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Sunday, February 15, 2015

Monthly Reminder that I have a donate button

People really helped me out not too long ago, so I don't really expect anyone to donate now.  I haven't heard back about whether I'll keep aid or not.  If not I'm more or less screwed.

Probably on the more side instead of the less side.

If I do keep it then the problems are reduced to two:
1 $520.26 was paid for heat but it was out of money that was already owed to someone else, I need to find a way to cover that cost.
2 I don't know whether all of this scrambling has derailed my plans to get the $3,948.00 I need to pay for this semester's tuition by semester's end.

So... that's nice.

Anyway, if you feel like helping me with my perennial problems with money there is a donate button in the upper right corner of the blog.

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I generally also talk about the month, so here goes.

The Roman calendar originally had ten months and a period of "no month here" that was otherwise known as "winter".

Numa, who may or may not have actually existed at some point, took one day from each of the 30 day months so that the remaining months were either 31 days or 29 days.

The unallocated days, plus the six days taken from April, June, Sextilis (August), September, November, and December added up to 57.  Numa broke this in just about half thus making a 29 day month and a 28 day month.

These he put on the front of the year (which is why the number months are off by two) instead of the end of the year, for reasons that I don't know.

February was named after Februalia, a ritual purification.  The word was believed, by Ovid, to come from an Etruscan word.  Ancient sources on etymology are often laughably wrong, but as we don't know a damn thing about the Etruscan language (except for some areas where we know, "It's not like this thing we understand, it's not like that thing we understand,") we can't really confirm or deny Ovid on this one.

Lupercalia absorbed Februalia but February kept the name.

Julius Caesar gave the months their modern number of days, which didn't change the standard February, but added a leap day every four years.  The Gregorian calendar subtracted a leap day every hundred years, but skipped a subtraction every four hundredth year.  Which is where things stand at the moment.

Today is ante diem XVI Kalendas Martias.

1 comment:

  1. Apparently, the technical term for the year that Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII were trying to approximate is the tropical year. The mean Julian year is 365.25 days long; the mean Gregorian year is 365.2425 days long; according to the calculations cited on Wikipedia, the mean tropical year circa 1 January 2000 is 365.242189 days long.

    I wouldn't be surprised if that's still where things stand another two thousand years from now. It's a very good approximation.

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