Greetings!

Today is the 29th of February and I wanted to provide you with “bits of information” that you can use throughout the day in conversations about this special day.

The year 2008 is a leap year. If you look at a 2008 calendar, you will see that February has five Fridays–the month begins and ends on a Friday. Between the years 1904 and 2096, leap years that share the same day of week for each date repeat only every 28 years. The most recent year in which February comprised five Fridays was in 1980 and the next occurrence will be in 2036. February 29th has been associated with age-old traditions, superstitions and folklore.

A leap year is a year in which one extra day has been inserted, or intercalated, at the end of February. A leap year consists of 366 days, whereas other years, called common years, have 365 days.In the Julian calendar–introduced by Julius Caesar in 46 BC and patterned after the Roman calendar–there was only one rule: any year divisible by four would be a leap year. This calendar was used before the Gregorian calendar was adopted.

Leap years are needed to keep our calendar in alignment with the earth’s revolutions around the sun.

No calendars used today are perfect; they are off by seconds, minutes, hours or days every year. To make a calendar more accurate, new leap year rules have to be introduced to the Gregorian calendar, complicating the calculation of the calendar even more. It will, however, need some modifications in a few thousand years. As for the tropical year, it is approximately 365.242199 days, but varies from year to year because of the influence of other planets.

There you have it…

By the way, for anyone whose birthday is today, happy birtday!!!!

Have a great weekend!

Nyda

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 9:44 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.