LEAP YEAR

February 29: "The original Roman 355 day calendar had an extra 22-day month every few years
to maintain the correct seasonal changes. By the time Julius Caesar took
reign, the seasons no longer occurred during the same months they once had.
Panicking, he remedied this in 44 B.C. by tossing the extra month and adding
the extra day to a few months instead. He threw in a month in honor of
himself (Julius-- July) and died a happy man having solved the calendar woes.
Not quite. Still creating seasonal confusion, the calendar was again changed,
first from an extra day every 3 years, to one every 4 years in 8 A.D. It was
then finally perfected with some complicated logic by Pope Gregory XIII in
1582 (who predicted Easter and Christmas would eventually fall on top of each
other without his divine intervention). He determined that Leap Day should
fall on any year divisible by 4 but not 100 (except when the year is
divisible by 400), setting up a calendar nearly identical to that of Mother
Nature. Thus, today our year is 365.2425 days, off from our solar year by
.00031, or one day's error over 4,000 years. "