Oh yeah, the older I get, the more every month feels like this. NYE already? I was just sitting on my tailgate watching Fourth Of July fireworks last month... I'd swear it.
My July 4th fireworks show was rained out this year, so the explosives sat on the shelf until Christmas Eve, when we set them off in the snow and subzero cold. Fireworks in the snow are magical. So, I truly was watching July 4th fireworks last week.
But I feel you on the instant passage of time thing. I blink twice, and it's Sunday freekin' evening again.
> The new calendar was adopted in some European countries where 4 Oct 1582 was followed by 15 Oct 1582 thereby skipping 10 days in between. However, it took as long as September 1752 for the new calendar to be adopted by Britain. In Great Britain and the British Empire, 2 Sep 1752 was followed by 14 Sep 1752 and that is the gap of 11 days we see in the cal 9 1752 output.
This is also the reason that some Christian groups celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7 rather than Dec. 25:
> “Christmas on Jan. 7 is also known as Old Christmas Day. Eleven days were dropped (from the Gregorian calendar) to make up for the calendar discrepancy that accumulated with the Julian calendar when England and Scotland switched in 1752,” Fr. Sammour explained.
If one is going to implement Julian-to-Gregorian calendar cutover, one ought to make it location-specific - this date is only correct for the former British Empire.
If one doesn’t have location information for a date, the only sane default is the first cutover at which the calendar was initially introduced, October 1582, which is the cutover date for Spain and Portugal (excluding their colonies), most of Italy, Poland and Lithuania (albeit, borders were different back then, so none of that exactly corresponds to the modern countries with those names.) To instead default to 1752 is a regrettable form of Anglocentricism
Google calendar does not reflect this if you look at September 1752. I'm not sure if that'e because they chose a different crossover point, or just ignored it altogether.
I suspect they took the opinion it’s not worth dealing with the many potential edge cases to support people who are booking appointments in the far distant past. How many people have even gone back that far in Google Calendar, never mind actually created any calendar events?
When Britain went Gregorian, with the results shown by cal, there were riots where people chanted “Give us back our 11 days!”. The rioters believed that everyone was fated to die on a given calendar date, and thus everybody's life had been shortened.
Actually, cal is showing a rather astonishing thing: the first 2 days of September were on the Julian calendar, the remaining 17 on the Gregorian calendar. Either a pure Julian or a pure Gregorian calendar would have shown all 30 days. However, cal's result is the most useful, as it tells us the dating system that was actually used.
> When Britain went Gregorian, with the results shown by cal, there were riots where people chanted “Give us back our 11 days!”. The rioters believed that everyone was fated to die on a given calendar date, and thus everybody's life had been shortened.
It seems that I fell for the myth of the riots. However, it is true that the Tories opposed the change bitterly, in part for sensible reasons (if done improperly, it would have caused a full rent to be payable for a 19-day month), and in part because it was a Whig proposal.
Blind opposition because it was the other party's idea? We can all be glad that this no longer happens.
The article seems to suggest that it does when it refers to falling back to the "environment" of the machine. Presumably that means the locale settings.
EDIT: Well, that's what the FreBSD man page says, but it isn't clear if they all behave this way. Seems like the Sllaris one implies it just uses that specific date.
I pity all you heretics who are celebrating the new year tonight. We followers of The One True Julian Calendar are sitting at home alone for the next 14 days.
