Calculating the Date of Easter 336
The God Plays Dice blog has an entertaining post on how the date of Easter is calculated. Wikipedia has all the messy details of course, but the blog makes a good introduction to the topic. "Easter is the date of the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after March 21... [T]he cycle of Easter dates repeat themselves every 5,700,000 years. The cycle of epacts (which encode the date of the full moon) in the Julian calendar repeat every nineteen years. There are two corrections made to the epact, each of which depend[s] only on the century; one repeats (modulo 30, which is what matters) every 120 centuries, the other every 375 centuries, so the [p]air of them repeat every 300,000 years. The days of the week are on a 400-year cycle, which doesn't matter because that's a factor of 300,000. So the Easter cycle has length the least common multiple of 19 and 300,000, which is 5,700,000 [years]."
Metric School Terms (Score:5, Funny)
In the UK the academic year is split according to the date of Easter. I recall hearing about an effort to move to a "metric" system which doesn't depend on Easter. This suddenly makes a lot of sense...
Re:how is it... (Score:5, Funny)
There, now it's an official Science article.
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
Re:how is it... (Score:2, Funny)
Happy Zombie Jesus Day! (Score:0, Funny)
WHAT?
Re:how is it... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Metric School Terms (Score:3, Funny)
Ah! The march of progress. Hasn't happened in the north-west yet, to my knowledge...
Re:Why would (Score:5, Funny)
Only this year. (Score:5, Funny)
Next year it will be April again though.
Re:Why would (Score:5, Funny)
Save the earth! It is the *only* planet with chocolate!
Stupid *nix Tricks (Score:5, Funny)
Calendars are funny things.
Re:It's not even accurate ... (Score:3, Funny)
The Golden Ratio Egg (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Metric School Terms (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Annual celebrations are arbitrary anyway. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Metric School Terms (Score:2, Funny)
Not that this will have any effect on the outcome of invading
Re:It's not even accurate ... (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Metric School Terms (Score:2, Funny)
There, fixed that for you. To prove this point we have just had a white Easter up here in Leeds, gotta love British weather, always keeps you on your toes! (or on your arse if attempting to keep on your toes this morning!)
Re:Jewish, not Pagan, and especially not Druid (Score:3, Funny)
Nature never was sued. There are rumors of a secret licensig deal; on the other hand polution wasn't really an issue before the whole mess started...
Re:Birth and death (Score:2, Funny)
To me Easter represents the day that the Flying Spaghetti Monster lost a meatball to the Giant Chocolate Rabbit. But fortunately he has plenty more. Oh, and yes I had pasta today to commemorate this fact. RAmen.
Re:Metric School Terms (Score:1, Funny)