The Heptal Calendar: Frequently Asked Questions
And Some Infrequently Asked Ones
What is it you don't like about months?
What's today's date? I usually guess the correct date, or one day later, or one day earlier. It's a little bit of unnecessary work that billions of people do at least once a day.
If some event, like vacation or a meeting, is coming up, I often want to know how many weeks there are till it happens, and what day of the week it happens on. If I know the Gregorian date, I have to do some thinking to figure those out. If I know the week and day, its obvious. More unnecessary work saved.
If I am planning an event, I often have to do the same thing in reverse: "I want to visit my sister two Sundays from now. What date is that?" Again, unnecessary work.
Maybe its better, but won't people refuse to switch? Remember the metric system!
To use the metric system, you have to learn many unfamiliar terms with strange names like "kilogram" or "milliliter". The Heptal calendar is based on seasons and weeks, which everyone already uses. The only new part is keeping track of which week it is.
Months are part of our cultural heritage, and I've been able to use them my whole life. Why switch now?
Roman numerals are also part of our heritage, and were the main way Europeans wrote numbers till the Renaissance. It wouldn't be that hard to continue to use them for things like addresses ("MDC Pennsylvania Avenue") or years ("I was born in MCMLXIV"). Why don't we? Because it's a bad idea to make our lives slightly harder just because we can.
How do I figure out when my birthday is?
Suppose a baby is born on win 2 Wed of a year that begins on a Monday. It's simple: celebrate the birthday on win 2 Wed every year.
But maybe each year you want the celebration to be the same number of days after the beginning of the year as the actual day of birth. The next year begins one day later, so in that year you add one day to the birthday and celebrate it on win 2 Thu. Whatever day a particular year starts tells us the "Offset" (ie 1 for Tuesday, 2 for Wednesday, etc.). In each year, we just add the Offset to the original birthday to figure out when to celebrate that year.
What if the baby is born in a year that doesn't start on a Monday? After the baby is born, subtract that year's offset to get her Zero Offset birthday. For example, if the year starts on a Wednesday (Offset = 2), and a baby is born on Sunday, then the baby's Zero Offset Birthday = Sunday minus 2 days = Friday. In each subsequent year, you add that year's offset to the Zero Offset birthday.
What if you have a whole classroom full of children - won't it get too complicated adjusting all the birthdays? No, because in each year the Offset is the same for everyone.
I thought Sunday is the first day of the week. Why do the weeks begin on Monday?
The weekend is Saturday and Sunday. The weekend should happen at the end of the week.
Why does the year begin on the winter solstice and not on January 1?
If the whole point of the calendar is to do away with the encumbrance of months, it is somewhat perverse having the year start on a day dictated by the months. January 1 only comes about 9 days after the winter solstice so the years line up pretty closely in the new system and old.
Why not add a day or two between the end of the last week of the year and the first week of the new year so that every year starts on a Monday?
That would be simpler, but it would mean that Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays, used for religious services by billions of Muslims, Jews, and Christians, would get out of sync with the days of the Heptal calendar. This would probably generate insurmountable resistance to the calendar.
What do you do about the two identical dates?
Under the system described here, every year has two different days with the same name. For example, if a year begins on a Monday (winter 1 Monday), then a 365-day-long year will
end on a Monday, which will also be winter 1 Monday. The best way to deal with this is to break the "after week 13 comes week 1" rule for the Fall/Winter transition. Instead, for Fall, there should be a shortened "week 14" that includes any days after week 13 that are still in the old year. In that week, only New Year's Day (the winter solstice) and subsequent days are referred to as "week 1".
Why not just use 52 weeks?
One could base a calendar on stating the week-of-year rather than the season and week-of-season. I think that it would be harder for people to remember which week it is if the number goes from 1 to 52.
In a given year, is the first day of each season the same day of the week?
No. The dates of the solstices and equinoxes are not exactly equally spaced because of the ellipticity of the Earth's orbit. The dates also wander back and forth a bit from year to year because a year is not exactly 365 days. For simplicity, the "calendar seasons," defined as weeks 1 to 13 of each of the four divisions of the year, are not altered to reflect these details.
Aren't months useful for dividing the year into 12ths?
The seasons naturally divide into groups of 4 weeks at the beginning and end of the season and five weeks in the middle. The twelve such divisions in a year are somewhat like months. Of course, the middle one of each three such divisions is 25% longer than the other two.
For some purposes, such as paying rent or collecting a paycheck, it may be useful to have more even months. The Heptal Calendar accomodates this as well. If the first and third division of each season take two days from the middle division, the resulting "months" will have lengths of 30, 31, and 30 days, respectively. The "stolen" days are always Mon & Tue of week 5 and Sat & Sun of week 9. For functions that need months, it's not hard to carve them out of the Heptal Calendar. For everything else, we can ignore these extra divisions and just use weeks and days.
Isn't it a waste of time to promote a calendar that will never be adopted by anyone?
Correction: Will
probably never be adopted.