please empty your brain below

I appreciate the timing of your post, DG - it's the attention to little details that's one of the reasons I check this place daily!
Will anyone be spending their leap day wearing the traditional blue and yellow and watching Leap Dave Williams?
A question, which has always puzzled me:

how was it possible, in 45BC, to work out that the earth took 365.25 days to go around the sun, and so conclude that a leap day was needed?
Re #12 about salaried workers doing an extra day's work for free. That is true, but often expressed as unfair. However it could equally be argued that salaried workers are overpaid for the other 3 years of the cycle. What actually matters is whether the same salary can be expressed in both annual and weekly terms and whether the ratio is exactly 52. or being pedantic 52.14. What I find interesting about this topic is that if one assumes a worker takes 6 weeks holiday plus 8 public holidays, he/she typically works (depending on the timing of weekends) 223 days in a 365 day year but 224 in a leap year ie 0.45% extra. 0.45% is significant in calculating say the UK annual growth rate: I wonder if government statistics take this into account.
DG, I wonder if Spotify would allow you to make your playlist collaborative without you needing to become a Premium Member? If so, perhaps one of us could update it with this year’s Number One for you?

Anyway, this was a very interesting post, as ever - though I suspect we would be disappointed if it wasn’t.
Mrs Planarchy was telling me this was the first time that there had been a leap day Guardian guide and I said "Ok bet DG has a whole lot more interesting keslvday facts " Glad to he right and delighted you're still here.
13. 67 years, not 63 - Frederic would have had no birthday in 1900.
In reading an article in the Guardian including some of the same stuff as DG's (but not as much), I was introduced to the term "leapling", which is apparently what (some of) the people born on 29/2 call themselves.

Leaplings are not the only people who choose a day to celebrate their birthday. Many of those born on 25/12 and 1/1 do likewise, to avoid being overshadowed. As does the Queen (for obscure traditional reasons).
Wlondon on Spotify updates Leap Year No 1's for you
12. I'm salaried but paid 4-weekly so I do get paid for the extra days work but anyone paid monthly doesn't.
That’s actually a really good playlist of songs. (I am writing this wearing blue and yellow)
Frequency of payment doesn't make any difference. Everyone's contract of employment should specify a pay rate per X, where X is one of (hour,day, week, month, year). If they are paid on a different frequency from the specified pay, then conversion should be done using the appropriate ones of (7, 365.25, 12). Payroll departments should know this.

Mind you, I am not aware of anyone modifying the 365.25 to take account of century non-leaps. But this doesn't matter, arguably, because there is nobody alive now who was alive in 1900, and precious few who are working now and still will be in 2100.
3. Is it coincidence that leap years coincide with exact multiples of four in the AD system of counting, which was first devised over 500 years after the Romans introduced regular quadrennial leap years?

Blue Witch - It would have been fairly easy to observe that after 365 days the sun has almost, but not quite, returned to the same position relative to the fixed stars, and that after 1461 days it has done so. With no leap years, the seasons would drift by a month every 120 years.
21 - Spotify
I am able to play your Leap Year list once I log-on with my free account, very entertaining too :)
A very minor and very pedantic point, but it's 'The Weeknd' re #21

dg writes: updated, thanks.
how it work for (famous) people that die on a 29th of February...many a commemoration will be missed out on?
"The Queen sent no centenarian birthday telegrams on February 29th 2000 because there was no February 29th 1900."

Also because the UK telegram service had been abolished in 1982 (replaced by the "Telemessage").
Following up on Jamesthegill at the head of the comments, I note that DG frequently has "significant" posting times. I like to imagine him watching the minutes tick by with his finger on the SEND key, but I suspect, perhaps unfairly, that he knows how to manipulate the system. Is that possible?
2020 is also a "Chinese leap year", i.e. there will be a leap month this year.
Julius Caesar (and his team, more likely) got a lot of information from Egyptian astronomers. By 45BC they'd been observing and measuring time for some 2,000 years. And the Babylonians had also been bloody good at it (they used base-60 numbers, which is why there are 60 minutes in an hour and 60 seconds in a minute). JC will have got accurate observations of the average length of a year from the Egyptians, who had shared the info from the Babylonians.
Lots of fascinating facts!
29) Either Mr & Mrs Henriksen planned very well or were very lucky! Either way it could have been very cheap as far as birthday presents/parties went!

Hoping today's post gets to 29 comments!
I think the leap second deserves a mention. The last one was in 2016, but no more are yet planned because they depend on the earth rotating at slightly the wrong speed, which nobody seems able to predict.
Walked 29,000 steps today.
Quite pleased with that.
If it could be manipulated, I think the preferred posting time would have been 02:29 (I would also prefer the kip)

A 13-month calendar would be quite fun (13 x 28 days with uniform days of the week), as every 365th day would be a bonus day, or 'day out of time', with a double bonus every 4 years. It's quite a paradox that such a rational idea would be fraught with many disadvantages, such as being stuck with your birthday on the same day of the week and inability to split the year into neatly equal quarters.
The frog clip art was very much appreciated. I haven't seen it for a good 5 or 6 leap years. It was a favourite!
Why do school children get an extra day off on leap year day? Obvs they don't this year, as it's a Saturday...
There are a fixed number of working days in the academic (school) year. Thus in a leap year there is one day more holiday.

Contrariwise most employees have a fixed number of days annual leave.










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