Dear Simon, Geoff, Andrew, Mac, et al, I am most interested in all your observations.
I am especially interested to hear that The Ecclesiastical Calendar is now on a PDF. > There may be a real and unexpected lesson > in statistics... The distribution certainly has quirks. Given that there are 35 possible dates and that the traditional life expectancy is three-score years and ten, the naive expectation is to see each date twice in a life time. This hardly concurs with reality! Nobody has yet explained what is meant by "Sunday"... When Pope Gregory XIII's Commission sorted out the Calendar they had to attend to the algorithm for the date of Easter. The new leap-year rule necessitated significant adjustments to the tables then in use. It seems most unlikely that the understanding of "Sunday" they had in mind ran from midnight UTC to midnight UTC!! One might suppose the longitude of Rome was used, or perhaps Jerusalem, or somewhere else? Even when you settle on the longitude, you still have to decide whether your two consecutive instants of inferior solar transit relate to the true sun or to the mean sun. Anyone know? Happy Easter Frank King, Cambridge, U.K. --------------------------------------------------- https://lists.uni-koeln.de/mailman/listinfo/sundial
