Re:The discrete-time physics hiding inside our continuous-ti...
by jcranmer on Monday April 15, 2019 @02:35PM
(#19667650)
The Mayan calendrical system uses a "year" of 360 days without attempting to account for leap days. Essentially, the long count (the classic 13.0.5.7.6 style system) is a base-20 count of the number of days from the epoch, with one of the digits being base 18 instead. The other components are the 260-day year of 20 "months" of 13 days, the 365-day year of 18 months of 20 days (with 5 extracalendrical days), (and together these two things create a 52-year cycle that's the "Short Count" calendar), a week-ish system (of 9 days), a lunar cycle count, a correction to the lunar cycle because it's annoyingly 29.5 days long, and a 819-day cycle we don't understand yet.
Their calendrical system did not attempt to correct for leap years, but we do know that they knew the length of the year to roughly the same precision as the Gregorian approximation.
Their calendrical system did not attempt to correct for leap years, but we do know that they knew the length of the year to roughly the same precision as the Gregorian approximation.