worldsday (31 December) are public holidays and fall outside of the week.

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/world-calendar.html

10a/

Every year and quarter-year starts on a Sunday. India supported Achelis' reform and it had the backing of a surprising number of Christian leaders, but it faced strong opposition from Jews, who pointed out that the Sabbath would fall on a different weekday every year, which would make proper religious observations incredibly impractical.

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/achelis.html

10b/

Since Worldsday and Leap Day would always fall between Saturday and Sunday, Achelis suggested that Jews could treat them as double-Sabbaths, evidently unaware that the Jewish calendar has rules in place precisely to prevent consecutive days of Sabbath restrictions. In any case, while Achelis and her supporters did keep up the fight, they ultimately failed to bring about calendar reform.

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/Lodge.html

10c/

Also in 1930, James Colligan proposed a leap week calendar. A normal year consists of 13 months of 28 days; the extra month, Columbus, falls between November and December. An extra week is added to every year whose last digit is 6, or which yields an integer multiple or 6 or 99 when divided by 100, or which is an integer multiple of 100 but not 400. This is considerably more complex than the Gregorian calendar, but at least every year has an integer number of weeks?

https://myweb.ecu.edu/mccartyr/colligan.html

11/

Something I notice about all these calendars is that their proponents emphasise how useful they are to *businesses*. Every quarter contains the same number of days, which is good I guess? Because apparently quarterly reports are incredibly important and absolutely must be delivered on the 1st of the month, and it's completely impossible for a company to have a quarterly report any other day of any month.

12/

And it's important for every day of the year to fall on the same day of the week because, uh, it's neater or something?

13/

They also tend to propose that all religious and cultural observances and festivals be moved to Sunday with a public holiday on the following Monday. Long weekends are great, but the motivation here is clearly to spare businesses the horrible burden of closing in midweek. And given how companies are increasingly making people work on public holidays, with Christmas Day being the only day when most people aren't working, I doubt that they would honour such a system.

14/

And as the Jewish reaction to the Elisabeth Achelis' World Calendar proposal illustrates, calendars that try to force every day to take place on the same day of the week wreak havoc with the religious obligations of observant Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Bahái'ís.

15/

Even if you're an atheist, this is still bad for you, as at the end of the year (and in the middle of a leap year), your wages have to last 8 days instead of 7, and you're not likely to get extra money when you're only working the same number of hours in the week prior.

16/

Leap week calendars avert this by having an integer number of weeks in each year, but that only serves to make the calendar harder to deal with for no extra benefit. (Leap month calendars are even harder to deal with, but that is because they synchronise their months with the phases of the moon, which I at least consider to be a benefit).

17/

And what they all overlook is that we live in a chaotic universe. Whether you measure by the ecliptic or the zodiac, Earth's orbit around the sun doesn't take an integer number of days, nor does the moon's orbit around Earth; plus, both are constantly but slowly changing due to orbital mechanics.

18/

An astronomical year lasts 365 years and change, with the change adding up to one extra day almost, but not quite, every four years. Neither a normal year nor a leap year is an integer number of weeks, and it is foolish and nonsensical to try and force the solar system to conform to an arbitrary human measure of time.

19/

Instead, I say embrace the chaos. If you want to reform the calendar, try and make it more accurate, and just accept that sometimes, holidays will fall on a Wednesday and we'll all have a midweek break.

#HappyNewYear to all who follow the Gregorian calendar.

end/thread

@Infrapink happy New Year to you too!

Off the top of my head, I can't think of any complaint a Baha'i would have with the days of the week changing. Baha'i dates are computed relative to the spring equinox and the eighth new moon following it. The seven-day week does exist, but it doesn't affect the placement of any holy days.