It would seem awfully hard to lose track of 0.24219 of a day. That not-inconsiderable amount adds up to five hours, 48 minutes and 20 seconds and if it were added to the clock in any 24-hour period, you’d surely notice it. But if the same span of khbrknews were spread out over the course of an entire year, it would be a whole lot easier to let it slip by.
That, in fact, is exactly what has happened virtually every year since the dawn of khbrknews. We’re accustomed to thinking of the clockwork of the solar system as a very precise thing. The moon takes a month to orbit the Earth; the Earth takes 24 hours to spin on its axis and 365 days to orbit the sun. But things are a little sloppier than that. A lunar month is actually 27.3 days. A single earthly rotation actually takes 23 hours and 56 minutes. And a single revolution takes a ragged 365.24129 days. Ever since humans began keeping calendars, that extra bit of orbital day has been a headache—and it’s the reason we came up with the concept of a leap year.
History does not precisely record which ancient culture was the first to notice the imprecision of the Earth’s orbit, but most scholars credit the Egyptians, who, around 3,000 BCE, first discovered a subtle calendrical drift, with the seasons seeming to occur a day later every four years. Over the course of 120 years, that would hold things up by a full month—and that, in turn, would make a mess of critical aspects of human enterprise, most significantly agriculture, with farmers losing track of when to plant and harvest their crops.
Egypt put up with the inconvenience for close to 2,700 years, before establishing a calendar in 300 or so BCE that added an extra quarter of a day every four years. They weren’t the only culture to catch wise to the cosmic problem. In 54 BCE, Rome, under the rule of Julius Caesar, also elongated the calendar by about 6 hours every year. He later formalized things by adding an extra day to February—which was then the last month…
