Complex Numbers

Leap

My February blog calendar has a nice checkerboard thing going and I'm loath to mess that up, right now. I've hit every even-numbered day since the 4th, which is the reason for the neat little pattern.

Leap years mean three things to me: Election year (about which enough has been said in here, for now), the Olympics (about which I don't care) and that February and March don't have the same date/day mapping. Had I been born on a leap day, it would probably have some sort of significance for me.

Calendars in general, though, are fascinating in many ways. First is the mathematical gyrations necessary to keep the calendar pretty close to the Earth's orbit. These calculations are even more interesting for lunisolar calendars, which often have leap months instead of days - which is why Jewish holidays meander about on the Gregorian calendar; they use a lunisolar calendar, ensuring that I always have to work to figure out when to wish my aunt a happy (whatever)day.

The Gregorian calendar itself was a modification of the Julian calendar, so called because it was instituted by Julius Caesar. Now, Caesar was arguably the most brilliant general in history, and the second-most brilliant politician (the top spot going to his successor), but as an astronomer he likely didn't know his tropics from his sidereals. Still, not only did he manage to get his name attached to a calendrical system, but also to one of the damned months (damned, that is, from a Northern Hemisphere perspective, as in "Damn, it's a hot and humid July).

Incidentally, lots of things have been named after Gaius Julius Caesar, but the procedure known as "caesarian section" was not. No, Caesar was named Caesar (probably) because he was born using this procedure (about 2000 years before epidurals were invented). And given that since his time, there was an emperor titled after Caesar right up until "Anastasia screamed in vain," that's about 2000 years of legacy for one breach birth... but I digress.

So the Julian calendar, in turn, was a modification of the earlier Roman calendar, which had pretty much the same month names as we have now (with the obvious exception of July and August). The Roman calendar had what they called an intercalary month, which sounds more like a tooth decay prevention device than a system for aligning lunar cycles with solar, instead of a leap day.

As another aside, the birthday of Augustus Caesar, to whom I alluded to as probably the greatest politician who ever lived, is September (not August) 23. That is also the birthday of the greatest musician who ever lived, Bruce Springsteen. I'm just saying.

The original Roman Calendar, which would be reformed first into Julian and then into Gregorian, began in March, not January, to align with the spring equinox - which is why the tenth month of our calendar (October) has a prefix more usually associated with eight than ten, further confusing any aliens that might be trying to figure us out prior to invading. It most likely had its own origin in more ancient lunar calendars, which is why we still call groupings of days "months," after the moon.

Which begs the question: why the shift from lunar to solar? We can see the phases of the moon, even today, a whole lot better than we can see the Earth's position relative to the sun and stars. Simple: herders and hunters need to know moon phases so they can know when they might be able to see at night, but planters need to know the seasons (ruled by the sun, not the moon) so they can know when to plant and harvest. The shift from the former to the latter resulted in the modification of lunar calendars to solar.

At least, in Europe. Elsewhere, lunar calendars are still in use, notably the Jewish, Islamic and Chinese calendars. And while we (of European descent) were still trying to figure out this whole "earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around" thing, the Mayans were working out a solar calendar more accurate than ours got to be until we invented atomic clocks.

And that's pretty damn cool for a culture that couldn't quite figure out what that "wheel" thing is good for.