The 400-year software patch to a 10-day memory leak

4 months ago

The 'Old New Year' is celebrated on January 13 in former Soviet countries, a tradition tied to the Julian calendar.
Julius Caesar introduced the Julian calendar with a leap year every 4 years, but it had a 0.00781-day annual drift.
The Gregorian calendar was introduced in 1582 to fix the drift by skipping 10 days and adjusting leap year rules.
Different countries adopted the Gregorian calendar at different times, leading to historical quirks like Sweden's February 30th.
The Russian Orthodox Church still uses the Julian calendar, causing holidays like Christmas to fall on January 7.
In Soviet Russia, Christmas was rebranded as a secular New Year celebration to suppress religious practices.
The Gregorian calendar's reform was based on geocentric theory, despite heliocentrism being known at the time.
The article also touches on AI-driven retrosynthesis and the pitfalls of current evaluation metrics in chemistry.

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