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Planetary Rhythms
Published in Lisa Heschong, Visual Delight in Architecture, 2021
The Romans also struggled with creating a civil calendar, based roughly on lunar months, which would stay properly aligned with the solar year. They did this by adding a few extra days during the winter, when needed: February was their preferred ‘flexi-month’ to bring the coming calendar year into better alignment. The Julian calendar instituted by Julius Caesar in 46 BCE added one extra day to February every four years to account for the extra six hours that were not included in a 365-day calendar. But the Julian calendar was slightly too long and still required occasional adjustments by decree. By the sixteenth century it had drifted by ten days. A revised calendaring system, named the Gregorian calendar for Pope Gregory XIII, was instituted by the Catholic Church in 1582, and gradually adopted by governments around the world, to the point where it is now the most widely used civil calendar internationally.
Timekeeping
Published in Jill L. Baker, Technology of the Ancient Near East, 2018
The development of time reckoning and calendars is complex and multifaceted. Initially, timekeeping was motivated by agricultural cycles: marking the passage of seasons, identifying when to plant and when to harvest. As humankind became sedentary and urbanized, calendars also kept track of religious holy days, feast/festival days, and civil celebrations. Calendars were based on the movement of the moon, sun, and other celestial bodies. The Sumerians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Canaanites, Greeks, and Romans each kept their own calendars. The Hellenic Greek calendar was transported into the Near East with the conquest of Alexander and replaced by the Roman calendar later on. In the time of Julius Cesar, the Julian calendar corrected errors and became the main calendar used throughout the empire, beginning 1 January 45 BC. Eventually, the Gregorian calendar, instituted in 1582 by Pope Gregory XIII, replaced the Julian calendar.
Globalization, Localization, and Cross-Cultural User-Interface Design
Published in Julie A. Jacko, The Human–Computer Interaction Handbook, 2012
Consider these date and time issues, among others: Calendars: Gregorian, Muslim, Jewish, Indian, Chinese, Japanese, and so on. Note that within India there are three major Hindu religious calendars (one used by northern Indians, one by southern Indians, and one shared by both) separate from a secular calendarCharacter representation: Hindu-Arabic, Arabic, Chinese, Roman, and so onClock of 12 or 24 hoursCapitalization rules: for example, book titles in Britain capitalize the first word only versus all main words in U.S. titles and all nouns in GermanDays considered for start of week and for weekend: Christian, Muslim, and Israeli calendars have different work and rest days. North American monthly calendars typically begin on Sunday; European monthly calendars typically begin on MondayFormat field separatorsMaximum and minimum lengths of date and timeNames and abbreviations for days of week and months: two-, three-, and multicharacter standardsShort and long date formats for dates and timesTime zone(s) appropriate for a country and their namesUse of am and pm character stringsUse of daylight savings timeUse of leading zeros
The mathematics of leap years: sophistication versus content in mathematics education
Published in International Journal of Mathematical Education in Science and Technology, 2022
Yip Cheung Chan, Kam Moon Pang, Kenneth Young
A leap year is a calendar year with 366 days rather than 365. The basic regularity, already found in the Julian calendar, is familiar: (Rule 1) every year divisible by 4 (e.g. 2012, 2016) is a leap year. The refinements (Swinburne University of Technology, n.d.), adopted in the Gregorian calendar since 1582, are less known and sometimes omitted (Collins, n.d.): (Rule 2) every year divisible by 100 is not a leap year, except that (Rule 3) every year divisible by 400 is a leap year. Why are Rule 2 and Rule 3 needed? Where do the numbers 100 and 400 come from? Are there (in principle) better rules? And what does ‘better’ mean? Thinking through these issues will lead to (a) an interesting mathematical problem, as yet not precisely defined, that can be approached at different levels of precision, generality and rigour, and (b) broader reflection on pedagogy, as explained below.