The Ten Days that Disappeared

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17 points·edw519··7 comments

Something most readers are probably already aware of, but I found this post interesting as I'd never considered what the acutal social, economic, political, etc, ramifications were for the world when this happens.... I'v previously always thought of the in purely academic terms "Yeah, that was a good move, makes sense. Good for the Pope."

Certainly makes the IPv4 to IPv6 transition look like a walk in the park . . .

Other interesting date facts:

February 30th actually happened. In Sweden in 1712: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30

Friday followed Friday. In Alaska in 1867: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Date_Line#Histori...

The Unix cal program uses the switch in Britain for this shift.

cal 9 1752

I don't understand why they didn't instead drop the next few leap days. How impatient can you be when cathedrals may take centuries to build?

Spreading the change over 40 years ran the risk of having a new pope reversing the decision. Sweden tried to do it this way and failed.[1]

I would also suspect that vanity played some role. If you start the slow transition you don't get a new calendar named after you.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/February_30#Swedish_calendar

Dershowitz & Reingold's "Calendrical Calculations" touches on this. The book goes describes how to represent calendars, and how to convert between them (Gregorian, Julian, Ethiopian, Islamic, Hebrew, Hindu, Mayan, and French Revolution, among others). Includes Lisp code!

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