From: Brian M. Scott on
On Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:12:09 -0800 (PST), Andrew Usher
<k_over_hbarc(a)yahoo.com> wrote in
<news:acc184f6-20cf-4ecf-8065-db72600e9c83(a)15g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>
in
sci.math,sci.physics,sci.astro,sci.lang,alt.usage.english:

[...]

> And the first day of the week is Sunday, not Monday - that
> is an incontrovertible fact.

Don't be ridiculous: it's merely a convention. For many of
us Monday is unquestionably the first day of the week.

[...]

Brian
From: Peter T. Daniels on
On Feb 19, 9:38 pm, R H Draney <dadoc...(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
> Peter T. Daniels filted:
>
>
>
> >On Feb 19, 1:02=A0pm, Cheryl <cperk...(a)mun.ca> wrote:
>
> >> I want an official long holiday weekend in every single month, no
> >> exceptions.
>
> >I thought they should have used MLK Day to commemorate the March on
> >Washington, rather than his birthday, since there are no holidays in
> >August.
>
> I always thought it should be observed on the anniversary of his assassination,
> so I could get my birthday off every year....
>
> I also plumped for rolling back "Presidents' Day" to the original "Washington's
> Birthday" and "Lincoln's Birthday", further suggesting that *every* president's
> birthday should be a holiday...(Polk and Harding screwed things up by having
> their birthdays on the same day of the year)...as luck would have it, at the

Statistically, in a group of 30 random people, you should expect at
least one pair to share a birthday. With a pool of 44, oughtn't there
to be two shared birthdays, on average?

> time I made this suggestion, that still would have left us with no holidays in
> June (Bush Sr came along a year or two later)....r
From: Peter T. Daniels on
On Feb 19, 9:40 pm, R H Draney <dadoc...(a)spamcop.net> wrote:
> Robert Bannister filted:
>
>
>
> >Androcles wrote:
>
> >> The USA doesn't have a football schedule. The rest of the world plays
> >> football, the USA calls that soccer and then plays it's own version of
> >> parochial handball.
>
> One expects such a reaction from someone who inserts an apostrophe into
> possessive "its"....

One doesn't, really; the greengroce'rs apostrophe is more a feature of
Britland than USland.

> >'Scuse me, what's rubbish about the rest of world playing that scoreless
> >drama with a round ball? Footballs may be different sizes and weights
> >and even the shape varies a bit, but they are basically ovoid. The other
> >game is for kids in the street.
>
> *Poor* kids...with foreign accents...and brown skin....r
From: Mike Dworetsky on
Yusuf B Gursey wrote:
> On Feb 19, 4:34 am, James Hogg <Jas.H...(a)gOUTmail.com> wrote:
>> John Atkinson wrote:
>>> Halmyre wrote:
>>>> On 19 Feb, 04:58, "Ray O'Hara" <raymond-oh...(a)hotmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> "Andrew Usher" <k_over_hb...(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message
>>
>>>>> news:65e2a2e7-1aef-4872-97a7-360fa6a10a6a(a)q21g2000yqm.googlegroups.com...
>>
>>>>>> Owing to the inconveniences which attend the shifting of the
>>>>>> calendar, and attempting in passing to create a more perfect
>>>>>> Church calendar, I say the following: 1. That Christmas day
>>>>>> should be fixed to a Sunday, and this should be the Sunday
>>>>>> between Dec. 21 and 27, and that in all civilised countries the
>>>>>> Monday should be considered a holiday, or the Saturday if not
>>>>>> normally. 2. That similarly Easter day should be fixed to the
>>>>>> Sunday which is 15 weeks following Christmas. 3. That the leap
>>>>>> year rule be changed to have a leap year occur every fourth
>>>>>> save that it be delayed when the leap year would start on a
>>>>>> Thursday, and that this gives 7 leap years in every 29, which
>>>>>> is near enough. 4. That the perpetual calendar can be made, by
>>>>>> considering the first day of the year of weeks to occur on the
>>>>>> Sunday after the Assumption, and if this is the first possible
>>>>>> calendar day, it is called week 1, and otherwise week 2, and
>>>>>> every year runs through week 53. And this calendar ensures that
>>>>>> everything can be fixed to a day of a certain week, in
>>>>>> particular the American Thanksgiving must be made 31 days
>>>>>> before Christmas. 6. This is surely the best possible
>>>>>> arrangement that can be made, without disturbing the cycle of
>>>>>> weeks or that of calendar days inherited from the Romans.
>>>>>> Andrew Usher
>>>>> The calendar has several sources, not just the Rome and the onewe
>>>>> habe in fine as it is
>>>> I just wish they'd settle on a date for Easter and be done with it.
>>
>>> But, the whole point of Easter is that it has a full moon! You might
>>> as well scrap the whole thing otherwise. Or are you suggesting that
>>> we only take holidays at Easter every four years or so, when your
>>> �settled� date just happens to correspond with the right lunar
>>> phase?
>>
>> My Book of Common Prayer makes things easy by pointing out that "the
>> moon referred to in the definition of Easter Day is not the actual
>> moon of the heavens, but the Calendar Moon, or Moon of the Lunar
>> Cycle, which is counted as full on its fourteenth day, reckoned from
>> the day of the Calendar New Moon inclusive." Also, in a Bissextile
>> Year "the number of Sundays after Epiphany will be the same, as if
>> Easter Day had fallen one day later than it really does."
>
> the Orthodox (Eastern) churches have a slightly different system.
> dunno exactly what it is.
>
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Easter
>
> Easter

