Sunday, April 20, 2008

Passover

I'm in San Francisco this weekend for my first celebration of Passover. As I've never observed a religious holiday in a purely secular setting (and, no, Christmas doesn't count), this should be fairly fun and educational. Growing up, I always thought Easter and Passover occured around roughly the same time of year, but of course this isn't strictly the case. This year Easter was really early: it falls on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the first day of Spring, which this year all happened to make Easter three days after the Vernal Equinox. And, of course, leave it to an astronomer to explain all of the intricate calendar calculations and relations between Easter, Orthodox Easter, Passover, and Rosh Hoshanah. Basically, the confusing arises when the Vernal Equinox is approximated to be (as opposed to basing these holidays on when the Vernal Equinox actually is).

3 comments:

mollishka said...

You are definitely not the first; several other people know, and since I explicitly do not have my name attached to the blog (even though it is obviously not anonymous), your comment is getting deleted.

Anonymous said...

It seems Dark Matter has actually been detected !

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.2741

mollishka said...

bj: Yes, this will be a very exciting result if it is actually true. The confusing part is that, if true, the parameters of the dark matter will fall in the regime that other experiments have fairly solidly ruled out. So something weird is going on whether or not its real.