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Even after Goines realized that he had been drawing figures and assembling tables of yearly cyclical calendar patterns only to satisfy some obsession or compulsion within his own self, he continued working at it. But when he got done – or done enough, because more could be done – he decided to set that aside and be done with it. He’d wrap it all up by specifying the steps that a computer program could take to find the day of the week for any given date within the period covered by the Gregorian Calendar.
He even took a notepad with him to France, but he didn’t manage to clarify his penciled notes, and he now despaired of specifying the calculation for a computer – a calculation whose final steps he had done “intuitively” when performing his parlor trick. He ended up working on the formula problem only long enough to be convinced that he no longer seemed to possess the programming skills that had put him in good stead at IBM those decades ago.
Consequently, he decided to simply remind the prospective whiz-kids who would do the programming that it was only a matter of calculating the yearly day-shifts occasioned by years not having an integral number of weeks. (If they all did have an integral number of weeks, then every year would begin on the same day of the week. But years don’t do that, because leap years have 2 more days than 52 weeks, and non-leap years have 1 more. Consequently, if a year immediately follows a leap year, it begins 2 days later in the week, otherwise it begins 1 day later.)
The whiz-kids’ program would have to calculate the answer to the same question he had posed for himself when he first started performing his parlor trick, before he got side-tracked by the puzzle of the bump at non-leap 00-years: How many day-shifts are involved in translating from a given date this year to the same date in some other year? It would come down to summing the 1-day and 2-day shifts before dividing by 7 and noting the remainder.
So, with x standing for the current year, and y for the year of interest, x - y = the number of years between them. But simply dividing that number by 4 would not give the number of 2-day shifts, because of the questions (1) whether to round up for any remainder and (2) whether any non-leap 00-years were involved (for each one of any of these would require the subtraction of 1)….
As for how to proceed, that’s where Goines stumbled in his penciled attempts to specify the logic of his intuitions… He would just have to leave this to the kids to figure out. They were the whizzes, after all. And Goines no longer was one – if he ever had been one in the first place.
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