Monday is a 24-hour bonus day that only occurs every four years. Depending who you are and how old you are, there comes a point in your life when you don’t like to celebrate birthdays every year because it means you’re getting older and most people would really like to get younger. This year, leaplings and leapers (everyone with a Feb. 29 birthday) can officially recognize their birthday.
Many leaplings and leapers will travel to Anthony, TX, the leap year capital of the world. Anthony is a city of about 4,000 people located on the border of Texas and New Mexico between El Paso, TX, and Las Cruces, NM. They became the leap day capital of the world in 1988 while seeking to promote their community. They host the “Worldwide Leap Year Festival.” The festival comes complete with a golf tournament, breakfast, and parade. They even have a “Worldwide Leap Year Birthday Club.” As you may have guessed, the event has grown by leaps and bounds since its inception in 1988. They’ve had leapers attend from every state in the union and some from as far away as Germany and Switzerland.
Another reason you might wish your birthday was on leap day is according to astrologers, those born under the sign of Pisces on Feb. 29 have unusual talents and personalities reflecting their special status.
The upcoming leap day has me thinking about the who, what, and why of leap day. It turns out, Julius Caesar is the father of leap year. According to inventors.about.com, he and his astronomers are behind the origin of leap year started in 45 B.C. The early Romans had a 355-day calendar, and to keep festivals occurring around the same season each year, a 22- or 23-day month was created every second year. Julius decided to simplify things and added days to different months of the year to create the 365-day calendar. Leap day was added every fourth year to account for time drift. You see, a year is actually 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 46 seconds long, not 365 days as is commonly stated. So that means leap day’s job is to account for, or offset, the time drift we accrue each year.
Leap year happens just about every four years with only one exception. No year divisible by 100 would have a leap year, except if it is divisible by 400. That means 1900 was not a leap year, but 2000 was. The last time this happened was between the years of 1896 and 1904. The next time will be 2096 and 2104. This means the longest time between two leap years is eight years.
The first leap year was observed in 1582.
Ages ago, leap day was known as ladies’ day, as it was the one day when women were free to propose to men.
Consider these leap year events: Rome burned (64), George Armstrong Custer fought the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), and the Titanic sank (1912).
By the same token, also in leap years: The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, MA (1620), Benjamin Franklin proved that lightning is electricity (1752), and gold was discovered in California (1848).
The Summer Olympics and the U.S. presidential election are both timed to coordinate with leap year. The first presidential election was in 1789, and the first modern Olympic Games were held in 1896.
The last time I shared a mathematical problem here, it was wrong. I hope this one is okay.
How rare is a leap day birthday? If we assume every day is equally likely to be a birthday, the probability that a person's birthday falls on a specific non-leap day (say, Aug. 18) would be one out of 365, or about 0.27 percent. We can calculate the probability of a leap- day birthday this way:
- Assume one leap day every four years.
- In four years, there are 365 x 4 + 1 = 1,461 total days.
- The probability of a leap day birthday would be around 1/1,461, or 0.068 percent.
I have a little clipping without its source noted, which says the leap day question becomes, what will we do with this extra day?
Some people like to think of leap day as a quadrennial gift, a free 24 hours that exists outside our normal routines. Find a way to use your free day to do something different.
Will we use the day to visit someone who would love our company? Will we talk by phone with someone who is lonely? Will we drive someone to an appointment or to the store? Will we assist the less fortunate by volunteering to help them? Will we volunteer our time in a school to help children learn? Will we write a check to support a worthy cause?
Will we write a poem or a book? Will we paint a picture? Will we exercise our physical bodies and nourish our spiritual souls?
Whatever we do with this one extra day is really not the issue. Because time is man-made and the brevity of life is all too apparent, the question is what will we do with all 365 or 366 days in a calendar year? What we do with our lives every day, not just one day every four years, is what really matters.
~
INKling of the Week:
To remember how many days are in each month, remember this New England rhyme:
Thirty days hath September
April, June, and November.
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone,
Which hath but twenty-eight, in fine,
Till leap year gives it twenty-nine.
