RE: Gregorian calendar missing days -- MIDRANGE-L

Buck,

I have attached an email that I got awhile ago that goes
into such thing, enjoy!
-----
Subject:        Is January 1, 2000, really the start of the
"New Millennium"?

Just something to think about.  I thought is was very
interesting.

Whose Millennium is it, Anyway?
A quick guide to when (or if) the Millennium strikes
By John Scalzi, AOL Insider

At 1:20 PM Wednesday, February 5th, Greenwich Mean Time
(that'd be 8:20 am on
the east coast, 5:20 am on the west) we pass a pretty
exciting milestone: The
one-millionth minute until 12:00 am, January 1, 2000.  From
here, it's just a
quick trip until the odometer flips over -- really, a
million minutes will go
by quicker than you'd expect.  All too soon, we'll be
looking around, throwing
confetti, and saying to each other: Welcome to the new
Millennium!

There's just one small problem: is January 1, 2000, really
the start of the
"New Millennium"?  The definitive answer: uh...maybe.

One thing is for sure: The year 2000 feels like it should be
the start of the
New Millennium.  It's the year 2000, after all, a big, round
number. It's
whole, complete, neat; a cutting off point, a place you can
point to and say
"this is where the future begins."  It's when we stop
writing checks with the
number "19" in the date column.  It's the year the computers
may or may not
fail.  There's an Olympics in Sydney.  There's a
Presidential election here in
the US.  How much more millennial can things get?

Well, here's the most obvious reason why January 1, 2000, is
not the
millennium: in our current calendar system, there was no
year zero.  The date
went from 1 BC to 1 AD with no year in between.  So decades,
centuries and
millennia formally start in the years that begin with "1" --
1991, 1901, 2001.
Which is why a few sticklers out there are holding their
champagne
celebrations until January 1, 2001.

But even they may be off: the current calendar system we use
is the Gregorian
calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, who instituted it
because the
previous calendar system (the Julian) was unacceptably
inaccurate.  In the
year 1582, when the Gregorian calendar was instituted, we
"lost" ten days to
get the calendar back on track with the seasons: October 4
was followed by
October 15th.  Shouldn't those lost ten days be factored in
somewhere?  (To
make things more confusing, Britain didn't adopt the
Gregorian calendar until
the mid 18th century -- by which time 11 days had to be
added.  In 1918,
Russia switched to the Gregorian -- and added 13 days.)

January 1st?  That became the accepted start of the New Year
only after the
Gregorian calendar was adopted.  Previous to that, other
days were recognized
as the beginning of the "new year"; In Britain, December
25th was marked as
the beginning of the new year until the 14th Century --
after which March 25th
became the mark of the new year.

Midnight as the start of the new day?  Depends on who you
talk to, and when.
Up until 1925, astronomers divided the day, not from
midnight to midnight, but
from noon to noon.  In the Jewish calendar today (as with
the ancient
Babylonian and the Greek calendar) the day went from sunset
to sunset.  The
Hindus and Egyptians started the day (appropriately enough)
at dawn.  It was
the Romans who started the day at midnight, and whose
example we follow.

Those interested in the millennium as the 2000th anniversary
of Jesus Christ
are also in for some surprising news.  Our time scale is
traditionally divided
into when Jesus was born and after (the years A.D. -- "Year
of our Lord" ) and
before he existed (B.C., "Before Christ").  However, in one
of life's little
ironies, to the best of our knowledge, Jesus was actually
born in 6 or 7 "BC".
Which means, of course, that his second millennial
anniversary would have been
in either 1993 or 1994.

We also have to ask: whose millennium is it, anyway?  While
the Western
calendar system has been widely adopted around the world, it
is by no means
the only calendar system in use -- nor will 2000 be a
millennial year for
those systems.  In the Jewish Calendar, it's currently the
year 5758.  On the
Chinese calendar, it's now 4696.  For the Muslim world, it's
the year 1418.
For them, our year 2000 will be just another year.

Finally, for the esoteric minded, ponder this --
"millennium" has as its root
the Latin word "Mille," meaning thousand: ten to the third
-- ten times ten
times ten.  Why is ten so important?  Presuming you have all
your fingers,
count on them and see what number you get.  Would the year
2000 be as
important to us if we had, say, eight fingers?  Or twelve?
Or would we regard
it as we'd now regard the years 1024 and 3456 (which are
"2000" in base eight
and base twelve, respectively)? 

So when is the Millennium?  Ultimately, it's hard to say --
when you add it
all up, what the millennium is seems to have less to do with
a state of
calendars than it does with our state of mind.  Which is
why, in the end, we
might as well celebrate it on January 1, 2000.  It feels
right, and all things
considered, that's as good as we're going to get.

So, just a million minutes to go.

Excited yet?


-----
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Buck Calabro [SMTP:mcalabro@commsoft.net]
> Sent: Thursday, May 28, 1998 10:08 AM
> To:   'MIDRANGE-L@midrange.com'
> Subject:      Gregorian calendar missing days
> 
> > At 02:45 PM 5/27/98 -0700, you wrote:
> > >Was the gregorian calendar put into place on Oct 15
> 1582? Moreover,
> > >what happened to dates between Oct 4 1582 and Oct 15
> 1582? How are the
> > >missing days accounted for? 
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