Leap Day

I have a fascination with Calendars. One of the artifacts of working on programming languages is that you get a very familiar sense with the different ways to represent time. For example, you could say that today is 1204777693833 milliseconds since January 1 1970. This might sound weird to you if you aren't a programmer, but its actually the standard way to represent time in the language I prefer. Then you would take that number and apply a context like so:

1. Gregorian Calendar in the American Style: March 5 2008 10:29 PM
2. Gregorian Calendar in the British Military Style: 5 March 2008 22:29 PM
3. Chinese Republic Era Style: Republic 97 1 28
4. Mike's mental state: about an hour before bedtime, time for a blog post and 2 rounds of BF2

So, from this perspective, time is defined from a certain celestial event. That event is the position of the earth relative to the sun at a time that is defined in the Gregorian calendar as January 1 1970. However, the expression of that time varies by culture, nationality, and even occupation (military vs civilian). In addition, each of us has several internal clocks running: our conception of absolute time as defined by the Gregorian calendar; our scheduling of events as they occur in the day; our internal body functions; probably about 4 or 5 primary calendars and a host of others.

But we can't be too cavalier to say that these representations of time are entirely abstract and without their own inherent relevance! Take GrubHub.com for example. Our expenses are defined on a bi monthly basis. Our revenues are defined on a daily basis. So, our revenue was up 3% for February while expenses stayed the same. Google is very similar (Daily revenue, Monthly Payroll). A 3% difference in for them is a *PROFIT* of 41 Million dollars for February. On the flip side, think about the Sears tower. They had an additional day of heating expenses, but earned only the standard monthly revenue for their tenants. That could amount to a loss in the range of about $100K

The transformation from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar introduced the concept of 97 Leap Days every 100 years . The goal was to permanently set the vernal equinox on March 21st. This transformation was decreed and adopted by most Catholic countries the date October 5 1582 was followed by October 15 1582 (although the day of the week didn't skip!) Across most of Europe, landlords tried to charge rent for the entire month of October which lead to several peasant revolts which had to be calmed by Pope Gregory himself!

In conclusion, our subjective Calandaraization of objective celestial time has far reaching and concrete effects on our material lives.

Homework for the reader:
Ponder the relationships between the two gods of American culture in our time: money and time

(American culture in our time is defined by the culture that exists at latitude =41.997186 and longitude=-87.66653 on the WSG84 datum as of 1204777693833 milliseconds since January 1 1970 defined by the Gregorian calendar as set on 24 February 1582 by papal bull Inter gravissimas.)