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The Symmetry454 calendar (Sym454) is a proposal for calendar reform created by Irv Bromberg of the University of Toronto, Canada. It is a perennial solar calendar that conserves the traditional month pattern and 7-day week, has symmetrical equal quarters in 82% of the years in its 293-year cycle, and starts every month on Monday.
The proposed calendar is laid out as follows:
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The idea of months having 4 or 5 whole weeks is not new, having been proposed in the 1970s by Chris Carrier for the Bonavian Civil Calendar and by Joseph Shteinberg for his "Calendar Without Split Weeks". Whereas the former has 5 + 4 + 4 weeks per quarter, and the latter has 4 + 4 + 5 weeks per quarter, the Symmetry454 Calendar has a symmetrical 4 + 5 + 4 weeks per quarter, which is why it is named Symmetry454. Balanced quarters are desirable for businesses because they aid in fiscal planning and analysis.
All months have a whole number of weeks, so no month ever has a partial week. Each day number within a month falls on the same weekday in all months and years; in particular, Friday the 13th never occurs under this calendar.
All holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. are permanently fixed. All ordinal day and week numbers within the year are also permanently fixed.
Unlike the World Calendar or the International Fixed Calendar (also known as the 13-Month Calendar), there are no individually scheduled intercalary "null" days outside of the traditional 7-day week. Instead, alignment of the weekday cycle with New Year Day is accomplished by using a leap week, which is appended once every 5 or 6 years. In leap years, December becomes a 5-week month. The leap week is shown in grey text in the above calendar year.
The preferred Symmetry454 leap rule is based upon a symmetrical 293-year leap cycle having 52 leap years at intervals that are as uniformly spread as possible:
It is a leap year only if the remainder of (52 × Year + 146) / 293 is less than 52.
This expression inherently causes leap year intervals to fall into sub-cycle patterns of (5+6+6) = 17 or (5+6) = 11 years, which symmetrically group to 17+11+17 = 45 or to 17+17+11+17+17 = 79 years. The full symmetrical grouping for each cycle is: 45+79+45+79+45 = 293 years. Outside of calendar theory, this arrangement is known as maximal evenness.
The 52/293 leap cycle has a calendar mean year of 365+71/293 days, or 365 days 5 hours 48 minutes and about 56.5 seconds, which is intentionally slightly shorter than the present era mean northward equinoctial year of 365 days 5 hours 49 minutes and 0 seconds (mean solar time). It is intentionally slightly shorter because the shorter the difference the less often you need to add a leap day or leap week. And we would want to avoid being slightly bigger because in that case we would need to remove a day or week from the calendar which is more undesirable and disruptive than adding one.
The Kalendis calendar calculator demonstrates the Symmetry454 calendar and interconverts dates between Symmetry454 and a variety of other calendars.
The Symmetry454 arithmetic is fully documented and placed in the public domain for royalty-free computer implementation.
Officially, Symmetry454 has been running since January 1, 2005, which was the first New Year Day after it came into existence. Its proleptic epoch, however, was on the same day as the proleptic epoch of the Gregorian Calendar = January 1, 1 AD.
Tentatively, Sunday April 7 on the Symmetry454 Calendar is proposed as a fixed date for Easter, based on a frequency analysis of the distribution of the Gregorian or Astronomical Easter dates.
There are only five possible dates for Easter within the Symmetry454 Calendar, since only day numbers divisible by 7 can be a Sunday. The three highest-frequency dates upon which Easter can land are March 28, April 7, and April 14. Selecting the middle date (April 7) would fix Easter at its median position within its distribution range.
The traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar which identifies years, months, and days according to astronomical phenomena. A more purely lunar calendar was also known in China, however this was not widely accepted by farmers who tended to focus on seasons and predictability thereof. The traditional Chinese calendar is also focuses on the solar cycle to produce a useful agricultural calendar. The Chinese lunisolar calendar has had several significant variations over the course of time and history, and despite the name also considers various other astronomical phenomena besides the cycles of the sun and the moon, such as the planets and the constellations of asterisms along the ecliptic. The logic of the various permutations of the calendar has been based in considerations such as the technical from mathematics and astronomy, the philosophical considerations, and the political. The influence of the Gregorian calendar evidences itself in modern times, and the disparities between different lunisolar calendars and others is notable. Typical features of the calendars include cyclical considerations, such as the ganzhi system or repeating cycles of months or solar terms. One calendrical consideration may be the consecutive numbering of years from a chosen starting year, such as the inauguration of Huangdi or the birth of Confucious. Also, many dynasties had their own dating systems.
The Hebrew calendar, also called the Jewish calendar, is a lunisolar calendar used today for Jewish religious observance and as an official calendar of Israel. It determines the dates of Jewish holidays and other rituals, such as yahrzeits and the schedule of public Torah readings. In Israel, it is used for religious purposes, provides a time frame for agriculture, and is an official calendar for civil holidays alongside the Gregorian calendar.
Intercalation or embolism in timekeeping is the insertion of a leap day, week, or month into some calendar years to make the calendar follow the seasons or moon phases. Lunisolar calendars may require intercalations of both days and months.
The Julian calendar is a solar calendar of 365 days in every year with an additional leap day every fourth year. The Julian calendar is still used in parts of the Eastern Orthodox Church and in parts of Oriental Orthodoxy as well as by the Amazigh people, whereas the Gregorian calendar is used in most parts of the world.
A leap year is a calendar year that contains an additional day compared to a common year. The 366th day is added to keep the calendar year synchronized with the astronomical year or seasonal year. Because astronomical events and seasons do not repeat in a whole number of days, calendars that have a constant number of days in each year will unavoidably drift over time with respect to the event that the year is supposed to track, such as seasons. By inserting ("intercalating") an additional day or month into some years, the drift between a civilization's dating system and the physical properties of the Solar System can be corrected.
