Couldn't Pope Gregory have fixed that OTHER calendar problem?

As you may know, there was a switch in the Western world from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar that the vast majority of us use today. “The motivation for the reform was to bring the date for the celebration of Easter to the time of the year in which the First Council of Nicaea had agreed upon in 325. Because the spring equinox was tied to the celebration of Easter, the Roman Catholic Church considered this steady movement in the date of the equinox undesirable… Between AD 325… (when… the vernal equinox occurred approximately 21 March), and the time of Pope Gregory’s bull in 1582, the vernal equinox had moved backward in the calendar, until it was occurring on about 11 March, 10 days earlier.”

The fix was to make years that are exactly divisible by 100

The Lydster, Part 116: Calendaring

Most of the time, I try to come up with a narrative about the Daughter. This time, just the calendar.

This fall, she was playing soccer. Unfortunately, in the very first game, fairly early on, she got kicked in the foot, left the game in pain, and never returned. But she was back in action by the following week. She likes playing defense, and is more interested in protecting her team’s goal rather than making a goal. However, for her homework, she has to write sentences, and she has allowed that someday, she WOULD indeed like to score a goal. That phase ended on November 2.

Both last year and this, there were two weekends where she had soccer, PLUS

End of the world postponed; date TBD

I had made light of all the end of the world stuff. Then I started to take in some information that made me rethink it. The stories in Metroland, for instance, were quite informative.

Seriously, I think the Mayan are getting a bad rap. A lot of what OTHER people said they said doesn’t appear to be true. The NBC News story I saw

12/12/12: The last time in your life, probably

12-12-12.

Today is the last time for 88 years there will be a date as perfect as this one. At 12:12 today, I plan to stop and acknowledge it. If my daughter is alive on 01/01/2101, she’ll practically be 97. I’d be almost 148, so I’m not counting on that.

What is it about repeating number dates that’s so cool?

Repeating numbers

Tomorrow is 11/11/11. I’m as fascinated as anyone by this fact. A bunch of people are getting married on that date. Is it that they consider it particularly lucky, or is it that they just want to make sure they don’t forget their anniversaries? Or maybe it’s that it’s a peculiar phenomenon that takes place 12 times in the beginning of the century, then not at all for 88 years, that they wish to embrace.

The movie being released on that date with that name is being directed by Darren Lynn Bousman (Saw II, Saw III and Saw IV); to say that I’ll never see it is a gross underexaggeration.

The repeated number phenomenon is much more interesting to me than the sequential system – 09/10/11, e.g. It’s because the latter is not universal. In the United States, that’d be September 10, but in the most of the rest of the world, it’s October 9.