You really do learn something new everyday.

Throughout the annals of my dogmatic existence I have experienced faith and doubt; I have learned to believe in heaven and hell and I have wondered what it all meant. Hence, my obsession with the “duality of man” as a punch line, motto and selling point for almost anything we do, but I digress. Being Catholic comes in very handy. Form the convenience of “there’s a big difference between Saturday night and Sunday morning” to trying to go to church in any country you may travel in, there are many understated selling points to the Catholic Church. Roman Catholic, that is. You know the one. We have the big house in Rome. The Nation with the lowest annual birth rate (zero), by the way: Vatican City. The greatest selling book of all time is the Bible. We basically rule the world. That’s a bold statement, I know. So, before I get too sidetracked, let me get to the point.

You learn something new everyday. I really do believe this. I try to learn something new everyday. Sometimes it is how a cathode ray tube propagates an analog display on a radar control unit from a radar beam. Once it was as simple as looking up the word “nepotism” in the dictionary. I’m not making this up. I actually used a dictionary.

Never one to deny my thirst for knowledge, today I learned how they calculate Easter, or more specifically, how they determine the exact date of Easter each year. [Background: My boss constantly jokes about me being a human calendar. OK, so just because I know that each year Election Day is the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November and that Thanksgiving is the fourth Thursday in November, I am some sort of idiot savant, I guess. So, I have a knack for remembering dates. What of it?] What does this have to do with the Catholic Church or my baptism? Well, it’s simple. I went to Catholic schools so I vaguely remembered something about Easter being the first Sunday after something-something after March 21 (the spring solstice). [That was also my grandfather’s birthday and one never forgets the birthday of a man that called his naps “going into my Yogi trance”.] Well, today I did it. I did what anyone would do - I googled it. Google, by the way, is an official word and was added to the dictionary this year. The number one hit led me to the answer to it all.

So, I also learned that there are two systems: ecclesiastical and astronomical. I discovered that in order for me to fully explain this to you I would have to entail Julius Caesar in my explanation. So, I’m going to simply show you how it’s done and then we can all say we learned something new today. If we need to learn about Julius Caesar we can just watch Rome on HBO.

Here you go. The formula to calculate the date of Easter Sunday:

c = y / 100
n = y - 19 * ( y / 19 )
k = ( c - 17 ) / 25
i = c - c / 4 - ( c - k ) / 3 + 19 * n + 15
i = i - 30 * ( i / 30 )
i = i - ( i / 28 ) * ( 1 - ( i / 28 ) * ( 29 / ( i + 1 ) )
* ( ( 21 - n ) / 11 ) )
j = y + y / 4 + i + 2 - c + c / 4
j = j - 7 * ( j / 7 )
l = i - j
m = 3 + ( l + 40 ) / 44
d = l + 28 - 31 * ( m / 4 )

So, what’s so hard about that? Easy as Pi.