numbering the years

Apologies for missing my post on January One.  I celebrated a bit too hard on New Years eve and I was short on wisdom on the day after.

The first calendars were lunar, a month being from one full moon to the next, but this does not work well with 365 1/4-3/400 days of the solar year and there was slippage with a month sometimes being in the winter and sometimes in the spring, summer, or fall.  It was the Romans who gave us the solar calendar, of course people had known about the solar calendar forever, but it was the Romans, who in their manner, laid down the law on that matter.  It wasn't a perfect system.  Some months had thirty days and some thirty one in an arbitrary manner that I believe was due to politics, and then there is that oddball little guy February.  A bigger fault is that they did not account for that 1/4-3/4/300  extra day, from time to time they added a day to February, but sometime around 1500 spring months were sliding into winter, and to set things right they skipped ahead like half a month or so to set things right.  What they do now is surreptitiously add a few nanoseconds in or out every now and then, because actually all solar years are not equal because of other planets being nearer or farther.

December 25th was a big day for the Romans, it was like a cult day for their many mystery religions.  The Christians corrupted it to Christ's birthday although the bible hinted strongly that the actual day was in the spring.  It used to be a time of great merriment and drunkenness, but the Christians corrupted it into some sober religious holiday.  Nowadays, behind our bold leader, Santa Claus, it is being corrupted again into a time of merriment and drunkenness and I see that as a good thing.

I think the vernal equinox would be a better day for New Years, the equivalent of midnight which we use to mark days.  The Romans came close to it with Dec 31, but I suspect politics got into this too.

The Christians, who conquered the Romans, gave us BC and AD.  Other people like the Chinese and the Jews just kept right on counting, but the problem here is when do you start counting from zero?  Whenever you choose you will have to have some way to account for the years before that year and you will have to use negative numbers (BC) to do that and count up from there.

Everybody knows that 2000 is technically not the first year of the new millennium but the last day of the old one and nobody cares, we like to celebrate on round numbers.

But the solar and the lunar years are just two of the measures of time, the third is the rotation of the Earth, more on that tomorrow, which will give me time to research some of the earlier material of my discourse.