Brain broken!

[kiya]

I poked at the web and found a calendar for 1773 with holidays marked on it (for running the plot I'm currently running on NE2.

So now I know when Ash Wednesday fell in 1773, which is the critical bit of information that I needed.

The calendar also includes Martin Luther King Day, Australia Day, Professional Secretaries Week, Earth Day, International Labour Day, . . . Independence Day for the States. . . .

. . . I didn't know there was a Mother-in-law's Day. . . .

(gwynyth, if you didn't know about this thing, it's here and I got there from here. In case you would find such useful.)

Comments

[brooksmoses]

Oh, cute -- it's in Javascript, so you can see how they calculate it. And they provide (as a comment in the code) a link to a US Naval Observatory site (http://aa.usno.navy.mil/faq/docs/easter.html) that they got the algorithm for calculating Easter from, which has a good explanation of how things go.

The Naval Observatory site also comes with a Calculator page that calculates when Ash Wednesday and Easter Sunday fall for a given year, and makes useful comments about the relevance of such. (For instance, for 1773, it points out that it's a Gregorian date and that the Gregorian calendar was not necessarily in use in non-Catholic countries then. And specifically that it was first used in England and the colonies in September 1752.)

- Brooks

[kiya]

Heh. :} Useful data that.

*continues to let her brain spin trying to work out precise Ash Wednesday events*

[redbird]

There are an incredible number of "holidays" that someone thought you could be convinced to spend money on greeting cards for. A really useful thing online would be a variant of this that knew when each holiday had first been celebrated, so wouldn't give you Earth Day, Australia Day, etc. for 1773. (This would be handy if you needed to know whether Mother's Day had been celebrated in 1903, for example; I hope we all realize that if it's France in 1743, nobody was celebrating Martin Luther King Day.)

[jenett]

I've found similar things, but thanks much for the pointer. I will go and experiment when I get my brain back in working order (see upcoming post for details...) ”