Thirteen Months

This 12 months to a year thing is crazy.  Some months have 30 days, others have 31, and February has 28, unless it has 29.  It’s just weird.  And it takes kids a while to figure it all out.  You can’t blame them either… it’s confusing.

Things would be much easier if we went to a 13-month year.

There are 365 (and change) days in a year.  That works out to 52 weeks plus one day.  52 is not divisible by 12, but is divisible by 13.  So 13 months of 4 weeks (each month being 28 days) would get us really close to 365.  The extra day (or two, in the case of leap year) could be tacked onto the end of the last month just to make things easy.  Not in the middle like it is normally done in February.  Again, weird.

There are other advantages too.  Since each month would be exactly four weeks, the days of the month would fall on the same day of the week for the entire year.  So if the 1st is a Thursday in the first month of the year, it will be a Thursday every month of that entire year.

Of course if we switched we wouldn’t be able to call them months any longer, because they wouldn’t be based on lunar cycles. 

I propose that we call the new “month” Smarch.  Except for the fact that Smarch has lousy weather.

The concept of going by the phase of the moon to determine time is pretty outdated at this point.  We all use calendars, computers, and cell phones to know what the date is.  But moving to a 13-period year would make the whole process much easier… it’s easier to remember the date if, for an entire year, the days of the month fall on the same days of the week.

Of course I’m not serious about changing, but it would make things much simpler.  Now we just need days made up of 25 100-minute hours.

Airline Security

I had a few interesting thoughts recently while traveling. We all know that there are a lot of hassles associated with air travel, and my mind kind of began wandering, wondering why we're putting up with all of this nonsense. Is it really necessary? And is all air travel going to be like this (or worse) from now into the unforeseeable future? (I sure hope not, it already takes forever to get on a plane, let's hope it doesn't get worse.)

Now I'm not going to pretend to have any sort of answers to the problem, but I have had a few "what if" scenarios come to mind.

So let's think about this... we've got tighter security to protect from potential terrorist attacks, right? And if that's the case, why are commercial airlines such valuable targets? Are smaller planes targets? It doesn't seem so, as the security at smaller airports isn't anywhere near as stringent. Terrorists try to inflict the most damage with the smallest amount of effort, and bigger planes make that easier to do, that's all.

It's the big planes they are after, right? So what would happen (hypothetically) if everybody started flying on small planes? Would the threat of terrorism in or via aircraft go away? I don't know, but it's interesting to think about.

This also begs the thought, why do we fly on big planes so much? It's all about efficiency, isn't it? It's cheaper to fly a big plane than it is to fly many smaller planes carrying the same number of people. But is it? With the added costs of higher security, are the airlines, and we as customers, actually saving any money? I have no idea, but it does make you wonder.

Anyway, just a thought I had. None of us like the security hassles of flying, and it kind of makes you wonder whether it is really necessary or not.