Today is October 6^th, 2006

Former WNBA player and Houston Comet Rebecca Lobo blows out 33 candles today. She was born in Southwick, Massachusetts in 1973.

And it was on this date in the year 1989 that we lost actress Bette Davis. She was 81.

For you movie fans out there, it was exactly 117 years ago today that Thomas Edison showed his very first motion picture. The year was 1889.

…and finally…

Today we’ll spend a few moments talking about something that we all take for granted. The next time you’re in your home office, look up on the wall above your desk, or perhaps it’s hanging in the kitchen right next to the pantry. Maybe, it’s adorned with pictures of your favorite sports team.  Or it might have on it several scenes of beautiful sunsets, or maybe kittens or cute little puppies.  Or perhaps it has no pictures on it at all. You know what it is.  It’s the familiar calendar.  We all know that it has 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days, and every 4 years we have that quirky little thing called a leap year when we add an extra day at the end of February. We may take it for granted, but guess what?  Our calendar has not always been configured the way that it is today.

Some of you linguists out there may have noticed that there are several month names that don’t seem to make sense.  For instance, the prefix “oct”, spelled O-C-T, usually refers to the number eight, but why, then is October the tenth month? The same paradox applies to the prefix “dec”, which means 10, and December, which is, of course, the twelfth month of the year.

Over 2000 years ago, most of the world kept track of the passing of time by something called the Roman Calendar.  There were only ten months in the year and October was the 8^th month and December was the 10^thmonth. The prefix of September, “Sept”, meaning 7, was indeed representative of the 7^th month of the year in the Roman Calendar. In the original calendar, there were only 304 days, which meant that 61 days of Winter did not actually fall within the confines of the calendar. As you can imagine, having 61 days without a name or a place, made life difficult for tax collectors, theologians and other professions whose job it was to keep track of such things.

For this reason, and many others, in the year 46 BC, the Roman calendar was replaced by the Julian Calendar. As you may have guessed, the Julian calendar was named after Julius Caesar. July was also namedafter the great Roman leader. With the addition of the months that we now know as January and February, the Julian calendar, like our modern one, had 12 months. So, it was the addition of January and February that is to blame for the paradoxical prefixes.

The astronomers of the time had long realized that the Earths orbit around the sun did not take exactly 365 days.  Originally, it was calculated that the orbit took 365 days plus an additional 6 hours. Due to this, the Julian Calendar did have a system in place to keep track of the additional 6 hours. It was similar to our modern leap year, but somewhat less accurate and more complicated.

We now know that the Earths orbit is exactly 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes and 12 seconds. Which means, that the Julian Calendar was overestimating the length of the year by 10 minutes and 48 seconds each year. Now, I know that doesn’t sound like much, but after several decades, or even several centuries of using this inaccurate system, we would be turning the page of the calendar to July 1^st, right at the time of the year when the trees were starting to bloom or perhaps while there was still snow on the ground. During the many centuries of its use, the Julian Calendar system had accumulated an error of 10 days.  Something had to be done to fix this problem. And in the 16^thcentury, something was done. Pope Gregory the 13^th introduced the calendar that we know today.  It was then, and is still called the Gregorian Calendar. In order to eliminate the 10 days that had been erroneously gained during the previous system, 10 days were skipped when the Gregorian Calendar was introduced.  According to the new calendar, those 10 days simply did not exist.

And one of those 10 days that did not exist was today’s date, October 6^th. That’s right, due to the implementation of the Gregorian Calendar, in the year 1582, there was no October 6^th.

And that is just one of the things that happened…or rather,did NOT happen on this day in history.