3.(21-22) Seminar 3 - Day of Week

Slim Novel 3 - http://adventuresofkimi.blogspot.com - See Homepage

21. Seminar: What Day?

Sunday Seminar by Kimura: He stands at end of table with white cardboard by left shoulder. Seated on his left is Miss Harumi, a printed perpetual calendar before her. On her left is Olga with Boris. Kimi is in usual seat at opposite end. Around, on her left, are Tommy and Ali.

   Kimura indicates on board:

743 752 741 631

-12, -40, -68, -96

   “Seminar today teaches to accurately, quickly locate day-name of week for calendar date-number. It assumes historical Monday to Sunday seven-day week. For calculations into future it assumes no change in Gregorian calendar.

   “Numerical key is 743 752 741 631. For the 1900's it gives the calendar date numbers for first Sunday each month in each of four reference years 1912, 1940, 1968 and 1996. Thus, in 1912, 1940, 1968, and 1996, the 7 January was and will be Sunday. And similarly, 4 Feb., 3 March, 7 April, 5 May, 2 June, 7 July, 4 August, 1 September, 6 October, 3 November, and 1 December will be the first Sunday in each month.

   “If you shift into other centuries, the above data shows rotation of start name days of week as shown.” He indicates on the board.

“For 1900-99, the reference weekday is, as mentioned, Sunday; then, for 2000-99, Saturday; and for 2100-99, Thursday; and for 2200-99, Tuesday. And the sequence, Sunday/Saturday/Thursday/Tuesday, repeats with each subsequent four centuries.

   “Going back from 1900, for 1899 to 1800, the reference day is Tuesday; for 1799 to 1700, it is Thursday; for 1699 to 1600, Saturday; and for 1599 to 15 Oct 1582, the start of the Gregorian calendar, Sunday.

   He asks “Kimi, what is your birth date?”

   “Three December 1916.”

   “First, we go to nearest reference year December. The system reveals the Sunday, 1 December 1912. Then go forward two days to Tuesday, 3 December 1912. Now we need to hop forward four years.  Here a rule informs. For same date of each successive year we move – I say ‘Click’ – one weekday forward and, also if in going forward we pass a leap year 29 Feb. we click ahead an additional day. In this case in going from Tuesday, 3 December 1912 to same date 1916, we go forward four years and cross one leap year, 29 February 1916. So we click weekday five places ahead from Tuesday, 3 December 1912 to Sunday, 3 December 1916".

   “Yeah!” exclaims Kimi, adding, “I born Sunday.”

   Kimura continues: “Next I will demonstrate in the Julian Calendar. Note its conversion, when ten days were skipped - deleted from history - from the day after the last day of the Julian Calendar, 4 October 1582, a Thursday,  to the first day of the Gregorian 15 October 1582 Friday. So for dates in the Julian Calendar one uses the shortcut of going directly to 4 October 1582, a Thursday, and working backward from that. Take Columbus’ discovery of America, 12 October 1492? We know the last day of the Julian, Thursday, 4 October 1582. Our goal is 12 October 1492 so the next step is to go back to the next reference year from the Thursday 4 October 1582 and it is 4 October in 1568.  From Thursday, 4 October 1582 to same date in 1568, click back by seven-year hops, taking into account passed leap-years. From 1582 to 1575, with 2 leap years passed, gives Tuesday, 4 October 1575, and to 1568, one leap year passed, gives Monday, 4 October 1568, a reference year. Now we can get to Monday, 4 October 1512. In 1512, we should go to the 8-day later Columbus discovery's 20^th anniversary, Tuesday, 12 October 1512.  Now we continue in seven-year hops, keeping leap years in mind: Sunday 12 October 1505, Friday 12 October 1498 (In the Julian, in contrast to Gregorian every –00 year is a leap year). And, six years involving one leap year puts us at Friday, 12 October 1492. America is a Friday discovery!”

   Kimura pauses for effect on the by now somewhat dazed seminarans “I guess I may be boring you, as Nils Bohr bored Boers in his lecture on Atomic structure in Capetown in 1905,” he says trying a bad joke and not getting any response. “But I want to do one more example: discovering the day of week on 1 December, A.D. 11,940 – ten thousand years in future. Of course it assumes retention of Gregorian calendar and same-name days of week.

   “Reviewing the reference weekdays for this and subsequent four centuries we see as follows: 1900-99, Sunday; 2000-99, Saturday; 2100-99, Thursday; 2200-99, Tuesday; 2300-99, and then re-Sunday.” 

   “Note that these recycle every fifth century on a 400-year repeating cycle. So to find days of cycle for the century starting AD 11,900, subtract the present century starting year – 1900 – from AD 11,900, the start of the century of 11,940. We get 10,000 years, and now divide the 10,000 by 400 and we get as answer 25 four-hundred-year cycles from AD 1900 completed by AD 11,900.  The respective weekday referents for centuries in the 400-year cycles – as you can see from what is written on the board – are Sunday, Saturday, Thursday, and Tuesday. So the completion of exactly 25 cycles brings it around again to Sunday for the four reference years in AD 11,900 to 11,999, and our 743 752 741 631 informs that the first day of December AD 11,940 Gregorian will be Sunday.”

   “He is correct,” says Harumi after consulting her perpetual Gregorian calendar.

   “So what else is new?” asks Olga, her tone implying that the Seminar is a waste of time.

22. Calendar Curio and Defense of ‘What Day?’

“I see you are not impressed, Madame Olga,” says Kimura with good humor.

   “Impress, me, by explaining why this is necessary.”

