Paul Gilmartin wrote: | By the way, the embolismic day in bissextile years | is February 24, the sixth day before the kalends of March.
Yes and no. In some medieval versions of what we call the Julian calendar---It was then called the Roman calendar---February 24th was duplicated; there were two of them cheek by jowl in leap years; and it was not the first February 24th but the the second of them that was the 'embolismic' day. (The Julian leap-year test is the simple one, mod(y,4) = 0. There is no 2nd-order mod(y,400) = 0 for centurial years.) Leap seconds are, among those of us who concern ourselves with these issues, extracalendrical, for the reasons I set out. The NIST feed, which I too have observed, has neither facilities nor time to do things right by inserting, say, 'extracalendrical leap second' into is text. We began on topic, but I think we have already tried the patience of some, and this is my last post in this thread. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
