My computer is showing today’s date as “Feb. 29, 2008″ — a once-in-every-four-years event.

The chance of being born on a leap year day is about 1 in 1,500. There are about 4 million leap year babies worldwide, according to the Detroit Free Press, which has an article today about the pluses and pains of being a “leaper.”

Besides the pesky question of exactly when to celebrate your birthday, some are things I’ve never even thought about, like having trouble registering for online services with programs that don’t recognize Feb. 29 as a valid date. Or how about being arrested for having a driver’s license where the birth date and expiration date don’t match.

On the upside, a leap year baby can say she is celebrating her 13th birthday when she has lived 52 years.

There’s even a site, the Honor Society of Leap Year Day Babies, which promotes awareness of leap-year-baby issues.

We have leap years today because the Earth takes 365.242 days to orbit the sun — not a neat 365.

Early calendars were based on lunar months, which average 29.5 days, according to an article in National Geographic News. One year consisting of these months would be about 354 days, throwing off important annual festivals, marking for example the start of certain agricultural seasons, as well as religious celebrations.

The Romans began adding days to the calendar to make up for the lost days, but those charged with the responsibility started to exploit their duty for personal gain — to see their candidates hold office for a longer time, for example.

Calendar years soon fell into disarray. So in 46 B.C., Julius Caesar instituted a single 445-day year, known as the “Year of Confusion,” to set everything straight and prepare for the adoption of a new 365-day “Julian calendar” with an extra day tacked on every four years.

But because the duration of a solar year is slightly less than 365.25 days, the now commonly-used Gregorian calendar was introduced. So now, every year that is divisible by four is a leap year, BUT — years that are evenly divisible by 100 ARE NOT leap years, unless they are also evenly divisible by 400, in which case they ARE leap years.

Totally confused? Well, you only have to worry about this every four years. On most years. Divisible by 100 and 400. OK, we’ll just call it the “Day of Confusion.”

Tags: random

This entry was posted on Friday, February 29th, 2008 at 2:10 am and is filed under Quarterlife Island. 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.