<![CDATA[I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself).]]>RE: https://telescoper.blog/2026/04/03/finding-easter/

I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself).

I had absolutely no idea how complicated the date of Easter is. Wow.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/topic/4e06ec68-bb5e-46f7-81a8-27170451997b/i-m-an-astronomer-and-i-teach-at-a-catholic-college-though-i-m-not-religious-myself-.RSS for NodeFri, 01 May 2026 16:57:27 GMTSun, 05 Apr 2026 16:03:33 GMT60<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:09:17 GMT]]>@riley @grb090423 @sundogplanets it is (per wikipedia) a suburb of Paris, with a basilica also named for Saint Denis.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://cupoftea.social/users/nxskok/statuses/116359571568112693https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://cupoftea.social/users/nxskok/statuses/116359571568112693Mon, 06 Apr 2026 20:09:17 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:12:48 GMT]]>@nxskok I don't know. I've never been to Paris outside the airport.

@grb090423 @sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116359113500266692https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116359113500266692Mon, 06 Apr 2026 18:12:48 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:45:30 GMT]]>@riley @grb090423 @sundogplanets isn't there a district of Paris called Saint-Denis? I'll bet it has several pharmacies in case you should happen to get a headache while there.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://cupoftea.social/users/nxskok/statuses/116359006143874686https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://cupoftea.social/users/nxskok/statuses/116359006143874686Mon, 06 Apr 2026 17:45:30 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:59:58 GMT]]>@nxskok The world in which, if you had questions about the Computus Arguments in Paris, you couldn't just pick up your phone and call the abbot in Rome who knew the Easter stuff for clarification, was so weird. @grb090423 @sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116357647445047864https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116357647445047864Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:59:58 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:27:07 GMT]]>@nxskok Anyway, it turns out that there's a Saint Dionysios of Paris, also known as Saint Denis of Paris, who lived somewhen in the middle of the 200s, was, as the legend goes, beheaded in Lutetia the 250s, moved into his own abbey in the 600s, and as his career progressed, eventually rose to be a patron saint of France and headaches. Unfortunately, reliable data about his life is scarce; we don't even know for sure if the root cause of his final headache was Valerian.

But he lived about two centuries before Dionysios Exiguus, and moved from Rome to Lutetia, so odds are, if Dennis the Geek was discussed in Gaul in a local vernacular during his lifetime, he would already have been called 'Denis'.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Denis

@grb090423 @sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116357518308029866https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116357518308029866Mon, 06 Apr 2026 11:27:07 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:43:51 GMT]]>@riley @grb090423 @sundogplanets thank you for the much better explanation than I deserved after all I did was almost-quote a line from Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://cupoftea.social/users/nxskok/statuses/116354752970087990https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://cupoftea.social/users/nxskok/statuses/116354752970087990Sun, 05 Apr 2026 23:43:51 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:21:47 GMT]]>@SamantazFox @sundogplanets I thought he was imaginary πŸ€”

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://masto.ai/users/rozeboosje/statuses/116354194334532858https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://masto.ai/users/rozeboosje/statuses/116354194334532858Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:21:47 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:16:55 GMT]]>@rozeboosje @sundogplanets Wait till you learn that he was likely born in 5 BC πŸ˜„

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://infosec.exchange/users/SamantazFox/statuses/116354175151180304https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://infosec.exchange/users/SamantazFox/statuses/116354175151180304Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:16:55 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:13:28 GMT]]>@sundogplanets Perhaps more bizarre is that in Norway the deadline to take studded tyres off your car is the week after Easter.

Which is completely daft as the dates that Easter can fall on is in a range of a month.

The weather here can vary enormously between late March and late April.

We just had two nights where snow fell. It would make a lot more sense to just pick a date that reflects the change in the weather such as the 15th of April for the deadline.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.social/users/the_wub/statuses/116354161578795453https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.social/users/the_wub/statuses/116354161578795453Sun, 05 Apr 2026 21:13:28 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:20:39 GMT]]>@nxskok He probably wasn't, in his days. He lived in the 'Civilised World'(tm); the still-chugging-on Roman Empire, where both Greek-speaking Romans and Latin-speaking Romans would have used some recognisable form of 'Dionysios' or 'Dionysius'. The 'Dennis' form probably only arose as the name got exported into the 'Barbarian World', probably starting from the semi-"wild", semi-Roman, Gaul of the day, where the two had some of the relatively friendliest encounters. Old Greek is a bit weird, as languages go, in that it has a marker suffix for the nominative case; most other European languages don't, and as the Greek and Latin words started to seep into the developing European languages, many of them kind of bulk-snapped the -os and -us nominative suffixes off from Roman words, and names. With that, and some vowel merging, Dionysios became Dennis for English (and Denis / ДСнис for Bulgarian). It's the same process that made 'Mathaios' into 'Matthew', 'Petros' into 'Peter', and 'Ioannes' into English 'John' and German 'Hans' and Slavic 'Ivan'.

@grb090423 @sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353717981086743https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353717981086743Sun, 05 Apr 2026 19:20:39 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:36:10 GMT]]>@psneeze Maybe. I don't know for sure, but NACA would probably have been into some fancy fluid dynamics calculations by its latter years, and a systolic array of human computers is a feasible way of doing it.

@sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353543110336225https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353543110336225Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:36:10 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:28:32 GMT]]>@psneeze

Incidentally, a major plot twist of the book is that future humans find it to be a problem that the early Eternity's meddlement didn't let Terrans develop space travel technologies.

@sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353513094101076https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353513094101076Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:28:32 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:26:46 GMT]]>@riley Maybe I'm confusing it with the NACA. @sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.ie/users/psneeze/statuses/116353506121486414https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.ie/users/psneeze/statuses/116353506121486414Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:26:46 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:24:27 GMT]]>@psneeze There was no NASA in 1955. It was still two years until the Sputnik Moment that caused NASA to be established.

@sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353496989969608https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353496989969608Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:24:27 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:21:32 GMT]]>@psneeze I don't know for sure, but Asimov's inspiration might have been the Manhattan Project's practice of arranging human 'computers' into systolic arrays to perform complex simulations before the time of automatic computers and spreadsheets. Reportedly, these computers could use mechanic calculators, though.

The Manhattan Project's practice might, in turn, be derived from the New Deal initiative of the "Mathematical Tables Project", which employed unemployed office clerks and tasked them to 'compute' look-up tables for a bunch of useful transcendental functions. Importantly, the Tables Project was relatively public from the beginning; the Manhattan Project, obviously, was very, very classified, in order to properly ensure that only Russian spies would know exactly what was going on in it. But ten years after the war, the organisational lessons of the project might possibly have started to seep out of the military.

@sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353485529590880https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353485529590880Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:21:32 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:19:05 GMT]]>@riley Computers is what NASA called the mathematicians (mainly women) who did the calculations for space flight so I suppose Asimov was influenced by that. @sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.ie/users/psneeze/statuses/116353475879388687https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.ie/users/psneeze/statuses/116353475879388687Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:19:05 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:09:30 GMT]]>@psneeze Oh, and there's a famous book by Isaac Asimov in which 'Computer' is a job title for humans, and not even by clever pun: The End of Eternity. In it, The Eternity is an organisation for manipulating Teh One Timeline, and it employs people known as Computers to figure out which way the timeline should be manipulated. Computers as we know them are notoriously missing from throughout the book (except, possibly, a seldom-referenced hand-held device that might be interpreted more like a PDA or a calculator), which kind of makes sense, because the book came out in 1955, when the early ancestors of our kind of computers were exotic experimental mathematics things that militaries sometimes gave maths departments a lot of money for.

@sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353438236240730https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://toot.cat/users/riley/statuses/116353438236240730Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:09:30 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:05:34 GMT]]>@sundogplanets Hilda of Whitby says "hold my beer"

"Bede present[s] the synod as a victory for the Roman party...[but doubted their use in Rome]. He produced his own version based on the Alexandrian tables, as amended by Dionysius...in his De Temporibus (703) and in more detail in his De Temporum Ratione (716–25). The Bedan tables came to be accepted in the British Isles and the Carolingian Empire in the ninth century and in Rome in the tenth."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Whitby

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://fosstodon.org/users/wnd/statuses/116353422743010304https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://fosstodon.org/users/wnd/statuses/116353422743010304Sun, 05 Apr 2026 18:05:34 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:50:34 GMT]]>@oldclumsy_nowmad @sundogplanets My grandmother had something called the Book of Common Prayer (Church of England) and it was all spelled out in the back of there.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://cupoftea.social/users/nxskok/statuses/116353363800216624https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://cupoftea.social/users/nxskok/statuses/116353363800216624Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:50:34 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:48:13 GMT]]>@Katzedecimal @sundogplanets 😁

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://masto.ai/users/rozeboosje/statuses/116353354504601256https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://masto.ai/users/rozeboosje/statuses/116353354504601256Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:48:13 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:43:05 GMT]]>@rozeboosje
Growth hormones /j
@sundogplanets

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://kind.social/users/Katzedecimal/statuses/116353334361558159https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://kind.social/users/Katzedecimal/statuses/116353334361558159Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:43:05 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:39:15 GMT]]>@riley @grb090423 @sundogplanets

Though it doesn't always (nearly) coincide with Pesach.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://chaos.social/users/project1enigma/statuses/116353319262599466https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://chaos.social/users/project1enigma/statuses/116353319262599466Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:39:15 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:37:12 GMT]]>@sundogplanets first sunday after first full moon after 25th march ... Easter is a holy day for procrastinators πŸ˜„ I'm not religious either, I think I learned that in my 40s

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.social/users/ranx/statuses/116353311224904577https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://mastodon.social/users/ranx/statuses/116353311224904577Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:37:12 GMT<![CDATA[Reply to I'm an astronomer, and I teach at a Catholic college (though I'm not religious myself). on Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:35:20 GMT]]>@sundogplanets What shocks me most of all is how the dude was born at Christmas and they nailed him to a cross 4 months later.

]]>https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://masto.ai/users/rozeboosje/statuses/116353303897630951https://board.circlewithadot.net/post/https://masto.ai/users/rozeboosje/statuses/116353303897630951Sun, 05 Apr 2026 17:35:20 GMT