   “First, even if its application seems trivial, its function is Evolution's triumph. Focus on the fact that this creation of the human mind accomplishes what otherwise would take a roomful of thinking machines. After all, to be able to mentally compute what day of week it was, 12 April 1627 AD or will be, 3 December 11,897 AD, is a huge feat and the only memorization, we need to speed this is the 743 752 741 631 and you can say what day of week any historical date fell on.

   Boris, a history buff, says “It would be useful to know the name of day that battles occurred.”

   Tommy chimes in “And novelists wishing to locate famous event days.”

   And from movie buff Ali: “I shall use it to find historical boo-boos in movies whose directors are dumb enough to show a day-of-week calendar in a scene on screen.”

   Olga adds her bit. “It could be a good conversation piece for parties and to show off that one's a genius, you know, like requesting someone's date of birth and once you get it, saying, ‘Aha, a Sunday!’”

   Kimi raises hand shyly and is acknowledged. “Why it so complicated to find day of week?”

   Kimura answers her: “The number, seven, days of the week, into three-hundred sixty-five, days of the year, will not divide cleanly.” He writes on blackboard: 365÷7 = 52 weeks and 1 day. “On top of that, the actual rotations on axis made by Earth during a full circle of Sol,  our sun, is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds, which becomes the decimal irrational mixed number 365.242.…; ‘irrational’, because the decimal is non-repeating digits that never end.”

   Tommy interjects. Isn't somewhere in there why Ole Pope Greg XIII had to end the Julian system?”

   Kimura smiles since he had asked Tommy to ask that question. “Yes. When Julius Caesar decreed his calendar, it was a triumph of his Greek slave mathematicians’ replacing the problematic older calendar based on our moon's quarters in a month. But his timekeepers calculated three-hundred sixty-five and a quarter days in a year, or in decimal 365.250, which was not very accurate in the real rotation. So the calendar fell behind on seasons as centuries passed. The originally icy cold Christ-masses in end-year Rome were moving backward seasonally so that by AD 1550 they had regressed into the seasonal equivalent of mid-December, and, given another few millennia, the faithful would end up celebrating Christ's birth on torridly hot, malarial, Roman summer days. So Gregory set his mathematicians – no longer Greek slaves but Jewish number hackers – to work, and, using the more accurate 365.242… as basis, they came up with Gregory's calendar we use today. First they deleted ten days of Earth's existence at start of Gregory's new calendar to correct for the seasonal regression of the inaccurate 365.250-day year. That was done by Gregory's decreeing the last day of the Julian, as Thursday, 4 October 1582 and the day after, the first day of the Gregorian calendar, being Friday 15 October.”

   “But the most brilliant part was taking the 0.242 into account. The Julian timekeepers, working on a 0.250 decimal, had too simply decreed every year whose digits were divisible by 4, a 366-day year – the extra day, 29 February – our famous leap year. The Gregorians added a little improvement. They deleted leap years from all –00 century years that could not be divided cleanly by 400. So AD 1600 had leap-year 29 Feb. but 1700, 1800 and 1900 did not; and 2000 will have it. This reduced the 0.250 very close to 0.242, and practically has eliminated the seasonal creep. But it still makes for yearly changing of weekday names for same calendar dates that needs the brilliant system of locating day of week for particular date that I have just presented.”

   Ali asks, “Isn't it possible to have a system where days of week and calendar dates are always same, year in, year out?”

   “Yes, you of course refer to the good Abbe Mastrofini's. He suggested to Pope Gregory XVI in 1834 a New Gregorian Calendar of 364-day years. The 364 can be divided by 7 cleanly to give 52 exact weeks but it would leave one and a quarter days unaccounted for each year. Abbe M. solved that by continuing Gregorian leap years and adding one extra free day every fifth year, which would be designated a worldwide celebration. The good point of his system is its invariability of day of week with calendar date no matter the year. It would have been a dream for historians of the future because then the famous dates – as for example whenever we land the first man on the moon - would always be on the particular name day of the week it first happened, in every future year. It would put the system I introduced in this seminar out of business. But by 1834, Rome was no longer able to impose its will as it had in Julius Caesar's and Pope Gregory XIII's time.

   “Let me end here by peeking far into future and suggesting a time will come for Abbe Mastrofini's system to become part of World Government. The Gregorian Calendar, good as it is to solve seasonal creep is still not exact and after ten thousand or more years the same problem will occur albeit more slowly. Also, the astronomical year is gradually increasing in time-interval because of both the gradual slowing of Earth in its solar orbit and in its rotation about its own axis due to tidal friction. Presently, 1.14 second adds to our calendar every ten thousand years. If you compute that over 1 million years, you get a 114-second increase in the 24-hour day, or 1.9 minute every million years. Not much, I'll grant, but in 1 billion years, it computes to 1,900 minutes, and that is 31.67 additional hours – a 366.561 year compared to the Gregorian's 365.242…  So by 1 billion years, if humanity will want to preserve the Abbe's 364-year perfect day-for-date calendar, an additional un-named, free day or two will have to have been added in a staggered way over each several years to account for the additional hours. But we can presume that by then it will be a moot question for a humanity no longer basing its calendar on Earth's rotation and revolution.”

   Tommy raps. “Thank you, Ken. I should like to say that what is important about this system is that it proves the human brain can outdistance mechanical computers once a New People person is put in charge, as will happen in our future Science Civilization. In the present bad civilization, most boobs do not use the most brain that could be. Imagine a world where today's average brain's power increases by power of ten? What problem could not be solved? What beautiful leisure for human happiness could not be made? How good it would be for Gaea, as I like to call our Earth, and all her animal and plant and inorganic parts!”

   Harumi, as keeper of clock, interrupts: “Time up!”

   Ali says,”Lyez eat!” and Tommy chimes in, “I’ll second that!”
   To read on, now, click 3.23 Saturday Sex