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SubjectRe: February 30th 2000
On Thu, Jan 13, 2000 at 01:00:54AM +0100, Robert Schiele wrote:
> > http://www.isoft.itil.com/bluncal_home.htm
>
> The calender described on this page might be used by some strange people, but
> it is not used by most people. In the calender that is in use all around the
> world the described problem is _not_ solved by a 'February 30th' but by leap
> seconds, which occur sometimes.

No, the problem _is_ solved by adding an extra day in February. The
web page just forgot to mention that every 100 years a leap year is
omitted. Thus, the extra day is Febrary 29th.

A year isn't exactly 365 days long (as most people already know). The
purpose of leap years is to approximate the actual length of a year.
Without leap years the northern hemisphere would have cold "summers"
and warm "winters" one day. (This already happened a long time ago
when calendars weren't as good as they are now.)

Leap seconds solve a mostly independent problem: A day isn't 86400
seconds long. Positive or negative leap seconds are inserted once in a
while because the sun should be shining at noon and not at midnight.

--
Jan

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