By: Hector Escobedo
Published
Since calendar reform efforts such as the International Fixed Calendar have failed due to neglecting the religious significance of the seven-day week, there seems to be growing consensus that for any perennial calendar to be successful, it must use leap weeks instead of intercalary days not assigned any day of the week. However, proposals such as Hanke-Henry and Symmetry454 retain the division of the year into twelve months which are non-uniform in length. A calendar which is as regular as possible, with uniform divisions of the year, is clearly superior: this was a major advantage of the International Fixed Calendar. However, months are really a vestige of ancient lunar calendars and do not fit neatly into the tropical year.
To avoid the dilemma of having either non-uniform months or thirteen months in the year, which makes seasons a non-integral period of months, it is advisable to get rid of them entirely. My proposed calendar instead uses the inverse division of four quarters, corresponding to the temperate seasons, each with exactly thirteen weeks. This is ideal for business and civil purposes, as activities and reports can easily be planned to recur on a weekly, multi-weekly, quarterly, or annual basis. A week remains seven days, and so the calendar will continue to conform to religious considerations as well as customary work schedules. For now, this proposal will be referred to as the Uniform Quarters Perennial (UQP) calendar.
The UQP calendar may be constructed according to the following principles:
- Every week begins on Sunday and is exactly 7 days.
- Every quarter is exactly 13 weeks (91 days).
- Every common year is exactly 4 quarters (364 days).
- Leap weeks are appended to a common year when required, to maintain the start of the year as close as possible to the day of the Northern hemisphere vernal equinox, but not later. Therefore Easter will always occur in the first quarter, after 1 to 5 whole weeks.
- There will be an interval of 5 or 6 common years between leap weeks.
Dates will no longer require days of the week to be noted separately from days of the month; for example, one can unambiguously refer to “Quarter 3, Week 12, Friday” as a fixed date. Calendars can display a reusable 7-column, 13-row grid design for each quarter without numbering the days, with one more row in the last quarter for leap week.
Since 20 March 2022 in the Gregorian calendar is a Sunday, and also marks the vernal equinox, it is a perfect synchronization point for this reform. Thus it will be designated as the first day of 2022 according to the UQP calendar, which is a common year. Quarter 2 of 2022 will begin on Gregorian 19 June, Quarter 3 on 18 September, and Quarter 4 on 18 December. UQP 2023 will begin on Gregorian 19 March 2023. The UQP years 2027, 2032, and 2038 will end with leap weeks. As an aside, this post is being published during the 2021 leap week! Also note that the Symmetry454 leap rule is designed to keep the equinox at the same approximate date over the long term, not to ensure that it stays at or before a certain date, and thus cannot be used for the UQP calendar. It has been verified to output results that would put the start of the year after the equinox. Further work is needed to determine precise algorithms for planning leap weeks in this system.