Orthodox Easter and other events are based on the Julian Calendar (one year
= 365.25 days), while Catholic and Protestant practice follows the Gregorian
calendar (one year = 365.2425 days plus the 1582 dropping of 10 days). Over
several centuries, the date of the spring equinox has drifted away from
March 21 in the Orthodox calendar.

The two religious systems have different methods for calculating Easter
within their own calendars.

Do a Google search for "calendar FAQ".

>
> Easter is a moveable feast, meaning it is not fixed in relation to the
> civil calendar. The First Council of Nicaea (325) established the date
> of Easter as the first Sunday after the full moon (the Paschal Full
> Moon) following the vernal equinox.[3] Ecclesiastically, the equinox
> is reckoned to be on March 21 (regardless of the astronomically
> correct date), and the "Full Moon" is not necessarily the
> astronomically correct date. The date of Easter therefore varies
> between March 22 and April 25. Eastern Christianity bases its
> calculations on the Julian Calendar whose March 21 corresponds, during
> the twenty-first century, to April 3 in the Gregorian Calendar, in
> which calendar their celebration of Easter therefore varies between
> April 4 and May 8.
>
>
>
>>
>> What could be simpler?
>>
>> --
>> James

--
Mike Dworetsky

(Remove pants sp*mbl*ck to reply)

From: R H Draney on
Androcles filted:
>
>
>"R H Draney" <dadoctah(a)spamcop.net> wrote in message
>news:hlni3r01mb3(a)drn.newsguy.com...
>> Robert Bannister filted:
>>>
>>>Androcles wrote:
>>>>
>>>> The USA doesn't have a football schedule. The rest of the world plays
>>>> football, the USA calls that soccer and then plays it's own version of
>>>> parochial handball.
>>
>> One expects such a reaction from someone who inserts an apostrophe into
>> possessive "its"....
>
>Oops... I forgot that is one possessive word that doesn't have an apostophe.
>My's mistake.
>What is "....", four thirds of an ellipsis ?

An ellipsis and a full stop....

>>>'Scuse me, what's rubbish about the rest of world playing that scoreless
>>>drama with a round ball? Footballs may be different sizes and weights
>>>and even the shape varies a bit, but they are basically ovoid. The other
>>>game is for kids in the street.
>>
>> *Poor* kids...with foreign accents...and brown skin....r
>>
>>
>I don't know that word, what does "....r" mean?

An ellipsis and a full stop and the world's shortest meaningful .sig....r


--
A pessimist sees the glass as half empty.
An optometrist asks whether you see the glass
more full like this?...or like this?