The Consequence of Matters

  Today is the Chinese new year. It is a sort of floating occurrence because the Chinese calendar is lunar. A lunar calendar is a wackadoodle way to keep track of time. The basic problem is that the synodic months is about 29 1/2 days long, and that doesn't fit evenly into a year. You get about 354 days if you count up 12 of them, and 383 and change if you do 13. Plus, the Moon's orbit precesses like crazy. So more properly, the Chinese and Jewish calendars are not lunar but lunisolar. They are basically lunar, but depending on what year it is you've got some 11 or 12 days of slop built in. The usual approach is to sprinkle days of no certain month (called intercalary days) to true it up, more or less, with the seasons. Intercalation is an inexact art, however, so Passover wanders sort of randomly around early Spring. And since the Last Supper was a Passover supper, Easter follows it around like a tiny dog. A solar calendar is better since if you follow the Sun you necessar...