Because Roman reckoning did not include a zero, the leap year in Julius Caesar's calendar was miscalculated. They instituted a leap year ever 3 years rather than every four because the 1st and 4th year of the cycle were considered the same (a fence post error). Augustus corrected this error in @8 AD .
Cheers, Kevin Kevin K. Birth, Professor Department of Anthropology Queens College, City University of New York 65-30 Kissena Boulevard Flushing, NY 11367 telephone: 718/997-5518 "We may live longer but we may be subject to peculiar contagion and spiritual torpor or illiteracies of the imagination" --Wilson Harris "Tempus est mundi instabilis motus, rerumque labentium cursus." --Hrabanus Maurus From: Joseph M Gwinn <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Reply-To: Leap Second Discussion List <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: Tuesday, January 14, 2014 7:17 PM To: Poul-Henning Kamp <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Cc: Leap Second Discussion List <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] LEAPSECS Digest, Vol 88, Issue 31 Well, while the idea of zero wasn't well established in Christ's time, they did have zero (and negative numbers) in the time of Pope Gregory, who established the Gregorian Calendar in 1582. But zero can still mean nothing to this day, so it seems unlikely that any religion will claim year zero. ..<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_%28number%29> Joe Gwinn [Inactive hide details for "Poul-Henning Kamp" ---01/14/2014 07:01:36 PM---In message <OF8E203EEC.858D9F51-ON85257C60.008191BF-8]"Poul-Henning Kamp" ---01/14/2014 07:01:36 PM---In message <of8e203eec.858d9f51-on85257c60.008191bf-85257c60.0081b...@mck.us.ra<mailto:of8e203eec.858d9f51-on85257c60.008191bf-85257c60.0081b...@mck.us.ra> y.com>, Joseph M Gwi From: "Poul-Henning Kamp" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> To: Leap Second Discussion List <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, Joseph M Gwinn <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>> Date: 01/14/2014 07:01 PM Subject: Re: [LEAPSECS] LEAPSECS Digest, Vol 88, Issue 31 ________________________________ In message <of8e203eec.858d9f51-on85257c60.008191bf-85257c60.0081b...@mck.us.ra<mailto:of8e203eec.858d9f51-on85257c60.008191bf-85257c60.0081b...@mck.us.ra> y.com>, Joseph M Gwinn writes: >The problem was religious - nobody was going to have Christ born in the >year zero. Actually, that was not really the issue, the issue was that they didn't have negative numbers at that time and therefore also didn't realize that "nothing" was a number. Negative numbers only came into acceptance during the heydays of the Venetian trade, where somebody, can't remember the name, argued that "we need negative numbers for this, because he owes more than he owns." or words to similar effect. At the time the "Anno Domini" convention was put into tradition, it would only make sense for them to talk about the year before and the year after. Nobody would have any reason to put a zero in there, If they had tried to do so, it would give no meaning to them, because "year zero" would literally mean "no year" or "year of nothing". -- Poul-Henning Kamp | UNIX since Zilog Zeus 3.20 [email protected]<mailto:[email protected]> | TCP/IP since RFC 956 FreeBSD committer | BSD since 4.3-tahoe Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence.
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