[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
If I may add my sob story....I'm bugged by our calendar. Quick what date is Thanksgiving this year? Different numbers of days in different months, leap years, leap seconds...yikes.
Be glad we're no longer using the Roman lunar calendar, where dates were fixed by counting backwards. The first day of the month was the date of the new moon. The Ides, or full moon date, was determined by counting backwards from the end of the month. Depending on the number of days in the month (28, 29, 30, 31), the date of the Ides could vary from 13 to 16. They had special priests in those days, to observe the moon as it approached newness, staring into the glare of the morning sun to see if they could spot a tiny crescent moon, which set the date of the first day of the month. The length of the month was determined by educated guesswork, basically, and then the Ides was calculated from that.
What will be the phase of the moon this Thanksgiving? James -- James E. Henderson SIP 1.747.618.5207 1-775-369-7682 UK 0-207-043-1121 -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
