carpediem

An occasion for every celebration.

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Every 24-hour period deserves its 15 minutes of fame.

An impulse decision by @garak in a fit of procrastination.


On this day in England 270 years ago, yesterday was the second of September!

September 14 marks the official adoption of the Gregorian calendar in England (and by extension the American colonies). Moving away from the Julian calendar caused a timeskip of 11 days which, despite popular misconception, resulted in a disappointing lack of riots and civil unrest.

Celebrate Timeskip Day by re-watching your favorite show with a prominent timeskip (I'm partial to Battlestar Galactica myself). Alternatively, celebrate with your own personal timeskip by drinking any alcoholic beverage in sufficient quantity! (Disclaimer: This is not medical advice.)

Computus

This timeskip was necessary to correct the accumulated calendar drift caused by the Julian Calendar over-estimating the length of the year by about 0.0088 days. The main reason that anyone seemed to care about this drift was specifically the Date of Easter. If you haven't looked at how the date of Easter is determined (a process called "Computus"), it's a total mess.

The date of Easter is defined by both an equinox and a full moon, meaning it involves on both solar and lunar calendars. Except not ones that track the actual phases of the sun and moon, but rather ecclesiastical solar and lunar calendars which track platonic ideals of the precession of the sun and moon. Even under the Gregorian calendar, the celebrated date of Easter is still occasionally "paradoxical" with respect the astronomy is it meant to model. This complicated system was chosen to place Easter near the date of Passover, but only approximately because the date of that holiday is in a calendar that uses leap-months.

Orthodox churches still use the Julian calendar to decide the dates of religious festivals. While they occasionally fall on the same date, Orthodox Easter is usually later than Western Easter (by one to five weeks). When this happens, Orthodox Christians in the United States can buy Easter supplies like candy and egg-coloring kits for hella cheap.

International Timeskips

Today is not Internation Timeskip Day because countries switched from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian at different times. Depending on what centuries they switched, many had timeskips of different lengths. Most Catholic countries adopted it in the late 1500's and had a timeskip of only 10 days, but the timeskip increased to 11 days in 1700, shortly before the Nordic countries began changing over.

Russia only switched over after the October Revolution in 1918, entailing a 13-day timeskip which caused the Revolution to have actually occurred in November. One side-effect of this is that Alaska was the last US state to adopt the Gregorian Calendar, having been Russian territory until its sale to the US, and suffering a 11-day timeskip in October 1867. This would have been a 12-day timeskip, except that the sale also simultaneously changed the local time zone to the opposite side of the International Date Line.


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