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Frequently Asked Questions |
Frequently Asked Questions about The 30x11 Calendar:
How do you say "30x11," and where does it get its name?
The name, "Thirty-Eleven." comes from it's form, which features the first 11 of the year's first 12 months containing 30 days each. The "30" is named first, since it emphasizes the 30 days in each of these months - a unique feature of this design.
The Gregorian Calendar has a problem. Each month of our current calendar varies in length: 31, 28/29, 31, 30, 31, etc. We have to look at a printed calendar or recite a rhyme to remember month lengths. Because of this, business quarters are unequal, causing problems for accountants and business owners. Connecting a weekday with a day of the month is now nearly impossible (Quick, what weekday did March 9, 2007 fall on? It was a Friday. But you had to look at a calendar, didn't you?) Determining how many days in each year have passed - and how many we have left - is also not an easy task with the Gregorian.
First, let's see what stays the same if we adopt the 30x11 Calendar: 12 months in a year; The names of the months and days of the week; Seven days remain in a week, 365 days are in a year, with 366 in a leap year, and leap years happen in the same years as the current calendar.
What changes? Each month has 30 days, except December, which has 35 days in a regular year, and 36 days in a leap year. (This doesn't change the length of the 365/366-day year.)This is a "gentle" reform to an old calendar we've become accustomed to, not a radical re-design that will leave people confused and hostile to the change. Previous attempts to reform the calendar changed the number of months, the number of days in the week, or had other radical changes that made them unacceptable to most people.
- It has an easy-to-remember 11 straight months of 30 days each, ending the confusion of variable month lengths.
- It offers three identical business quarters of 90 days each.
- It still only has one "leap day," and puts it in December, at the very end of the year.
- It allows easy calculation of ordinal days (number of days in the year), since almost almost all months are equal in length and each month starts again after 30 days. March 1 is always the 61st day of the year. June 30 is always 180th. November 15th is always the 345th.
- Months progress in a more logical fashion, with each month within a year's calendar year starting two weekdays later than the previous month did (if January starts on a Monday, February starts on a Wednesday.)
- Its logical design makes calculating any weekday of any date - such as March 9 - an easy task (If January starts on Tuesday, then March 1 will be a Saturday, Mar. 8 is a Saturday too, so Mar. 9 is a Sunday.)
Do you expect it to be adopted worldwide?
That is the only way it can be adopted. One or two or even a group of nations simply couldn't run on one calendar, while the rest of the world uses another. (Although this very thing happened for centuries, as the Gregorian Calendar supplanted the Julian Calendar, it's not practical in today's interconnected world to wait 500 years for all nations to "catch up" and adopt a new calendar.)
It's difficult to say, but supporters of calendar reform should be under no illusions that it will happen very soon. The battle has just now begun to spread the word about this calendar, so it could be years. If you want to help, click the "Help get the word out" link, above.
February gets two days to make it a "normal-length" month. Historically, the ancient Romans took months from February to lengthen months that were named to honor rulers like Julius and Augustus Caesar. The ancient Egyptians had a calendar of 365 days consisting of twelve 30-day months and five days at the end of December, totally 365 days. While not based upon this calendar, the 30x11 Calendar is similar.
Note that the "new" calendar days of Dec. 32-35 do NOT extend the calendar past 365 days. These are the 362nd through the 365th days of the year, replacing today's Dec. 28-31, and are not "extra" days of the year - even though they extend December's length. From a mathemetical point of view, placing these days at the end of the calendar allows the simplicity of the progression of 11 contiguous months (30, 30, 30, 30, etc.) to continue, and lets us easily determine the numerical values of the last day of each month easily, without interruption (30, 60, 90, 120, 150, 180...)
In ancient times, the Romans put the leap year day in February, which was the end of the calendar year for them. Placing a 36th day in the last month during leap years honors that tradition. It also doesn't interrupt the numerical counts of days of the year, as cited previously. The 30x11 leap day simply becomes day 366 of the year. In the Gregorian Calendar, the 29th of Feb. makes March 1 the 61st day, instead of the 60th day, as it is in normal years. This interrupts the day-number count for the rest of the year.
Knowing that each month begins exactly two weekdays after the previous month lets us easily determine the weekday of any calendar date. If Jan. 1 is a Monday, February would start two weekdays later. Feb. 1, 2007 would be a Wednesday, March 1 a Friday, April 1 a Sunday. If April 1 is a Sunday, then April 8, 15, 22, and 29 are also Sundays. If you're looking for April 17, it's two days after Sunday- a Tuesday. The advantage of doing this in one's head is clear.
No, it's not "perpetual," in a strict sense. Some previous and current attempts at calendar reform have tried to make the calendar "perpetual," meaning every year begins on the same weekday. But this requires days to be actually dropped from the calendar, since we have 365 calendar days in each normal year - an odd number that ruins the even number that is required to make this scheme work. Dropping or ignoring off-calendar days is a price too high to pay for a "perfect" calendar, and most people don't mind at all that Jan. 1 starts on a new weekday each year.
The 30x11 Calendar Committee is meant to be a worldwide effort, and is not narrowly focused on any one nation. We would like to have Organizers in EVERY nation participating in this campaign. Contact us if you are willing to help out!
Frequently
Asked Questions
Contact: Email (use "@" sign) anewcalendar at yahoo.com