U know why there are most months 30 or 31 days long ?

admin — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:45:08 +0000

This has resulted from a compromise. Initially, months were mostly 29 days long and the average length of a month was 29.5 days which is the time taken by the Moon to orbit the Earth. However, this resulted in a year of only 354 days while the orbital period of the Earth is 365.2422 days. As a result, the calender became out of sync with seasons which was bad. This was initially corrected in an arbitrary way by adding a 13th month, but soon the calender was thrown into severe confusion.

In 46 B.C., Julius Caesar reformed the calender by ordering the year to be 365 days in length and to contain 12 months. This forced some days to be added to some of the months to bring the total from 354 up to 365 days. To account for the extra 0.2422 days, every fourth year was made a leap year. This made the average length of a year to be 365.25 days.

However, the Julian year still differs from the true year and by 1582, the error had accumulated to 10 days. So, 10 days were dropped from the year 1582 so that October 4, 1582 was followed by October 15, 1582. In addition, a modification was made that century years that were not divisible by 400 would not be considered as leap years. For example, 2000 would be a leap year while 2100 would not. This made the year sufficiently close to the actual year and this calender is called the Gregorian calender.

As the year is now set up to follow the seasons accurately, it no longer follows the phases of the Moon.

U know why one minute has 60 seconds?

admin — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 20:53:48 +0000

With the birth of mechanical watches, around the thirteenth century, it was established the habit of splitting time in 60 smaller parts, all equal, each of which was called in Latin “pars minuta prima” which means “first small part” then cut short ‘minutes’, and these in turn were divided into 60 shares still other smaller, each of which was called, in Latin, secunda pars minuta (second small part), then cut short’ second ‘.

The choice of the number 60 is traced back to Sumerian, which had divided the circle in 360 equal parts, each of which later was called degree, from a Latin word meaning “step”.
60 and 360 numbers were regarded as “magical” granted by the gods , because easily divisible in so many different ways without leaving the rest

uKnoWhy.com » Uncategorized

U know why there are most months 30 or 31 days long ?

U know why one minute has 60 seconds?