Especially for Jordan

[eleneariel]

I'm finally almost done working my way through Mapping Time (by E.G. Richards), and while intellectually I understand how it works, stuff like this still BLOWS MY MIND:

[discussing corrections made to various ancient calendars when they got off track with the lunar and seasonal cycles, as they invariably did, nobody having noticed yet that the length of a year is closer to 365.24222 days than any whole number]

Thus 46 BC contained 445 days. [...] This mammoth year was known as 'the last year of confusion.'

However,

It is unfortunate that Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March in 44 BC [...] Caesar was unable to oversee the proper working of his new calendar and the pontifices, as usual, misunderstood their task and interpreted their orders to insert an intercalary day every fourth year as one every three years using Roman inclusive counting. Once more the calendar began to slip.

Then there's always the period when England and her colonies adopted the Gregorian calendar in September of 1752:

Wednesday, 2 September, was followed by Thursday, 14 September, and the intervening 11 days just did not exist in that year.

I understand it but I still can't wrap my head around it. Where did those days GO?

Comments

[ransomedsea.livejournal.com]

-mind-ker-plooey!-

[franciscanorder.livejournal.com]

I'm not exactly sure I understand, but it would seem to me that they were probably off by 11 days at that point anyway.

I'd liken it to the spring forward/fall back of daylight savings. When we spring forward, that hour we lost doesn't *really* go anywhere. When they sprang forward 11 days, it was simply to correct an already present 11 day error.

[http://users.livejournal.com/patrick___/]

Yeah, that's how I understand it too. They knew they were off too, because things like the Equinox and the Solstice would way off from when they knew they were supposed to be.

[franciscanorder.livejournal.com]

Dude...that icon is AWESOME.

[http://users.livejournal.com/patrick___/]

Hahaha, thanks! I actually made it in Microsoft Paint, believe it or not.

[eattheolives.livejournal.com]

Right, the errors in the calendar had added up, over hundreds of years, to being 11 days off. Intellectually, I get it ... but even with daylight savings, while I understand it in my head, every season I STILL puzzle over exactly where that hour went!

Time is a strange and slippery thing.