Happy Leap Year Day!

[LCHIEN]

Happy Leap Day. It's like a free day! (unless you have to work, hehe.) Better than Daylight savings time, because you don't have to give it back later.

You know we have leap years every four years Except NOT in multiples of 100 Years (e.g. 1900, 1800) Except we DO for years that are multiples of 400. So in 2000 we had a rare 00 leap year, the only one you'll see in your lifetime.

So why is this arbitrary weirdness? An orbit around a sun (1 Year) is actually 365.242189 rotations (1 day) of the earth. There's nothing making an integer number of revolutions in an orbit - its just a random number of the relative location and masses of the Sun and the earth.

So the 365 is what we normally call a year.
The extra .242189 is a bit less than a quarter of a day, that's why we add 1 day every four years.
Taking off that correction it leaves an extra .0078 days per year or every 128 years we would get another day. So that's why we skip 3 of every 4 xx00 years. That gets us to .0003 day per year accumulated error which is a day every 3300 years or so.
which no one has yet seen fit to make a correction for.

[twistsol]

For me personally, it means the last day of the month is Monday meaning I didn't have to work yesterday to prepare for month end closing.

[billwmeyer]

I was annoyed with it this year. I'm salaried, so it's like a day I don't get paid for ( I know, February's a short month), līm retiring in May, so it is an extra day I have to work, and to top it off, it's on a Monday, my most hated day of the week! Add to that, I'm an accountant, so I ended up working late, preparing for month end. Other than that, it was great! End of rant!