ANST - SR Chronicler Officer Update Info

[Padraig Ruad O'Maolagain]

Please note that my comments are extremely tongue-in-cheek, although I have tried to be accurate in my data.

David Hoffpauir said - 
>
>Having pointed this out, and deftly side-stepping the millennium issue, I
>will adamantly argue that a new century has begun.  A new one begins with
>every second, half-second or however you care to meter time and one equally
>closes. I for one am liberal enough to believe that one hundred years has
>past. Somehow. It's all dependent on where you count back to.  It may not
>square off with a nice round number at the stroke of midnight.  So what!
>It's a human thing, none of the other creatures I've met seem to care.

True, but in the way that we humans keep track of time, the generalized term "century" means a particular 100 year period, such as "the first century", A.D. 1 though 100, "the 20th century", A.D 1901 through 2000, etc., so we have a common reference point.

>You
>know, everybody says that George Burns lived to be one hundred years old.
>Did he?  His first year was all in that count up to being 1 year old and he
>died before hitting 101.  So technically he lost the bet.  Do we take away
>his centurion status on a technicality?
>

Acutally, no.  You prove by your own argument that he had 100 birthdays, and was therefore 100 years old. (The century thing again, 1 through 100).  After your birth, when one year has passed, you are one year old.  When 100 years have passed, you are 100 years old.

>What if that Gregorian dude woke up with a hang over and decided to put off
>counting time for a day or so?  What if the world was created on Friday
>afternoon instead of 10:56 am, Thursday?  HMMM... In other words our whole
>concept of time really gets down to a 365 day earth cycle divided by a
>decimal counting system that has more to do with number of digits on our
>hands than any divine mandate which governs every moment of our existence.
>Kinda makes you wonder why we've got to be to work at 8 am.  As far as the
>millennium goes, hmmm... ask me next year.
>

Have exactly 2000 years passed since the birth of Christ?  Unlikely.  Both the Julian and the Gregorian calendars were adjusted multiple times over the centuries due to miscalculations, mistakes, politics, and because the solar year is not exactly 365 days long, plus the fact that dates on the solar and lunar calendars match up only once every 16 years or so.  

Add into this mish-mash the early monk who made a mistake in his calculations of how many years had passed since Christ's birth, and the resulting figure became the official date.  By the time the mistake was discovered many years later, correcting all of the handwritten records and making all of the necessary changes would have made Y2K look like a first-grader's addition problem.  (Calendar corrections WERE attemped hundreds of years later, and caused much chaos for everyone - and STILL didn't get the date right.)

Taking everything into account and counting backwards from the present, it seems that the actual date of Christ's birth was sometime in the spring (lambing season, and the reason the shephards were in the fields with their flocks), between 5 and 3 BC.  There's a good Irishism for you - Jesus was born 5 years before his birthday.

So it should actually be sometime between 2003 and 2005, the millenial anniversary long past, and I have to agree with David - with all of this taken into consideration, what's the big deal about getting to work at 8am?

Well, I guess that's enough rambling for now.

Padraig

--
May you live as long as you want, and love as long as you live.
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