30 days hath September....

Why do some months have 30 days and others 31? Because if they didn’t, that knuckle thing wouldn’t work.
Originally, the calendar months were mostly 29 days long, with an average of 29.5 days per month. This worked fine, as the moon takes an average of 29 days to orbit the earth. However, this works out to just 354 days per year, well short of the 365 days (365.2422 days actually) that it takes the earth to revolve around the sun.
The Roman emperor Julius Caesar is mostly responsible for our modern calendar. In order to maintain the relationship of the months to the seasons, Caesar inserted several months into the calendar, making the year 445 days long. (Not what you want to see if you’re a teacher.)
In 46 B.C., responding to protests from the RTU (Roman Teachers Union), Caesar took out one month, shortening the year to 365 days, and adding extra days to some of the months, giving them 31.
But there was still the problem of that leftover .2422 days. Caesar solved this by adding a day to February every four years--Leap Year.
Still, the calendar had its problems. The Julian (Caesar's) calendar was off by 10 days in the year 1582, so the dates of October 5-14 were dropped altogether. Also, it was decided that years divisable by 400 would not have Leap Years.
This new calendar (Gregorian) is the one we use today. It no longer follow the phases of the moon, but it does accurately follow the seasons.


http://curious.astro.cornell.edu

http://www.astro.uu.n/

Hey, Hey, Blow the Man Down....

No, it wasn't an inland hurricane. The National Weather Service (click link to see radar image and read NWS reports on the storm) in Paducah, Ky., call the May 8 storm a Derecho. Derecho (pronounced deh-REY-cho) is Spanish for "straight." This particular storm was measured 34 to 46 miles in diameter. The average derecho only comes in at 12 miles wide.

This storm was one for the books, and one storm experts will be studying for years to come. Along with the winds--which were clocked at 81 mph in Carbondale and at 106 in some locaions, this storm carried with it a few tornadoes, hail, heavy rains, and stretched from the Mississippi River to the Ohio, cutting a path of falled trees, damaged houses, and over 80,000 homes without electricity at one time or another. Nearly two weeks later, and some remote areas of Southern Illinois are still without power.

Sources:

Weather Service: Storm was a 'derecho' The Southern Illinoisan, May 16, 2009, page 1A

National Weather Sevice, Paducah, Ky. Weather Forecast Office, www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display

May 20, 2009

Google Images

HI MOM!

I Want a Girl, Just Like the Girl....
The ancient Greeks celebrated Rhea, mother of the gods, during the spring. In the early days of Christianity, Mother Church was celebrated as Christianity spread in Europe. In the 1600s, Europeans started to celebrate the Virgin Mary. This morphed into Mothering Day in England, where servants of the elite were sent home over the weekend to honor their Moms. This day was celebrated with a "Mothering Cake."
English colonists discontinued Mothering Sunday. They didn't play or celebrate, and were more of the hard work, hard worship type.
It wasn't until after the American Civil War that modern Mother's Day began to see the light. Julia Ward Howe, author of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," attempted to get a peace resolution passed in an international council. This "Mother's Day of Peace" was an attempt to inspire others to join the cause for peace, coming on the heels of the horrific carnage of the Civil War.
Howe's work was based on the ideas of Anne Marie Reeves Jarvis, a woman who started "Mother's Friendship Day" to promote sanitation and act to reconcile both the North and South in the aftermath of the Civil War.
Jarvis' daughter, Anna, continued her mother's ideas after Jarvis' death. Anna's letter-writing campaign led to President Woodrow Wilson signing the proclamation in 1914 to set aside the second Sunday in May to honor mothers.


The History of Mother's Day, www.theholidayspot.com/mothersday