Let’s fix a date

Welcome to a new year of Backbytes. We’re familiar with the emotion that every year seems like the last one, so we’re excited to see the development of the Hanke-Henry Permanent Calendar, which would divide the year onto four 91-day quarters, and so, reliably into two 30-day months and one of 31 days.

It would mean that 19 May (for example) was a Saturday every year and that the year always starts on a Sunday. Every five or six years we’d add an extra week at the end of December, to keep in sync with the solar system.

It allows the “permanent, rational planning of annual activities, from school to work holidays” says one of the inventors, but if you have a birthday on 31 January, we’re sorry to tell you that you will be abolished.