CLICKING ON THE WEB: Leap Day is past but Leap Year bounds ahead

Wednesday, 05 March 2008

by Howard Lestrud
ECM Online Managing Editor

Leap Day has come and gone but we are still in the midst of a Leap Year, a happening every four years when we get an extra day to put on our calendar. How many of us would like to have a birthday on Feb. 29? Our age would go by much more slowly than it does now.

Two of my working colleagues said, “Howard, why don’t you do something on Leap Day?” Even though the day has passed, it still is a timely topic and one with a history work researching.

One of the first Web sites to check is one posted by Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Go there at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leap_year

Let’s read what Wikipedia says about Leap Year and Leap Day:

“A leap year (or intercalary year) is a year containing one or more extra days (or, in the case of lunisolar calendars, an extra month) in order to keep the calendar year synchronised with the astronomical or seasonal year. For example, in the Gregorian calendar, February would have 29 days in a leap year instead of the usual 28. Because seasons and astronomical events do not repeat at an exact number of full days, a calendar which had the same number of days in each year would, over time, drift with respect to the event it was supposed to track. By occasionally inserting (or intercalating) an additional day or month into the year, the drift can be corrected. A year which is not a leap year is called a common year.

“In the Gregorian calendar, the current standard calendar in most of the world, most years whose division by 4 equals an integer are leap years. In one leap year, the month of February has 29 days instead of 28. Adding an extra day to the calendar every four years compensates for the fact that a solar year is almost 6 hours longer than 365 days.

“However, some exceptions to this rule are required since the duration of a solar year is slightly less than 365.25 days. Years which are evenly divisible by 100 are not leap years, unless they are also evenly divisible by 400, in which case they are leap years. For example, 1600 and 2000 were leap years, but 1700, 1800 and 1900 were not. Going forward, 2100, 2200, 2300, 2500, 2600, 2700, 2900, and 3000 will not be leap years, but 2400 and 2800 will be. By this rule, the average number of days per year will be 365 + 1/4 − 1/100 + 1/400 = 365.2425, which is 365 days, 5 hours, 49 minutes, and 12 seconds.

“The Gregorian calendar was designed to keep the vernal equinox on or close to March 21, so that the date of Easter (celebrated on the Sunday after the 14th day of the Moon that falls on or after 21 March) remains correct with respect to the vernal equinox. The vernal equinox year is about 365.242374 days long (and increasing), whereas the average year length of the Gregorian calendar is 365.2425.

“The marginal difference of 0.000125 days means that in around 8,000 years, the calendar will be about one day behind where it is now. But in 8,000 years, the length of the vernal equinox year will have changed by an amount which cannot be accurately predicted (see below). Therefore, the current Gregorian calendar suffices for practical purposes, and Herschel’s correction (making 4000 AD not a leap year) will probably not be necessary.

“A person born on February 29 may be called a “leapling.” In common years they usually celebrate their birthdays on 28 February or 1 March.

“For legal purposes, their legal birthdays depend on how different laws count time intervals. In Taiwan, for example, the legal birthday of a leapling is 28 February in common years, so a Taiwanese leapling born on February 29, 1980 would have legally reached 18 years old on February 28, 1998.

“There are many instances in children’s literature where a person’s claim to be only a quarter of their actual age turns out to be based on counting their leap-year birthdays. A similar device is used in the plot of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance: As a child, Frederic was apprenticed to a band of pirates until the age of 21. Now, having passed his 21st year, he leaves the pirate band and falls in love. However, it turns out that the pirate indenture says that his apprenticeship does not end until his 21st birthday, and since he was born on February 29, that day will not arrive until he is in his eighties, and so he must leave his fianceé and return to the pirates. Of course, it all turns out happily in the end.”

The Associated Press this week filed a story on a Chippewa Falls, WI woman born on Feb. 29, 1912. She was actually 24 last Friday in leap birthdays but in actual birthdays, she is 96. She sometimes would observe her birthday on Feb. 28 and other times, on March 1. She says, “It depended on what day of the week it was and what fit the best,” Iverson said. “Someone might have been too busy one day, so we’d do it another day.”

If you wish some more reasoning behind the birth of leap year, go to the infoplease.com site at http://www.infoplease.com/spot/leapyear2.html

It is not an uncommon occurrence for a woman to propose marriage to a man but there was a time when Leap Year was said to be the only acceptable time a woman could propose to a man. The proper date was said to be Feb. 29. That, of course, has been proven to be a myth.

In researching this column, I even discovered there is a special society for leap year babies. It’s called The Honor Society of Leap Year Babies. Web site for the Society is located at http://www.leapzine.com/hr/

The Honor Roll was launched in April, 1997, with the sole purpose of celebrating people born on Leap Year Day. Since then thousands have joined the ranks of the honored.

The Society says chances of being born on Leap Year Day are 1 in 1461, or only 0.06864 percent of the world’s population are Leapers. Statistics indicate there are about 200,000 Leap Year babies in the U.S. and about 4 million in the world. The Web site says that most Leap Year babies celebrate most often in February.

The Honor Society also works as a lobbyist in an attempt to have Leap Year Day placed on the calendar. Advocates of a Leap Year holiday urge everyone to write to government officials in an attempt to having Leap Year Day proclaimed a holiday.

Go to LEAPzine and find a special Web page just about leap year facts and trivia. Go there at http://leapyearday.com/LeapZineHomePage.htm

Leap Year, found in the even years, is also a signal that the year is a presidential election year. Happy Leap Day and Happy Leap Year. The year 2008 may be the leapingnest day ever.