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Wednesday, February 18, 2009

Our Glorious History, Part IV

La quatrième partie d'une série de longueur indéterminée.

<grisom> Umu! More hellworms!
I know how to convert between the Gregorian and Coptic calendars, but I also know that the Coptic calendar has drifted rather far from the year-start originally intended by the Ancient Egyptians. When did the Egyptian calendar start *when it was invented*?

<umunmutamku> PRELIMINARY WIKIPEDIAING (i am at school and write hastily from a business-bldg computer) seems to indicate the year started with the heliacal rising (?) of the star Sirius.

<grisom> I know!

Supposedly the "heliacal rising" was an astronomical proxy for a certain point in the Nile's flood cycle, which presumably occurs on a specific date in our current calendar. The original Egyptian calendar was exactly 365 days every year, so it got badly out of sync with the Nile by the time it was Romanized into the Coptic calendar. The Coptic calendar itself, with its Julian leap years, has gone even further out of whack since then. So what I want to know, put more precisely, is: If the Coptic calendar were still in sync with the Nile, on what Gregorian date would the Coptic year begin?

(My purpose in all this is to figure out how to line up the Coptic and French Republican month names, of course.)

<grisom> July 20th! Okay, actually that's a Julian date, but it probably doesn't matter too much. This would mean we are currently in Nivose-Meshir.

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Maxims and minims for the wise and the foolish

  • I think that historians are talking nonsense, because they don't write their essays in Coq. — Umunmutamku
  • LANGUAGE IS A HIERARCHICAL AUTHORITY
    A GOVERNMENT OF THE CONSCIOUSNESS — Tezcatlipoca
  • Whoever fights against the empire, becomes the empire. [or something along those lines] — Philip K. Dick [as told to Tezcatlipoca]
    • We’re not fighting the empire! We are the empire! Go away, or we'll smack you with this stick! — Tezcatlipoca
  • You don't have to be straight to shoot straight. — Barry Goldwater
    • Indeed, we must prevent life, which is frequently fatal. — Umunmutamku
      • There are also a number of legitimate scientific reasons for it as well (though I don't know what they are) — Tezcatlipoca
  • Instead of thinking of Scripture as a manual, I try to think of the Bible as ‘a boyfriend’. — punkrainbow
    • Your feelings are lying to you. — Jer 17:9
  • READ A BOOK, I'M SURE IT'S IN ONE OF THEM. — Tezcatlipoca
    • Books are full of bullshit and lies! — Tezcatlipoca
      • We will lie to you but we will lie to ourselves as well. You will, however, see through our lies and grasp the shining truth within. — The KLF
  • A Gnostic is by definition a knower, and since knowledge supersedes belief, a knower cannot very well be a believer. — Stephan A. Hoeller
    • talking about the great unknown is ridiculous. it’s THE GREAT UN-FUCKING-KNOWN — Anonymous
      • The enemy knows the system. — Claude Shannon

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