Appreciation for Leap Day!

I love leap Day. 

It's a day that is "special" for scientific reasons as opposed to other days that have been deemed special for historical reasons (I'm fine with those), religious reasons (not my thing), or commercial reasons (worst of all). Importantly, as far as I know, the main stream public has not yet widely adopted any particular Leap Day rituals; no one expects me to engage in any pre-determined behavior on this day. 

This morning, I was reflecting on how small we are; one recently evolved species, on one little planet, revolving around a sun that seems old to us but is a relative newcomer to the galaxy. At the same time, I was struck but how great we are in that we have somehow figured out that our planet is orbiting around the sun, and that we spin on our axis some 365.24 times for every trip around the sun. It's almost unfathomable to me that we know these things.

As depicted in the graphic above, the earth completes 365 spins (days) in fractionally less time than it takes us to complete a full orbit (year) around the sun. We all know this is why we need to add a "leap day" every 4 years to approximately keep our calendar system on track. But this is only an approximation. 

We also skip leap year about once every 100 years to fine tune the adjustment. Sadly, this will never happen in my lifetime; the last "skip" was in the year 1900, and the next will be in the year 2100. I am OK with that though, I suspect the whole thing will be infused with commercially-driven rituals by then anyway.