J
Joe Morris
Flightless Bird
"Char Jackson" <none@none.invalid> wrote:
> My favorite DST story is the one where the lady (covered on one of the
> nightly news shows, IIRC) who was screaming that it was God's time and
> it was not in our domain to be messing with God's time. I thought that
> was pretty humorous, but she was totally freaked that bad things would
> happen if we humans messed with things.
I wonder how she would have reacted to the introduction of the Gregorian
calendar had she been alive at that time. Resynchronizing the calendar with
the seasons required dropping ten or more days from the year in which the
new calendar was adopted.
The first adoptions in 1582 dropped 5-14 October, and some people were
convinced that this robbed them of ten days of their allotted lifespan.
Greece, which didn't adopt the new calendar until 1923, had to drop 13 days
because of additional accumulated errors in the Julian calendar since 1582.
obDataProcessingConnection: you think that Y2K posed a problem? Consider
the trouble that would be caused for computer systems by not only dropping
the days, but also upsetting the mapping of weekdays: Thursday, 4 October
1582 was followed by Friday, 15 October. (This is why "perpetual calendars"
(remember them?) had a hole in the year matrix - usually the entry for 1752
in the British Empire (including the US) since that's when England adopted
the Gregorian calendar and dropped 11 days.)
Joe Morris
> My favorite DST story is the one where the lady (covered on one of the
> nightly news shows, IIRC) who was screaming that it was God's time and
> it was not in our domain to be messing with God's time. I thought that
> was pretty humorous, but she was totally freaked that bad things would
> happen if we humans messed with things.
I wonder how she would have reacted to the introduction of the Gregorian
calendar had she been alive at that time. Resynchronizing the calendar with
the seasons required dropping ten or more days from the year in which the
new calendar was adopted.
The first adoptions in 1582 dropped 5-14 October, and some people were
convinced that this robbed them of ten days of their allotted lifespan.
Greece, which didn't adopt the new calendar until 1923, had to drop 13 days
because of additional accumulated errors in the Julian calendar since 1582.
obDataProcessingConnection: you think that Y2K posed a problem? Consider
the trouble that would be caused for computer systems by not only dropping
the days, but also upsetting the mapping of weekdays: Thursday, 4 October
1582 was followed by Friday, 15 October. (This is why "perpetual calendars"
(remember them?) had a hole in the year matrix - usually the entry for 1752
in the British Empire (including the US) since that's when England adopted
the Gregorian calendar and dropped 11 days.)
Joe Morris