OK, I ranted once to some of you (A long LONG time ago... It's not even in my Gmail logs anymore ;) ) about how Easter is based on being the 14th day after the middle of the moon cycle in march... Or SOMETHING LIKE THAT... And how I feel like it's wrong for Christians to critisize "peagans" for astrology, yet Christains base one of the biggest holidays of the year off of moon cycles? WTF...
Anyway, this rant isn't about that. This rant is about the Julian VS. the Gregorian Calendars.
It comes up, because I was reading about the Tunguska Event (AKA, the totally badass explosion that happened in Russia for some unknown reason... Probably a meteoroid or comet exploding in the atmosphere, creating the equivolant of a large nuclear bomb, knocking down HELLA trees.... But I digress...) and it mentioned a discrepency in the dates... Apparently Russia was using the "Julian Calandar" at the time, while much of the rest of the world was using a "Gregorian Calandar." Some difference of 16 days or something like that.
Anyway, so I decided that I needed to look up the difference between the calendars, and this is where shit got weird: It's all based on how the Julian Calendar had a leap year every 4 years, but that messed up the lunar calandar. Apparently gaining a day every 300 years... So after 1200 years, the Catholics looked at the moon and said "Damn, we are 3 days behind the moon... Easter is wrong!" I guess it also caused a conflict where Easter would fall in the middle of Rome's birthday, which is a "Pegan Holiday" and we can't overlap that, no, that would be wrong too...
Anyway, long story short, they cut out a bunch of leap years... Something to the effect of "Every year devisable by 4 will be a leap year, unless the year is devisable by 100, in which case it WON'T be a leap year, unless it's a year devided by 400, in which case it WILL again." Or something like that. In other words, 2000 will, 2004 will, 2008 will, 2012 will... But 2100 won't, and 2200 won't, and 2300 won't. But 2400 will! Stay on your toes!
Anyway, so I guess it's more correct now... But why the hell did it have to be fixed JUST FOR EASTER!
And what happens every 100,000 years (or so) when we loose a day they didn't account for? And what about the decaying orbit of the earth? And...
OK, I'm done.
Here are my sources:
Tunguska Event: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Julian Calendar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Gregorian Calendar: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
