Tolkiencal

Convert a date into the Shire calendar

Description

TOLKIENCAL is my personal tribute to my favourite writer: J.R.R. Tolkien. The calendar used by the Hobbits of the Shire divided the year into twelve months which, unlike the irregular months of Roman and modern Europe, were of equal length: every month in the Hobbit year had exactly thirty days. This totals only 360 days, so the left-over five or six additional days in each year were invested in a pair of festivals, one at each solstice.
In European calendars a given date, like January the first, falls on a different day of the week every year — sometimes it is a Monday, sometimes a Tuesday, sometimes another day. The Hobbits prevented this disorder.

You can find many other informations on:
http://www.advancedmcode.org/tolkiencal.html

You can visit my homepage http://home.tele2.it/cardillo
My profile on XING http://www.xing.com/go/invita/13675097
My profile on LinkedIN http://it.linkedin.com/in/giuseppecardillo

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.5 (R2007b)

[John D'Errico]

I can't imagine what purpose someone might find for this, ..., but it strikes my sense of whimsy.

My endless quest for perfection (and mlint) points out there is an unterminated line with no semi-colon. But well, I don't know for sure that hobbits use semi-colons anyway. 8-)

[Giuseppe Cardillo]

Five star from John D'Errico? I'm very honored! Thank you very much! I agree with your your comment on perfection (Tolkien was so lover of perfection), so I have uploaded the file. Thank you again.

[B. Roossien]

Although it is completely useless, as a Tolkien fan, I love it!

However, I found an error when trying to use the 22nd of June as date (year doesn't matter). All other days seems to work:

> tolkiencal('22/06/2007')
??? Subscript indices must either be real positive integers or logicals.

Error in ==> tolkiencal at 113
        disp([days{wd(c)} ' ' sd{abs(m(c))} ' ' num2str(year)])

I'm sure you can fix that, so you get a 5-star rating from me as well :-)

[Giuseppe Cardillo]

You have right. I have fixed this bug and uploaded the file. The function erased the wrong day in not leap years (185 instead of 184). Now it works properly. Thank a lot!

[Joseph Hollmann]

We don't date much, do we?

It's a fun piece of code. I have no doubt that Tolken discusses this calendar in detail, but where? I guess I'm asking for a Hobbit Calendar reference...

sigh

[Urs (us) Schwarz]

i see double standards creeping up on the FEX... it worries and bothers me
us

[John D'Errico]

Urs, this is probably completely useless as a computational tool. But its really an homage to Tolkien, for those who love those books. As such, it earns my respect. Its also well enough written, with interesting documentation. I think that many of us love to find Easter eggs in Matlab - little surprises that do not really belong, but still make us smile when we find them. In a sense, this is much the same. While it does not fill any real purpose in Matlab, I believe this tool deserves its praise.

By the way, I'm not suggesting that the FEX is a place for any trash that might be put up there as a joke. But this submission is not that.

Joseph is very correct, a reference would be appropriate.

[Giuseppe Cardillo]

John hit the mark about the scope of this function. To please my namesake Joseph, the first reference is, of course, Lord of the Rings Appendix D. Anyway, if you search on Google "Shire Calendar" you will find many references.
In particular, you can find a link in Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shire_Calendar).
Another useful link is http://shire-reckoning.com/calendar.html.
In the next days, I'll add some lines of comment in the file to explain better several choices that I took. Thank you all.

[A FEX Observer]

I agree with Urs. This submission does not provide anything valuable or useful (in terms of contents or coding) to the Matlab community. Yet it is rated amazingly high by a few of those people, who are usually very quick in annihilating such surrealistic contributions. The fact that a guru(?) has an emotional bond with the idea behind a program certainly cannot be sufficient to give out a 'reward'.
Walter.