Re: Interesting Day
Ick. Sorry about the formatting on that last message. I wrote it on my Palm and didn't realize it was going to stick the entire original message down on the bottom. - jmh ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Interesting Day
At 02:57 PM Monday 3/24/2008, John Horn wrote: Ick. Sorry about the formatting on that last message. I wrote it on my Palm ObOldJoke: Hope you used washable Ink. Lava Soap Maru . . . ronn! :) ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Interesting Day
On Mon, 24 Mar 2008, Ronn! Blankenship wrote: At 02:57 PM Monday 3/24/2008, John Horn wrote: Ick. Sorry about the formatting on that last message. I wrote it on my Palm ObOldJoke: Hope you used washable Ink. Lava Soap Maru Lava soap -- it's not just for cleaning up after car maintenence! :) Julia ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
Re: Interesting Day
Thursday night I got to see Bruce Springsteen in concert. There is a seriously religious experience! (And it was a fantastic show, by the way...) - jmh On 3/21/08, Pat Mathews [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And Thursday was one of the 8 pagan holidays, the Spring Equinoxhttp://idiotgrrl.livejournal.com/ Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:39:00 -0500 To: brin-l@mccmedia.com From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Fwd: Interesting Day Good Friday! Happy Purim, Eid, etc... Wednesday, Mar. 19, 2008 By DAVID VAN BIEMA WITH SIMON ROBINSON/NEW DELHI On Friday more than a billion Christians around the world will mark the gravest observance on their Calendar, Good Friday, the day Jesus died on the cross. (To be followed in two days by Easter Sunday, to mark his Resurrection). But unlike some holy days, say, Christmas, which some non-Christians in the U.S. observe informally by going to a movie and ordering Chinese food, on this particular Friday, March 21, it seems almost no believer of any sort will be left without his or her own holiday. In what is statistically, at least, a once-in-a-millennium combination, the following will all occur on the 21st: Good Friday Purim, a Jewish festival celebrating the biblical book of Esther Narouz, the Persia n New Year, which is observed with Islamic elaboration in Iran and all the stan countries, as well as by Zoroastrians and Baha'is. Eid Milad an Nabi, the Birth of the Prophet, which is celebrated by some but not all Sunni Muslims and, though officially beginning on Thursday, is often marked on Friday. Small Holi, Hindu, an Indian festival of bonfires, to be followed on Saturday by Holi, a kind of Mardi Gras. Magha Puja, a celebration of the Buddha's first group of followers, marked primarily in Thailand. Half the world's population is going to be celebrating something, says Raymond Clothey, Professor Emeritus of Religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh. My goodness, says Delton Krueger, owner of www.interfaithcalendar.org, who follows 14 major religions and six others. He counts 20 holidays altogether (including some religious double-dips, like Maundy Thursday and Good Friday) between the 20th (which is also quite crowded) and t he 21st. He marvels: There is no other time in 2008 when there is this kind of concentration. And in fact for quite a bit longer than that. Ed Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz, co-authors of the books Calendrical Calculations and Calendrical Tabulations, determined how often in the period between 1600 and 2400 A.D. Good Friday, Purim, Narouz and the Eid would occur in the same week. The answer is nine times in 800 years. Then they tackled the odds that they would converge on a two-day period. And the total is ... only once: tomorrow. And that's not even counting Magha Puja and Small Holi. Unless you are mathematically inclined, however, you may not see the logic in all this. If it's the 21st of March, you may ask, shouldn't all the religions of the world celebrate the same holiday on that date each year? No. There are a sprinkling of major holidays (Western Christmas is one) that fall each year on the same day of the Gregorian calendar, a f airly standard non-religious system and the one Americans are most familiar with. But almost none of tomorrow's holidays actually follows that calendar. All Muslim holy days, for instance, are calculated on a lunar system. Keyed to the phases of the moon, Islam's 12 months are each 29 and a half days long, for a total of 354 days a year, or 11 days fewer than on ours. That means the holidays rotate backward around the Gregorian calendar, occurring 11 days earlier each year. That is why you can have an easy Ramadan in the spring, when going without water all day is relatively easy, or a hard one in the summer. And why the Prophet's birthday will be on March 9 next year. Then there is the Jewish calendar, which determines the placement of Purim. It is lunisolar, which means that holidays wander with the moon until they reach the end of what might be thought of as a month-long tether, which has the effect of maintaining them in the same seaso n every year. Good Friday, meanwhile, like many of the other most important Christian holidays, is a set number of days before Easter. The only problem is that the date of Easter is probably the most complicated celebratory calculation this side of Hinduism, which has a number of competing religious calendars. The standard rule is the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox. But in fact, the actual divination of the date is so involved that it has its own offical name: computus. And so challenging that Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of history's greatest mathematicians, devoted the time to create an algorithm for it. It goes on for many lines. And, of course, it doesn't work for Eastern Orthodox Easter (about
