Magic Calendar™

This one is just for fun:

Magic Calendar™

Hate Mondays? Want to rid yourself of their horror?
How about weekends? They're awesome, right? Wish they came more frequently? Now they can, thanks to Magic Calendar™!
Magic Calendar® eliminates unsightly Mondays by compacting the week into just 6 days, 4 days for work and a standard 2-day weekend. Because the work week is shorter, weekends come sooner!

Forget hump-day-- your work week will magically go from "just begun" to "almost over" -literally over night!
Are you an hourly employee? Then your boss will love Magic Calendar®, too! Tell him that you are willing to work just ONE more hour each day and show him how he can get up to 54 more hours* of "productivity" from each and every employee in a year, while giving them more time off, more frequently!
What's more, calendar dates have become magically much much easier to remember, since  each and every month's comprised of exactly 36 days which always fall on the same day of the week, thanks to Magic Calendar™!
Magic Calendar™ will allow you to plan more efficiently and accurately for holidays, day trips and special occasions such as anniversaries, weddings, birthdays or graduations, since you will always know what day of the week any given date is-- straight off the top of your head!

Act now and get a FREE bonus holiday week (5-days) at the beginning of each year, for the rest of your life! ABSOLUTELY FREE!
That's right- you get 6 weekends a month for 10 months (that's 8 FREE additional weekends per year) PLUS a 5-day vacation at the beginning of each year, just for making the switch today.

BUT WAIT- THERE'S MORE!
Start using Magic Calendar® today and receive a bonus vacation day every four years!

NOT ENOUGH?
We'll give you ALL of the Federal and religious holidays that you already have, PLUS the extra 8 weekends per year, AND the 5-day holiday (including bonus Leap Year®  vacation day every 4 years), just for subscribing now!
Magic Calendar™ restores sanity and organization, increases productivity, stimulates the economy and promotes a happier, healthier lifestyle for all!

Start using Magic Calendar® TODAY!
*Some math required to show this to your boss.

Seriously, though; something that I've always found vexing is remembering what day of the week each date is. It changes every month & every year making it hard to predict what exactly I will be doing, for example, on my birthday. Planning around the holidays? Forget it. I also am one of millions (maybe even billions!) of people who think Mondays are terrible. I also love weekends. Who doesn't? Then one day I realized that something can be done about this. Here is my solution:

Divide the year into 10 months that are 6 weeks long comprised of 6 days per week-- 4 weekdays and a 2-day weekend. The remaining days can go in the gap between Christmas Day through New Year's Day. That 5-day period can be counted as a special section of the year we can call "Month Zero" or "Week Zero" in which we generally all take vacation and don't get much done. On Leap Years we can just make that Week/Month Zero one day longer. If we begin doing this on the next Leap Year, New Year's Day becomes the first day ("Onesday") of Month One and every day after that always falls on the same day of the week. Christmas is always on a weekend, extending the holiday week from the last two days of Month Ten to the first day of Month One (seven days of holiday/eight days on a leap year).

Imagine always knowing your birthday falls on a "Twosday:" You can now plan your life more effectively. Weekends come more frequently, occurring 60 times a year instead of 52. you begin to feel like you have a lot more leisure time-- because you do! One-third of each week is now a weekend. 

• Consumers spend more money on weekends. 
• The economy is very service-oriented, and more frequent weekends means ample opportunity for businesses to profit-- and hire more employees.
• Americans use less electricity on weekends. 
• More equal work opportunity for everyone.
• More frequent rest & time at home for everyone = better family & mental health conditions.

Now, I know what you're thinking:
"...if there are only 4 days of work each week, how can I afford those extra weekends?"
Here's how: work one more hour per day.

Current Calendar:
5 days X 8 hours = 40 hours X 52 weeks = 2,080 work hours per year.
Magic Calendar™:
4 days X 9 hours = 36 hours X 60 weeks = 2,160 work hours per year.

If you ask me, "it's about time" that we did something like this!

Infrared Photovoltaic Panels? Exciting Technology on the Horizon - GD 2.01

Solar energy has made considerable gains in efficiency in the last decade and better yet, the price of photovoltaic (PV) panels has dropped significantly.

However, one feature of PV panels is that they are virtually unresponsive to the infrared part of the light spectrum. About 40% of the sun's energy reaching Earth is in the infrared range. By developing PV panels that can transform even a fraction of infrared light into electrical current, we could create a vast increase in PV efficiency and power output.

How about night-time? Everyone knows that PV cells don't produce electrical current in the dark. So right off the bat, we're losing at least 50% efficiency on every PV panel no matter how good it is, because more than half the time it doesn't work.

Here are two interesting pieces of research that together could forever alter the utility of solar PV panels.

First -

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2011-11/new-glow-dark-material-only-glows-infrared-light

Second - 

http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/infrared-photovoltaic-0621.html

The first link - an article in Popular Science online magazine - is about a new phosphorescent liquid developed by researchers at the University of Georgia that charges up in about one minute and emits light in the infrared range for up to two weeks.

To quote popsci.com:

"They tested it in natural sunlight, color-filtered sunlight and fluorescent light, and found it works with just a few seconds of light exposure, even on a cloudy day. It works in liquid, too, including tap water, saltwater and bleach, which could make it very useful for deep-sea applications or even in living organisms. The material could also be useful in developing more efficient solar cells, nanoparticles that bind to cancer cells, or in infrared paint only viewable by people with IR goggles, the researchers say."

This is great because you could actually put this liquid within a plastic film that could be rolled out automatically over PV arrays to charge for just a few minutes a day, roll back up, and then roll out over the PV panels overnight.

"But I thought you said that PV panels ignore infrared?"
--Yes. However, a new material composed of a specific type of carbon nanotubes and C60 (AKA Buckyballs) actually does the job. According to the article on MIT's website:

"The carbon-based cell is most effective at capturing sunlight in the near-infrared region. Because the material is transparent to visible light, such cells could be overlaid on conventional solar cells, creating a tandem device that could harness most of the energy of sunlight."

However, it's still in the research and development phase.

"The carbon cells will need refining, Strano and his colleagues say: So far, the early proof-of-concept devices have an energy-conversion efficiency of only about 0.1 percent."

While 0.1% sounds rather minuscule, it's important to point out that new solar technology generally begins at low efficiencies and gradually get better through the development process. And also, 0.1% efficiency is actually a lot better than what photovoltaics are currently getting out of infrared light, which is nothing.

Once the kinks are worked out, PV panels could be constructed with an infrared-gathering carbon nanotube layer working all day, and working all night because you unrolled your infrared-glowing phosphorescent sheet on top of it.

Keep an eye out for innovations like these!