Oct. 25th, Still collecting Oct.'s rent...

来源: 2014-10-25 14:23:12 [博客] [旧帖] [给我悄悄话] 本文已被阅读:
Oct. 25th. Long live the Russian Revolution!

Turned out the date is for Julian calendar, not the Gregorian calendar the rest of world used (which put the date on Nov. 7th...)

In Julian calendar, each year as multiple of 4 is a leap year with 29 days in Feb. This is suppose to correctly reflect the rotation of earth around the sun, so that each month should have 2 equinox points (the "jieqi" in Chinese). However, this model is too coarse, so by the time of Pope Gregorian 14th, the calendar was off as much as 11 days... A new calendar was invented, with years multiple of 100 not to be leap years, but years multiple of 400 are...

Same with Chinese calendar. We do not have leap year, we have leap months, the way these leap months are inserted is to ensure that there are 2 equinox points each month. That's very serious matter! If it went wrong, the official in charge of calendar would have his head chopped off...

Collected 4% yesterday, 1% today, still counting...