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February 29, 2008

Does Leap Day add up for you?

For once, the working-class folks are getting a break.

For hourly workers, a Leap Year could be a benefit -- extra hours squeezed into a year's paycheck. And an extra day to pay those February bills.

But for salary earners, you may be working an extra day this year without making any more money.

That's because just about every four years, an extra day is added to February in an attempt to keep our clocks in line with the solar year -- what we see in the sky as one full orbit of the earth around the sun.

But even the extra day doesn't square everything away -- that would be too easy. The difference between the solar year (also called the tropical year) and 365 days is about .2422 days -- not .25, which would bring us back in line exactly every four years.

So we don't add an extra day every four years, but every four except those years that can be divided by 100.

But if that year, divisible by 100, is also divisible by 400, it is a Leap Year. That's why we had an extra day in 2000. We won't in 2100.

And that just about does it.

Except for leap seconds -- but that's a different story all together...

In any event, you can (sort of) look at at this as an "extra" day.

So what are you going to do with it? See what people across the world say.

-- projo.com staff writer Brandie M. Jefferson

Posted by Brandie Jefferson  at 8:42 AM | Permalink

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