- Tue Feb 13, 2024 1:18 pm
#105278
Jonathan,
There is nothing to diagram here. The proposal is to add a day to every fourth year, like we currently do, but instead of making it February 29th, making it just not belong to any week at all. Additionally, the last day of every year would belong to no week. This ensures that January 1st is the same day of the week every year. The same is true of every day, actually, except the "weekless" days added (one for every year, and the additional leap day). We're trying to find where this would cause a scheduling conflict.
Answer choice (A) doesn't seem to present a problem. If your birthday is on December 30th, it's the same day of the week every year. December 31st would be the last day and thus "weekless". It would ALWAYS be weekless, though, so I see no problem there.
Answer choice (B) is an issue. "Every seventh day" is going to become a different day of the week once the "weekless" days are considered. "Every seventh day" is normally the same day of the week, but consider what happens at the end of the year. If a person had a religious observance near the end of December, seven days later is going to involve the "weekless" end-of-year days, and thus the day of the week of the observance, which would have been the same through the entire year up to that point, will now get pushed to a different day for the coming January. Compare that to what happens under the current system. If I have to go to church every seventh day, and I consider that to be Sunday, then I go to church every Sunday. But if, say, December 30th is Sunday, then under the new system, seven days later will no be Sunday any more. The "weekless" days are..days, so they count for the "every seventh day" idea, but they aren't Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday...etc. So now "every seventh day" is going to become a different day of the week for the entire next year. And this will happen every year. That's much less convenient than our current real system, where "every seventh day" is always Sunday!
Answer choice (C) is not an issue at all. Under the new system, years have the same number of days as they have now. We certainly schedule school with a fixed number of days per year currently. There can't be any problem doing that under the new system.
Answer choice (D) is not an issue either. When a holiday is Monday or Friday, people get a three-day weekend. How does adding "weekless" days affect that?
Answer choice (E) is no issue whatsoever. The new system is utterly predictable in how it works. It's trivial to plan years ahead.
Let me know if anything is unclear and why it is, and I'll try to help.
Robert Carroll