Re: Interesting Day
Ronn! wrote: Good Friday! Happy Purim, Eid, etc... Very interesting as my son was married yesterday and while many of his new wives Persian family members knew it was the Narouz, I'm sure the kids didn't know any of that when they chose the date. Doug ___ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
RE: Interesting Day
And Thursday was one of the 8 pagan holidays, the Spring Equinoxhttp://idiotgrrl.livejournal.com/ Date: Fri, 21 Mar 2008 20:39:00 -0500 To: brin-l@mccmedia.com From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Fwd: Interesting Day Good Friday! Happy Purim, Eid, etc... Wednesday, Mar. 19, 2008 By DAVID VAN BIEMA WITH SIMON ROBINSON/NEW DELHI On Friday more than a billion Christians around the world will mark the gravest observance on their Calendar, Good Friday, the day Jesus died on the cross. (To be followed in two days by Easter Sunday, to mark his Resurrection). But unlike some holy days, say, Christmas, which some non-Christians in the U.S. observe informally by going to a movie and ordering Chinese food, on this particular Friday, March 21, it seems almost no believer of any sort will be left without his or her own holiday. In what is statistically, at least, a once-in-a-millennium combination, the following will all occur on the 21st: Good Friday Purim, a Jewish festival celebrating the biblical book of Esther Narouz, the Persia n New Year, which is observed with Islamic elaboration in Iran and all the stan countries, as well as by Zoroastrians and Baha'is. Eid Milad an Nabi, the Birth of the Prophet, which is celebrated by some but not all Sunni Muslims and, though officially beginning on Thursday, is often marked on Friday. Small Holi, Hindu, an Indian festival of bonfires, to be followed on Saturday by Holi, a kind of Mardi Gras. Magha Puja, a celebration of the Buddha's first group of followers, marked primarily in Thailand. Half the world's population is going to be celebrating something, says Raymond Clothey, Professor Emeritus of Religious studies at the University of Pittsburgh. My goodness, says Delton Krueger, owner of www.interfaithcalendar.org, who follows 14 major religions and six others. He counts 20 holidays altogether (including some religious double-dips, like Maundy Thursday and Good Friday) between the 20th (which is also quite crowded) and t he 21st. He marvels: There is no other time in 2008 when there is this kind of concentration. And in fact for quite a bit longer than that. Ed Reingold and Nachum Dershowitz, co-authors of the books Calendrical Calculations and Calendrical Tabulations, determined how often in the period between 1600 and 2400 A.D. Good Friday, Purim, Narouz and the Eid would occur in the same week. The answer is nine times in 800 years. Then they tackled the odds that they would converge on a two-day period. And the total is ... only once: tomorrow. And that's not even counting Magha Puja and Small Holi. Unless you are mathematically inclined, however, you may not see the logic in all this. If it's the 21st of March, you may ask, shouldn't all the religions of the world celebrate the same holiday on that date each year? No. There are a sprinkling of major holidays (Western Christmas is one) that fall each year on the same day of the Gregorian calendar, a f airly standard non-religious system and the one Americans are most familiar with. But almost none of tomorrow's holidays actually follows that calendar. All Muslim holy days, for instance, are calculated on a lunar system. Keyed to the phases of the moon, Islam's 12 months are each 29 and a half days long, for a total of 354 days a year, or 11 days fewer than on ours. That means the holidays rotate backward around the Gregorian calendar, occurring 11 days earlier each year. That is why you can have an easy Ramadan in the spring, when going without water all day is relatively easy, or a hard one in the summer. And why the Prophet's birthday will be on March 9 next year. Then there is the Jewish calendar, which determines the placement of Purim. It is lunisolar, which means that holidays wander with the moon until they reach the end of what might be thought of as a month-long tether, which has the effect of maintaining them in the same seaso n every year. Good Friday, meanwhile, like many of the other most important Christian holidays, is a set number of days before Easter. The only problem is that the date of Easter is probably the most complicated celebratory calculation this side of Hinduism, which has a number of competing religious calendars. The standard rule is the Sunday after the first full moon on or after the day of the vernal equinox. But in fact, the actual divination of the date is so involved that it has its own offical name: computus. And so challenging that Carl Friedrich Gauss, one of history's greatest mathematicians, devoted the time to create an algorithm for it. It goes on for many lines. And, of course, it doesn't work for Eastern Orthodox Easter (about one month later than the Western Christian one this year, on April 27). So, should we celebrate all these celebrations? Yes, says William Paden, the author of Religious Worlds: The Comparative Study
