Sneaky Engineers

Hi Everybody,

I just realized that you lost me back in January.  I was sending things to old list addresses and wondering what happened to the group.


Happy Easter.

> 150 years ago, or so Gauss offered up an algorithm for
> calculating the date of Easter. The procedure is accurate to
> within 3 days. It can also be modified to compute the older
> Passover and lots of variants [1].  If you are neither
> Christian nor Jew, no problem, you probably know one.
> 
> Gauss (and his contemporary Thomson/Kelvin) may have been
> pious, but they were engineers and therefore sneaky
> bast'rds.  The precision is important as it enables you
> to link lunar month (tides) and the Spring Equinox without
> introducing those parameters into the harmonic
> calculation.  Gauss was interpolating the Spring
> Equinox as half the distance (backwards) from Next Summer to
> Last Winter. 
> 
> http://www.rustprivacy.org/2014/balance/Easter.ods
> http://www.rustprivacy.org/2014/balance/Easter.xls
> 
> (use the ODS version if possible, there is no EASTERSUNDAY()
> function in EXCEL)
> 
> I am also a sneaky bas..., um, kindred spirit, and observe
> that if you compute the
> haversine(DOY)=(1-cos(DOY))/2=sin(DOY/2)^2 on the quarter,
> that is (1460+1 (Leap) Day/16) then you get a Season phase
> (hour) angle ...
> Spring(.5),Summer(1),Fall(.5),Winter(0)  and
> furthermore, this works for any square codeset or set of
> acronyms.  The groups
> [Spring,Summer,Fall]=[Agricultural Year] and
> [Fall,Winter,Spring]=[Academic Year] are always present.
> There is no use concerning yourself with timestamps and
> fractional phase angles and the binomial distribution
> because, as Gauss knew, if you are correct within 3 days,
> Easter is the one that's a Sunday.
> 
> Happy Easter :-)
>  
> --Gannon
> 
> [1] http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~gent0113/easter/eastercalculator.htm

Received on Thursday, 17 April 2014 23:20:31 UTC