There was posting this morning on Slashdot, which got picked up by Metafilter proposing a static calendar, one in which every day of the year falls on the same day of the week in perpetuity. Instead of leap days we have leap weeks called ‘Newtons’.

This reminded me of my interest in a universal world chronology, to replace the Christian calendar for academic historical reaserch. For one thing, the Christian calendar is unfairly dominant across global multi-ethnic culture. The other thing, all those negative numbers in BC land. I began thinking about this in 1998, and today I worked out a new system. Details here, where you will find some email I posted on a mailing list in 2001, where I wrote this:

I am fond of [the Christian chronology] myself, and can’t imagine using anything else in my daily life, but when it comes to historical research, to reading history, I hate BC. It cuts us off from a line of events in an unnatural way. I simply would like it if historians, anthropologists, and sociologists could get together and figure out a new system to date historical events with that eliminates BC. […]What I’m proposing is rather simple isn’t it? Just find a day in the past which academics can use as a starting point for an international chronology, that incorporates ancient history in a positive, rather than negative, scale of values. There is a time before civilization, and perhaps this pre-history belongs in a negative scale for simple psychological value, and to keep our date numbers low (no point in adopting a system where we’d have to write 13 Feb 6,987,089,976).

In my new system, Year 0 is 3340 BC, which was the year an eclispe occured that was recorded by neolithic Irishmen, as detailed here. I chose this arbitrarily as a year with a datable event which was sufficiently far back to encompass most of recorded history in positive values. This year also has the advantage that it ends in 0, thus making an effective year 0.