Messages in this thread | | | From | nathan.zook@amd ... | Subject | RE: February 30th 2000 | Date | Thu, 13 Jan 2000 10:55:39 -0600 |
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BZZZT! Thank-you for playing. (Although you are getting warmer.) The purpose of leap years is to keep the equinoxes (equinoxi?) & solstices fixed. This is important for the agrarian & hunter-gatherer segments of society (which used to be almost everybody), since planting, breeding and migrations are sensitive to these things. Many (most?) religions also had feasts similarly tied.
But the length of day is dependent upon orbital _geometry_ (ie: The angle between the Earth's axis and a line segement between the centers of the Earth & Sun), not its _position_ (ie: distance to the Sun or location in the orbital elipse).
Leap seconds are completely unrelated, since they are designed to keep the Sun overhead at noon, which was the definition of a day before the railroads got involved.
Nathan
-----Original Message----- From: Peter Svensson [mailto:petersv@psv.nu] Sent: Thursday, January 13, 2000 4:04 AM To: Richard B. Johnson Cc: Daniel Lafraia; svlug@svlug.org; linux-kernel@vger.rutgers.edu Subject: Re: February 30th 2000
This thread has already gone on too long and I'm sorry to contribute to it, but this is not correct. The leap seconds handle the correlation between astronomical time and utc (so that the sun appears in the same position on the sky at the correct time). Leap days handle the correlation of our orbital position around the sun to dates.
Peter -- Peter Svensson ! Pgp key available by finger, fingerprint: <petersv@psv.nu> ! 8A E9 20 98 C1 FF 43 E3 07 FD B9 0A 80 72 70 AF <petersv@df.lth.se> ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Remember, Luke, your source will be with you... always...
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