Thursday, May 19, 2011

823 years of BS, or why that rumor is wrong

You've probably gotten the email, or seen the Facebook post, about how this year (2011) is so incredibly rare and that it hasn't happened in 823 years (or won't happen again for 823 years).
I honestly don't know how anyone with half a brain can fall for that. Or forward it.
Think logically. We have SEVEN weekdays. So January 1 can be on any of those days. That's SEVEN different calendars. But oh wait, there's leap year. So you need another SEVEN calendars with February 29 on them. (But you can see that there's only 7 versions of January 1 through February 28.)
That's a total of 14 calendars. The 7 leap year ones, obviously, don't get used very often. But 2011 isn't a leap year. In fact, 2005 had the EXACT SAME CALENDAR (gasp) and it will come around again in 2022. It is not rare at all. And I have no idea where the bogus 823 year figure comes from. 823 years ago was 1188. This year, January 1 was on Saturday. In 1188 it was on Friday--but it was a leap year, so it does correspond with our calendar from March 1 on. (The point being that it's not the exact same calendar.)
From Virtual Perpetual Calendar, here is calendar 6 (this year's) and 200 years of occurrences.

Please, please, please, STOP SENDING/POSTING this nonsense.  Or at least do it where I can't see it.