Talk:International Fixed Calendar
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I see that Simon J Kissane created this article and Janet Davis wikified it. Simon, would you mind citing the origin for the proposal?
This article smelled a little partisan to me, so I spent a few minutes doing some research. I found http://www.calendarreform.org/, started by Canadian Miklós Lente. He offers four different proposals for calendar reform. None of them refer to "Sol," though. It sounds like Yet Another Idealistic Pipedream – more like Esperanto than the metric system (please pardon my bias – after all, I'm restricting it to this /Talk page :-). Still, in the spirit of neutral point of view I merely seek the source of the idea so that all readers can judge its value with full knowledge of its history.
<>< Tim Chambers
- I agree with your evaluation in re: pipedreams, Tim, but the United Nations briefly considered it - not terribly seriously, I think. The French Revolution and the Soviet Union each tried 'reformed' weeks. The Soviets had a 10-day week. It didn't take. The combination of Christianity AND the 'workers' thinking they had fewer days off stopped it. As in all things calendrical I keep wishing I could find my copy of Eviatar Zerubavel's The Seven Day Week, which is incredibly informative as well as a good read. --MichaelTinkler
I read it somewhere, I'm sorry I can't recall where... when the United Nations considered calendar reform in the 1950s it and the World calendar were the two main proposals. Now I look at it a bit more, maybe I have the name of the thing wrong... I'm sure I've read it called the "Perpetual Calendar" somewhere, but all I can find is a reference to the "International Fixed Calendar" or the "Cotsworth calendar" or the "Eastman plan"... the thing obviously had a lot of names. Okay, have a look at this website: http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/13-month.htm -- Simon J Kissane
I recall reading about this calendar in the Encyclopedia Britannia when I was at primary school c.1980. My recollection was that it was there called something like 'World International calendar'. The article named the extra month 'Sol' (not 'Midi').
Incidentally the reason I read about it was that I and my brother had independently invented this calendar (aged about 12), almost identical in detail, and subsequently discovered it in the encyclopedia. By strange coincidence we had even also (jokingly) proposed the name 'Sol' for the extra month (!) but decided to opt instead for the more poetic 'Midsummer', which incidentally I see now is also like a conflation of 'Midi' and 'Sol'.
The only difference between our calendar and this one was that we had the leap day at the end of the year, on the grounds that (i) it wouldn't disrupt the week pattern mid-year (and hence disrupt e.g. the mapping from day count from the start of the year onto named dates), and (ii) people would generally be on holiday on New Year's Eve and so the fact that it was an irregular date would be less disruptive to business and the like. Ben Finn 17:48, 30 Apr 2005 (UTC)
I've not heard of the "Perpetual Calendar" as a specific calendar before. The disciption[sic] is almost identical to the "Cotworth and Eastman Calendar". The only difference is that the leap day occurs in the extra month Sol rather than at the end of the year. See the above mentioned web page for more details. Karl Palmen
I've mostly seen this called the "Universal calendar" or the "Cotsworth calendar" (Moses Cotsworth was one of its inventors). It is also essentially the same as the "Positivist calender" of Auguste Comte, except that the latter invented new month- and day-names.
Ben Finn,
That's an interesting story of yours. It is an interesting coincidence. I also agree that the extra day would be better at the end of the year however "Midsummer" would not exactly make sense south of the equator. My idea would be to put the extra month at the end of the year instead of the middle and call it "Yule". Jimp 7Sep05
Coptic calendar and Ethiopian calendar have also 13 months. --Hello World! 03:01, 5 December 2005 (UTC)
But they are far from being equal in length. The 13th month is only 5 or 6 days compared with 30 days for the other months.
In the international fixed calendar, I expect that the extra month was placed in the middle of the year to minimise the displacement of the other 12 months from their Gregorian namesakes.
Karl 4 December 2005
[edit] converter program and other stuff
I independently invented a calendar that was the same as this, but named the 13th month different and placed it one month after the International Fixed Calendar's (IFC) extra month. I made Java code to convert a Gregorian date to the International Fixed Calendar. Should I post the source code on a subpage of my user page and link to it, or posted here in the same manner as that at Doomsday algorithm, or what?
Hope some one answers this. Lee S. Svoboda 22:21, 21 December 2005 (UTC)
