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Dorothy Copus Brush Let's hope the calendar is left alone Cartoons are wonderful. Just the other day
I saw one that was funny but also a reminder that this is leap
year. At the dais a speaker was addressing the convention of
the National Fraternity of Computer Nerds. He told them, "And
since this is leap year, we DO have one small unresolved problem.
After February 29th, all computers will immediately jump to 2001!" Remembering the predictions of all the mistakes
Y2K might cause, I was interested in an article that appeared
in the February Discover magazine tracing the history of leap
year. What a tangled web it is! Without a calendar our lives would be filled
with missed appointments and important but forgotten dates that
should have been remembered. Long before humans even thought
of millenniums, the Egyptians devised one of the earliest calendars.
It used 12 months with 30 days in each one. Later, they added
five extra days to each year to approximate what is known as
the tropical year made up of 365 and one-fourth days. However, that is only one system used. There
is also the solar day, based on the changing on the seasons and
the lunar month which is calculated according to the phases of
the moon. Yes, it does get complicated. Now consider that when stars are used as the
measure, there is a very small difference because an Earth year
lasts 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, 46 seconds. As for the sun,
the Earth spins around that orb a bit faster. The bottom line
is that annually there is about an 11-minute error. Over many,
many years if this were not corrected, our seasons would be completely
out of synch. Very ancient civilizations didn't have computers,
but they finally figured out how to handle the calendar. In about
46 B.C., Julius Caesar reformed the procedure in the Julian calendar
by making each century year a leap year. That 11-minute annual
error finally caught up with that system, and by the 1500s the
equinoxes and solstices were occurring 10 days too early. That was completely unacceptable to Pope Gregory
XIII, and in 1582 he ordered 10 days would be taken off the calendar.
That year, Oct. 4 was followed by Oct. 15. He didn't stop there
but also decreed that all century years divisible by 400 would
be leap years. Are you still with me? Sorry to say there
is even more to muddy the reckoning. Ordinarily, century years
ending in double zeros do not have a leap year. But once every
four centuries, that double-0 year is a leap year and that, patient
reader, is why there will be a Feb. 29 in 2000. The Gregorian calendar took a long time to be universally accepted. There have been some proposals to make more changes but to no avail. We can only hope our Congress doesn't decide to have hearings on the calendar. If they had been around back in 1582 when Pope Gregory played the magician and simply made 10 days vanish, there is no doubt in my mind they would have acted. |