July 2– From "Plutarch’s Lives: Caesar" translated by Dryden and edited by A. H. Clough

I love this guy's outfit

July 2– From Plutarch’s Lives: Caesar translated by Dryden and edited by A. H. Clough

Summary: Caesar changed the calendar and got assassinated.

Commentary: We already got a Caesar reading back in March. The summary for today is all about him changing the calendar, but we only got like one paragraph of that. Kind of disappointing, I thought a reading about calendar math/history might be interesting. The current (Georgian) calendar is a very minor revision to the Julian calendar, built around standardizing leap years. It's an improvement, but only in about the smallest possible way. People have come up with so many better calendar systems since then, and we haven't used any of them. My favorite is Symetry454, which:

1. Is perpetual (the minimum improvement for any new calendar we should consider): All days are the same day of the week every year e.g. January 1st is always Monday, July 2nd is always Tuesday.

2. All same numbered days are on the same day of the week month to month. The 1st is always a Monday, the 18th is always a Thursday, etc.

3. All holidays are now fixed. While the goofy "Xth Thursday after Y" construction is kind of fun, it's not very practical.

4. Aligns most or all major civil and religious holidays, keeps a traditional sabbath cycle, and avoids Friday the 13th, accommodating a variety of superstitions that a lot of other alternate calendars ignore.

5. No non-calendar days (many alternate proposals add in a weird day somewhere that doesn't have a real date and make you call it sprok day or something).

6. Evenly divisible weeks, months, and quarters. Always starting on Monda7y and ending on Sunday.

I don't love the Leap Year implementation, but I don't know that there are any calendars that I do, between overly complicated (every 4 years, but not 100s, except 400s) or (as above) involve adding weird semi-days.

From the site linked:

It is a leap year only if the remainder of ( 52 × Year + 146 ) / 293 is less than 52.

That's not very hard math (it looks like a lot, but it's nothing you couldn't work out on pencil and paper in grade school), but I don't love that it works out to sometimes 5 years between leaps and sometimes 6.

We get a whole leap week instead of a leap day. Again, that sounds like a lot, but it keeps things more regular (making one of the 4 week months into a 5 prevents breaking anything).