every day in 2016, write a sentence or a paragraph or a poem that appreciates
Julian date
whuuuuuut? yes. Julian date. now you might think the Julian date is the number of days since the Ides of March back in 44 BC. no, no, no, no, no! neither meaning is that. neither? yes, like so many things worth knowing, the Julian date is ambiguous. for many people, the Julian date is just the DoY (Day of the Year - which is 61 on 1 March on leap years, but is 60 on 1 March on most years). actually I am mistaken, this is the Julian date as distinct from the Julian day. OMG! I've gone more than half a lifetime without catching that distinction! what one learns when one appreciates! yes, apparently the DoY and the Julian date are the same. tra-la! the Julian day is something else entirely. oh, you're gonna love this! the Julian day or Julian day number is the integer assigned to a whole solar day starting with JDN 0 assigned to the day that begins at noon on 1 January 4713 BC in the proleptic Julian Calendar. as a frinstans, today (11 April 2016 at 0000 GMT was JDN 2457490.500000. now we need to go back and collect a few terms. a whole solar day runs from noon to noon, instead of from midnight to midnight like a normal day. a proleptic calendar is a calendar extrapolated back to before when it was adopted. thus, no one in 4713 BC knew that it was 4713 BC or had any idea of a month called January. they didn't know about computers or PDAs or GPS either, but they did just fine without them. you'll probably never need to know about Julian days unless you're an astronomer or work with astronomers, but Julian dates come in handy for us normal people sometimes. me? I appreciate knowing about both, even getting a misunderstanding about them corrected.
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