Sunday, March 1, 2020

A (Belated) Happy Leap Day


Yesterday was Leap Day.

Every four years, we get the Olympics,* and we Americans get a Presidential election, and we get leap year.  I always wondered how we managed to get all these lined up like that: if they’d spread them out a bit, we could have some excitement 3 years out of 4 and it wouldn’t be so draining once every four years.  But it is what it is, I suppose.

We have an extra day, of course, because, astronomically speaking, a solar year is way closer to 365.25 days than to 365 even, so every 4 years we manage to accumulate an extra day.  For more fun details on why there are leap years, plus way more interesting oddities about dates and times, you could check out my talk on dates in Perl from a few years back.  Sure, you may not know Perl, but only the last part of the talk is really about Perl; the rest of it is perfectly comprehensible regardless of your personal level of technogeekery.

Leap Day was often celebrated by “allowing” women to propose to men.  Supposedly, this was a negotiation between Saint Bridget and Saint Patrick in Ireland, back in the olden times (by which we mean the 5th century or so).  Very gracious of St. Patty to begrudge the women of Ireland 1 day out of 1,461 to choose their own spouses.  Hopefully this type of thing is not really required any more, despite the fact that the abysmally received Leap Year is a mere 10 years old.

Other than that, Februrary 29th is also St. Oswald’s Day.  Who, you may ask, is St. Oswald?  Enh.  Some dude.  You didn’t think they were going give leap day to any of the good saints, did you?

Tune in next week for a longer post.



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* Yes, yes, only the Summer Olympics, since 1992.  But, then, prior to 1924, those were the only Olypmics there were.