Alternative Calendar: Difference between revisions

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== Real Life ==

* Academic circles are prone to replacing BC/AD with BCE/CE ("Before Common Era"/"Common Era") to be more secular. Generally speaking a cultural non-starter with the general public, also liable to get certain Christian groups angry. The actual purpose behind the idea isn't really to avoid dating by Jesus<ref>no academic is dumb enough to pretend that's actually changing, what with the numbers being ''exactly the same''</ref>, but to not have to imply acceptance of a religion that you don't necessarily follow every single time you write the date: "AD" = "Anno Domini" = "year of Our Lord" (so writing AD is equivalent to saying "Jesus is my lord") and BC = "Before Christ" = "Before the Messiah" (so writing BC is equivalent to saying "Jesus is the Messiah"), and non-Christians occasionally get upset with the idea of needing to say what amounts to a small Christian prayer just to communicate simple concepts.

* Omni magazine once postulated a 13-month revision of the Gregorian calendar, with the 1969 moon landing as its zero point and 28-day months named for scientists. Dates would have been either "B.T." (Before Tranquility) or "A.T." (After Tranquility). It would, however, require a leap day every year, with a "double-leap" (2 29-day months) every 4 years. That would make, for example, 2008-03-29, assuming the leap is in the first month... 0038-04-02. This also assumes that July-December of 1969 were "year 0" with 1970 as a full "year 1".

* ''[[Omni]]'' magazine once postulated a 13-month revision of the Gregorian calendar, with the 1969 moon landing as its zero point and 28-day months named for scientists. Dates would have been either "B.T." (Before Tranquility) or "A.T." (After Tranquility). It would, however, require a leap day every year, with a "double-leap" (2 29-day months) every 4 years. That would make, for example, 2008-03-29, assuming the leap is in the first month... 0038-04-02. This also assumes that July-December of 1969 were "year 0" with 1970 as a full "year 1".

* The French Enlightenment gave us August Comte's [http://personal.ecu.edu/mccartyr/pos-cal.html Positivist calendar], which named every day and month after one of history's great men. The new regime created after the French Revolution adopted the same kind of calendar based on humanistic values and working according to a simple mathematical system.

** After her Revolution, France tried a ''metric'' calendar. It wasn't very popular, for various reasons (ten-day weeks meant weekends were a lot rarer!), and only lasted twelve years. The names of the months and days of the week were changed, one of which (Thermidor, which lasted from July to August) is still remembered in the name of the dish Lobster Thermidor. They also had separate a name for each [[wikipedia:French republican calendar#Days of the year|day of the year]], trying to mimic the calendar of saints with something secular -- in this case, plants, animals and tools. Which gave us day names like "pig" (Frimaire 5) or "manure" (Nivose 8) - yes, really, they had this. Now imagine all the teasing in school for kids born on these days...