The Revised Julian calendar, or less formally the new calendar and also known as the Milanković calendar, is a calendar proposed in 1923 by the Serbian scientist Milutin Milanković as a more accurate alternative to both Julian and Gregorian calendars. At the time, the Julian calendar was still in use by all of the Eastern Orthodox Churches and affiliated nations, while the Catholic and Protestant nations were using the Gregorian calendar. Thus, Milanković's aim was to discontinue the divergence between the naming of dates in Eastern and Western churches and nations. It was intended to replace the Julian calendar in Eastern Orthodox Churches and nations. From 1 March 1600 through 28 February 2800, the Revised Julian calendar aligns its dates with the Gregorian calendar, which had been proclaimed in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII.
A solar calendar is a calendar whose dates indicate the season or almost equivalently the apparent position of the Sun relative to the stars. The Gregorian calendar, widely accepted as a standard in the world, is an example of a solar calendar. The main other types of calendar are lunar calendar and lunisolar calendar, whose months correspond to cycles of Moon phases. The months of the Gregorian calendar do not correspond to cycles of the Moon phase.
As a moveable feast, the date of Easter is determined in each year through a calculation known as computus. Easter is celebrated on the first Sunday after the Paschal full moon, which is the first full moon on or after 21 March. Determining this date in advance requires a correlation between the lunar months and the solar year, while also accounting for the month, date, and weekday of the Julian or Gregorian calendar. The complexity of the algorithm arises because of the desire to associate the date of Easter with the date of the Jewish feast of Passover which, Christians believe, is when Jesus was crucified.
The epact used to be described by medieval computists as the age of a phase of the Moon in days on 22 March; in the newer Gregorian calendar, however, the epact is reckoned as the age of the ecclesiastical moon on 1 January. Its principal use is in determining the date of Easter by computistical methods. It varies from year to year, because of the difference between the solar year of 365–366 days and the lunar year of 354–355 days.
Calendar reform or calendrical reform is any significant revision of a calendar system. The term sometimes is used instead for a proposal to switch to a different calendar design.
A leap week calendar is a calendar system with a whole number of weeks in a year, and with every year starting on the same weekday. Most leap week calendars are proposed reforms to the civil calendar, in order to achieve a perennial calendar. Some, however, such as the ISO week date calendar, are simply conveniences for specific purposes.
The Doomsday rule, Doomsday algorithm or Doomsday method is an algorithm of determination of the day of the week for a given date. It provides a perpetual calendar because the Gregorian calendar moves in cycles of 400 years. The algorithm for mental calculation was devised by John Conway in 1973, drawing inspiration from Lewis Carroll's perpetual calendar algorithm. It takes advantage of each year having a certain day of the week upon which certain easy-to-remember dates, called the doomsdays, fall; for example, the last day of February, 4/4, 6/6, 8/8, 10/10, and 12/12 all occur on the same day of the week in any year.
The Buddhist calendar is a set of lunisolar calendars primarily used in Tibet, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, India, Sri Lanka, and Thailand as well as in Malaysia, Singapore and Vietnam by Chinese populations for religious or official occasions. While the calendars share a common lineage, they also have minor but important variations such as intercalation schedules, month names and numbering, use of cycles, etc. In Thailand, the name Buddhist Era is a year numbering system shared by the traditional Thai lunar calendar and by the Thai solar calendar.
The ISO week date system is effectively a leap week calendar system that is part of the ISO 8601 date and time standard issued by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) since 1988 and, before that, it was defined in ISO (R) 2015 since 1971. It is used (mainly) in government and business for fiscal years, as well as in timekeeping. This was previously known as "Industrial date coding". The system specifies a week year atop the Gregorian calendar by defining a notation for ordinal weeks of the year.
The Dreamspell is an esoteric calendar in part inspired by the Maya calendar by New Age spiritualist, Mayanist philosopher, and author José Argüelles and Lloydine Burris Argüelles. The Dreamspell calendar was initiated in 1987 and released as a board game in 1990.
The Burmese calendar is a lunisolar calendar in which the months are based on lunar months and years are based on sidereal years. The calendar is largely based on an older version of the Hindu calendar, though unlike the Indian systems, it employs a version of the Metonic cycle. The calendar therefore has to reconcile the sidereal years of the Hindu calendar with the Metonic cycle's near tropical years by adding intercalary months and days at irregular intervals.
The Gregorian calendar is the calendar used in most parts of the world. It went into effect in October 1582 following the papal bull Inter gravissimas issued by Pope Gregory XIII, which introduced it as a modification of, and replacement for, the Julian calendar. The principal change was to space leap years differently so as to make the average calendar year 365.2425 days long, more closely approximating the 365.2422-day 'tropical' or 'solar' year that is determined by the Earth's revolution around the Sun.
The Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar (HHPC) is a proposal for calendar reform. It is one of many examples of leap week calendars, calendars that maintain synchronization with the solar year by intercalating entire weeks rather than single days. It is a modification of a previous proposal, Common-Civil-Calendar-and-Time (CCC&T). With the Hanke–Henry Permanent Calendar, every calendar date always falls on the same day of the week. A major feature of the calendar system is the abolition of time zones.
A perennial calendar is a calendar that applies to any year, keeping the same dates, weekdays and other features.
The Solar Hijri calendar is a solar calendar and one of the various Iranian calendars. It begins on the March equinox as determined by the astronomical calculation for the Iran Standard Time meridian and has years of 365 or 366 days. It is the modern principal calendar in Iran and is sometimes also called the Shamsi calendar and Khorshidi calendar. It is abbreviated as SH, HS or, by analogy with AH, AHSh.
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