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A few people have written to us concerning the fact:
• March first will never land on a Sunday in the 21st century.
They have all insisted that in 2009, March 1 will be on a Sunday.
However, as part of the same recent congressional legislation that is changing the date of Daylight Savings Time and fixing the time zone mess in Indiana, the way that leap years are handled will also change starting in 2008. For that reason, while pre-legislation, 2009 was due to have a Sunday March 1st, it will actually end up landing on a Saturday under the new system.
Note that to my knowledge, there have not been any patches issued for any major OS (Microsoft, Apple, nor Linux), due to this legislation (in part because there is an expectation that it will be further modified or even repealed at the last minute), so checking it on one's computer will reflect the old system until the patches have been issued.
Thanks for that clarification Taed, but isn't the 21st century 100 years? Looking at my calendar (including the fact of the offset) it appears that March 1st will fall on a Sunday.
Perhaps you meant decade?
If you mean March 1, 2100, then yes, that does fall on a Sunday. But I see that as the start of the 22nd century, not the end of the 21st.
It's arguable whether the 21st century goes from 2000-2099 or 2001-2100. The first way is my preference, and it is orthogonal to decades, in that the 70's was from 1970-1979. The second way is from counting off every 100 years from year 1, since there was no year 0.
Personally, I think the second way is silly, since it assumes that year 1 is the "start" of the centuries. Then by that same logic, the century before the first century would go from 100-1 BC. And would that be called the 0th century or the negative first century?
But why start counting at year 1? Why not start at when the Gregorian calendar's use started, which was 1752 for the United States. Why not start at 1066, or the time of the first recorded word, or many other possibilities?
Speaking of wacky calendars, the switch from Julian to Gregorian in the US produced a messed-up September since they were almost 2 weeks out-of-sync:
September 1752Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 14 15 1617 18 19 20 21 22 2324 25 26 27 28 29 30
Oh! That explains a mystery I've been wondering about for quite a while.
On Labor Day Weekend 1752 I went on a real bender down in Belmar on the Jersey shore. Beer, wine, mead. Ben Franklin even brought some of his homemade hooch. I drank from Friday until Wednesday (I had some vacation days to use up). I crashed Wednesday night and the next thing I knew it was 2 weeks later.
Posted By: TaedHowever, as part of the same recent congressional legislation that is changing the date of Daylight Savings Time and fixing the time zone mess in Indiana. . .
May I point out, that we were not aware that we had a time zone mess in Indiana, until the legislature got involved.
Now it turns out that due to our failure to observer DST for the past 30 years or so, we have incurred a daylight DEFICIT and must use the recently enacted DST "catch up" clause in order to get our daylight back in sync with the rest of the US.
It is a pain to have to set our clocks ahead every month (except for leap months) until 2012, but if it will help the nation, we will comply
Take a look at the perpetual calendar on http://www.timeanddate.com/ as an example, but...
I'll repost my comment here, since there seems to be more on the topic in this thread than on http://factcheck.gullible.info/discussion/280/march-first-will-not-land-on-a-sunday-in-the-21st-century/:
Regardless of any legislation (unless our governement has decided to ignore the historical popes and create their own calendar), there is a pattern to calendars that is easy to discern from looking at any perpetual calendar in print. In fact, perpetual calendars could not exist if there was not that definite pattern.
It would seem impossible that, over the course of a thousand years, that pattern could never have March first fall on a Sunday. Mathematics could probably explain this, whether politicians could, or not. The repeat is 7 years, or 6 years, taking leap year into account for next March, (March is always a bit confused, following February).
After 2009, during which you seem to imply the pattern is revoked, the next day March first should fall on a Sunday is 2015, unless that, too, has been changed by legislation. If so, we are in for a worse situation than the Y2K debacle promised. We will have to throw out all our little perpetual calendars we have been keeping over the years. And, none of our watches will work anymore.
Oh, what to do, what to do?
Write to your Congressman?
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