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Take THAT, leap-years!!

TorgoX on 2002-06-01T02:19:29

Dear Log,

While flipping thru the Koran, I found a rant against leap-years, of all things.

In God's sight, there are TWELVE months, as he set forth on the day he created heaven and earth. Four of the months are sacred. That is the true path; do not stray from the orthodoxy! And fight the Unbelievers' forces, as they fight against your forces. But know that God is with the Pious!
إنّ عدّة الشّهور عنْد اللّه اثْنا عشر شهْرا في كتاب اللّه يوْم خلق السّموات والأرْض منْها أرْبعة حرم ذلك الدّين الْقيّم فلا تظْلموا فيهنّ أنْفسكمْ وقاتلوا الْمشْركين كافّة كما يقاتلونكمْ كافّة واعْلموا أنّ اللّه مع الْمتّقين
Clearly, intercalation [i.e., insertion of a leap-month] is increased Unbelief! That's how the Unbelievers go wrong, because they do wrongly do "right" one year, and "rightly" do wrong the next, legislating what God forbids. Apparently they enjoy doing evil! And God does not guide the Unbelievers!
إنّ عدّة الشّهور عنْد اللّه اثْنا عشر شهْرا في كتاب اللّه يوْم خلق السّموات والأرْض منْها أرْبعة حرم ذلك الدّين الْقيّم فلا تظْلموا فيهنّ أنْفسكمْ وقاتلوا الْمشْركين كافّة كما يقاتلونكمْ كافّة واعْلموا أنّ اللّه مع الْمتّقين
I suppose at this point, satire would be redundant

like standards...

hfb on 2002-06-01T04:25:59

the nice thing about 'god' is that there are so many to choose from. :)

Sounds like anti-Judaism

jdavidb on 2002-06-01T16:07:09

I'm guessing the inspiration for that Koranic passage is the Jewish religious calendar, which, if I understand correctly, adds a leap month named Veadar every few years (something like every 3 years in 22 or so). The Koran was big on saying, "The Jews and/or the Christians say God wants you to ... but actually He said ..." Kind of like Muhammad switching his followers from praying toward Jerusalem to praying toward Mecca, or like treating Friday as a religious holy day instead of Saturday or Sunday.

Re:Sounds like anti-Judaism

citizenx on 2002-06-04T13:36:29

The Jewish calendar's "leap year" repeats Adar (and calls it Ve'Adar, which can be construed to mean "and Adar"). It's a 19 year cycle that gets the Jewish and Gregorian calendars to line up again (I was born on 30 September, which was the day before Yom Kippur that year -- the next time Yom Kippur fell on 1 October was right after my 19th birthday), and it goes something like:

Normal Normal Leap
Normal Normal Leap
Normal Leap
Normal Normal Leap
Normal Leap Normal Leap
Normal Normal Normal Leap

Note that I pulled that out of my ass, but I managed to stop at 19 without thinking about it. The accuracy (or lack thereof) notwithstanding, I'm pleased with that. I did look this up once or twice, but I'm too tired to search for the info right now.

Re:Sounds like anti-Judaism

jdavidb on 2002-06-04T14:28:08

Cool info. Thanks!

Arabic and HTML

vsergu on 2002-06-02T01:41:53

How does the browser know to display the characters right-to-left when there's no indication of that, or the language, in the HTML? Am I missing something, or is it just Unicode magic that makes it impossible to write Arabic characters left-to-right or Latin characters right-to-left? What are the LANG and DIR attributes for, then?

IE 5.5 does seem to be aligning the lines as though the were left-to-right text, though. (And the two blockquote are identical -- copy-paste error?)

Re:Arabic and HTML

vsergu on 2002-06-02T01:51:15

I've answered my own question with a little research. Unicode magic is responsible; characters have directionality. The DIR attribute is necessary only when the magic is insufficiently powerful, as in an English sentence containing Arabic words.

And LANG is not used for determining direction, since Turkish is still Turkish whether it's written in Latin or Arabic characters.

Re:Arabic and HTML

TorgoX on 2002-06-03T02:10:14

You need DIR to let the rendering engine know whether to start laying out paragraphs/tables/cells starting from the right or from the left. It's also needed for resolving the form of some things like ( and ), which are directionality-sensitive but have no inherent direction of their own.