[ weird things ] | introducing new and improved ocd timekeeping

introducing new and improved ocd timekeeping

You'd think that in the age of atomic clocks we wouldn't have debates about the passage of time. And yet, here we are...
alarm clock

Every year we have to change the calendars because old dates now correspond to new days, and we have to keep track of when important events should take place. Yes, it can be a bit of a hassle, but with computers on the job, we generally manage just fine. It’s not even something we even have to think about anymore. But for a duo of astrophysicists, a day of scheduling things in advance for each year is just too much work. So in order to bring some apparently much needed sanity to our unexpectedly insane calendars, they decided to start an impassioned campaign to adopt the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar which permanently ties a certain day of the week to a specific date and deals with that pesky extra quarter day it takes us to complete our orbit with an extra week every five or six years. And that’s not all. One of the calendar’s advocates, Richard Henry, says we’ll also need to abandon the international date line, switch to GMT no matter in which time zone we actually are, and change our daily patterns to accommodate this new uniform, standardized timekeeping method.

One wonders if Henry would also like to have us combine genders so we don’t have people who are humans but yet have different reproductive organs, as well as make sure we all have lunch strictly between 11:30 GMT and 12:30 GMT so there’s no haphazard eating at 11:53 or 13:22 GMT messing up the proper order of things. I mean come on, the man is seriously suggesting that we basically go ahead and ignore time zones because noting that humans in different parts of the world have different circadian rhythms and need to rearrange their days appropriately and logically is apparently stupid because that means different regions will have different schedules rather than a sole master one. No, this really is his argument against time zones. To make all this a bit more bizarre, his quest seems to have been born when after a day of planning his entire year’s teaching schedule, he bolted upright and screamed “this is utter madness! Madness I tell you, madness!” and rushed to dust off a calendar which would let him set what he wants his teaching schedule to be once and once only. And then the whole idea simply went downhill from there as he had to introduce fixes to our current calendars and time zones to cope with the facts that the Earth dares not to complete an orbit in exactly 365 days and has the temerity to also spin around its axis as it does, creating seasons and uneven daylight in the process.

As many impassioned advocates for their pet idea are wont to do, the criticisms Henry acknowledges in most of his rebuttals tend to be rather silly, like that of a woman complaining that she wanted her birthday not to be on a Thursday from now on. His bizarre response to that complaint? “You’re free to celebrate when you want! What the devil difference does it make what it says on the calendar?” So if that’s the case, why the devil would he want to rearrange our painstakingly calibrated time zones and calendars which do a very, very good job of time keeping in their current form? Because he’s so OCD about his teaching schedule, he’s right on the verge of having it turn into CDO? (Which is still OCD, just with the letters in the right order.) We’re talking about 7 AM for the American West Coast being nighttime just because it bugs Henry to know that there are people whose watches and calendars say something different from his own. If we struggled for days on end to work out how and when to observe all our holidays and what calendars we should use at the beginning of each year, I could see his point. But since we have no problem with any of this, why fix what’s not broken? The last time we had discrepancies with calendars was in 1712. After 300 years with nary an issue, I think we’re all set.

# science // calendar / timekeeping / timezone


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