[geeks] Now for something completely geek

[Sandwich Maker]

" From: Dave Fischer <dave at cca.org>
" 
" adh at an.bradford.ma.us writes:
" 
" >why not decimal time while you're at it?  100 sec/min, 100 min/hr,
" >10 hr/day.  1 new sec = 0.864 old sec.
" 
" >ten day weeks.  [these are actually an old idea; ancient egypt used
" >them before the invention of the 'modern' calendar]
" 
" Ah, that egyptian calendar was so nice.
" 
" 12 30-day months.
" weeks aligned on month boundaries
" 5-day festival at the end of the year to round it out.
" 
" As opposed to the earliest version of the Roman calendar (a few
" thousand years later) that we use - 10 months, 30 or 31 days each,
" and a roughly 60-day period that didn't count, over the winter. And
" when they filled in the winter with a few more months, it was still
" so bad they had a "leap month" called Mercedonius that was occasionally
" thrown in to the middle of February, often for political reasons
" (to screw with the timing of elections?).

oh yeah.  some appointments were on an annual or biannual basis, and
some of them were virtually a license to steal if you were corrupt.
now add to that the fact that the calendar was such a mess that one of
the lesser appointments was 'calendar man'.  now if you, the corrupt
official, could convince calendar man to make mercedonius say 180 days
long...  it happened at least once.

we have julius caesar to thank for the julian calendar, which survived
into the 18th c, but not from when he was emperor.  prior to that he
was calendar man for a year, and that's when he instituted his reform.
________________________________________________________________________
Andrew Hay                                  the genius nature
internet rambler                            is to see what all have seen
adh at an.bradford.ma.us                       and think what none thought