Leap Day

[Magicman]

But not a problem with the Best By Date on my milk:

[Jeff]

Perpetual Milk!

[rusticretreater]

February 30 was a day that happened in Sweden, 1712. This occurred because, instead of changing from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar by omitting a block of consecutive days, as had been done in other countries, the Swedish Empire planned to change gradually by omitting all leap days from 1700 to 1740, inclusive. Although the leap day was omitted in February 1700, the Great Northern War began later that year, diverting the attention of the Swedes from their calendar so that they did not omit leap days on the next two occasions; 1704 and 1708 remained leap years.

To avoid confusion and further mistakes, the Julian calendar was restored in 1712 by adding an extra leap day, thus giving that year the only known actual use of February 30 in a calendar. That day corresponded to February 29 in the Julian calendar and to March 11 in the Gregorian calendar.

That milk sir, should be in a museum.

[Magicman]

We could just use a "Metric" calendar and forgetaboutit. 

[WV Sawmiller]

  I understand the ancient Egyptians (IIRC) used to have 12 months that were each 30 days long then they had a 5 day holiday to bring everything into sync. I guess every few years they'd have to have a 6 day holiday.

[Magicman]

With some of the help that is in today's job market, there are those that already think that they deserve a 5-6 day holiday each week. 

[GRANITEstateMP]

Plus at least 2 weeks paid vacation

[B.C.C. Lapp]

We could just use a "Metric" calendar and forgetaboutit. 

Kinda the same as the day light savings time thing.  I could never figure out why we just don't change the time a half hour, instead of an hour, and leave it that way.   So we'd have the best of both worlds without the aggravating change twice a year.

[SwampDonkey]

Another thing I never understood was closing all the curtains and blinds in an office and turning the lights all on during day time. How much energy is 'daylight savings' saving on the power bill? Nil, I suspect. 

[Ianab]

We could just use a "Metric" calendar and forgetaboutit. 

While that's a good idea, you would have to slow the Earths rotation to make it work. See a "Year" is actually  365 days, 6 hours, 9 minutes (approx). So while you could have "metric clocks", with say 10 "methours", each one being 100 "metminutes", and 100 "metseconds", the number of days in a year isn't a nice round number.

Leap years account for the 6 extra hours, because after 4 years, you have a whole day. The 9 minutes are accounted for by ignoring any "leap year" that ends with 00, Unless the year is divisible for 400!! That's close enough to be good for a few thousand years. Without the correction seasons would eventually drift, and Summer in the North would end up in July after about 1,000 years. But you can see how writing computer calendar software can get complicated. 

A heap of "self serve" fuel pumps crashed here in NZ this leap year. A software bug of some sort that probably also related to being GMT +13 for the time zone. (daylight saving). I assume when the fuel pumps tried to clear the payment with the bank system, they couldn't agree on the date, and customer card was declined. Normal terminals in the shop still worked (different software / calendar).  

It's the sort of glitch that was expected with the Y2K bug, except everyone was expecting that, and had double checked / rewritten systems to make sure they could handle more than a 2 numeral year on their internal calendar. 

The NZ Maori didn't have an official calendar pre European days. They would basically rely on the rising of the  Pleiades star cluster (which they call Matariki) to mark the start of Spring, and the right time of year to plant your sweet potato (kumera) crops.  Pleiades being in the Northern sky, you can't see if from here in Winter, so when it appeared in the sky again, that was the end of Winter, and start of the New Year. It was actually a pretty logical way to mark the passing of each year.   

[Magicman]

Actually it is not so out of whack.     Simply adjust the length of meter to match the earth's rotation. 

The earth ain't messed up...it's us. 

[SwampDonkey]

The result of thinking only in one way. A major problem in many things. As MM suggests it's a simple fix. It disrupts things, but fixable.