I am just trying to envision the Pope sending a commission of astronomers. It
feels very scientific.

On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 09:02:12PM -0700, Diego R. Martinez wrote:
>    Sorry, minor correction. The October Revolution happened on November 7,
>    1917 Gregorian.
>
>    On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 20:58 Diego R. Martinez <[1]diego001@gmail.com>
>    wrote:
>
>    Some database systems, including the Sybase database that later became
>    Microsoft SQL Server, use 1/1/1753 00:00:00 +0000 as the start of their
>    epoch. The reason why this is is that 1753 is the first year in the
>    English calendar that is fully coordinated with the Gregorian calendar.
>    The English calendar has 11 missing days that were skipped from
>    September 2 to September 14 to convert from the Julian calendar to the
>    Gregorian calendar.
>
>    The Julian calendar was used from the days of Julius Caesar and
>    measures the year at 365.25 days per year. But over the course of
>    centuries, The calendar drifted by about 1 day over 128 years. This is
>    because the mean solar tropical year is actually 365.2422 days. In
>    1582, this drift from the tropical year accumulated to 10 days. This
>    caused Pope Gregory XIII to try to fix the calendar and he sent a
>    commission of astronomers to redesign the calendar. The motivations of
>    the Roman Catholic Church there were also to celebrate religious
>    observances at the correct time. In 1582, Catholic countries skipped 10
>    days.
>
>    Of course, this happened after the English reformation and a lot of
>    folks called it “Papist time” in England. And this is why England
>    didn’t adopt the Gregorian calendar until 170 years later. This is also
>    why George Washington’s Birthday is in different forms. One was called
>    “Old Style” (which is the old Julian Calendar), and we also have a date
>    in “New Style,” which was 11 days later.
>
>    The Orthodox Church never adopted the Gregorian calendar by not
>    recognizing the authority of the Pope. This is why Orthodox Christmas
>    is later and Orthodox Easter is later. And the Russians didn’t change
>    their calendar until after the October Revolution of October 25, 1917
>    (which happened on November 8th, 1917 in the rest of Europe because of
>    the calendar drift!)
>
>    But yes. If we want an epoch, we could do a lot worse than what Sybase
>    chose.
>
>    On Tue, Oct 27, 2026 at 20:19 Brian E. Lavender <[2]brian@brie.com>
>    wrote:
>
>      Quote from __Core Java, Volume II: Advanced Features, 13th Edition__
>      > Now let us turn from absolute time to human time. There are two
>      kinds
>      > of human time in the Java API, local date/time and zoned time.
>      Local
>      > date/time has a date and/or time of day, but no associated time
>      zone
>      > information. An example of a local date is June 14, 1903 (the day
>      on
>      > which Alonzo Church, inventor of the lambda calculus, was born).
>      Since
>      > that date has neither a time of day nor time zone information, it
>      does
>      > not correspond to a precise instant of time. In contrast, July 16,
>      1969,
>      > 09:32:00 EDT (the launch of Apollo 11) is a zoned date/time,
>      representing
>      > a precise instant on the time line.
>      I thought that was interesting. So, the Epoch perhaps ought to be
>      June 14, 1903?
>      Brian
>      --
>      Brian Lavender
>      [3]https://www.brie.com/brian/
>      "There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
>      make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the
>      other
>      way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious
>      deficiencies."
>      Professor C. A. R. Hoare
>      The 1980 Turing award lecture
>      _______________________________________________
>      Lug-nuts mailing list -- [4]lug-nuts@bigbrie.com
>      To unsubscribe send an email to [5]lug-nuts-leave@bigbrie.com
>
> References
>
>    1. mailto:diego001@gmail.com
>    2. mailto:brian@brie.com
>    3. https://www.brie.com/brian/
>    4. mailto:lug-nuts@bigbrie.com
>    5. mailto:lug-nuts-leave@bigbrie.com

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--
Brian Lavender
https://www.brie.com/brian/

"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to
make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other
way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."

Professor C. A. R. Hoare
The 1980 Turing award lecture
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